Bring Up the Bodies

I. Falcons. Wolf Hall, Wiltshire: September 1535

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws.

Later, Henry will say, ‘Your girls flew well today.’ The hawk Anne Cromwell bounces on the glove of Rafe Sadler, who rides by the king in easy conversation. They are tired; the sun is declining, and they ride back to Wolf Hall with the reins slack on the necks of their mounts. Tomorrow his wife and two sisters will go out. These dead women, their bones long sunk in London clay, are now transmigrated. Weightless, they glide on the upper currents of the air. They pity no one. They answer to no one. Their lives are simple. When they look down they see nothing but their prey, and the borrowed plumes of the hunters: they see a flittering, flinching universe, a universe filled with their dinner.

All summer has been like this, a riot of dismemberment, fur and feather flying; the beating off and the whipping in of hounds, the coddling of tired horses, the nursing, by the gentlemen, of contusions, sprains and blisters. And for a few days at least, the sun has shone on Henry. Sometime before noon, clouds scudded in from the west and rain fell in big scented drops; but the sun re-emerged with a scorching heat, and now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

As they dismount, handing their horses to the grooms and waiting on the king, his mind is already moving to paperwork: to dispatches from Whitehall, galloped down by the post routes that are laid wherever the court shifts. At supper with the Seymours, he will defer to any stories his hosts wish to tell: to anything the king may venture, tousled and happy and amiable as he seems tonight. When the king has gone to bed, his working night will begin.

Though the day is over, Henry seems disinclined to go indoors. He stands looking about him, inhaling horse sweat, a broad, brick-red streak of sunburn across his forehead. Early in the day he lost his hat, so by custom all the hunting party were obliged to take off theirs. The king refused all offers of substitutes. As dusk steals over the woods and fields, servants will be out looking for the stir of the black plume against darkening grass, or the glint of his hunter’s badge, a gold St Hubert with sapphire eyes.

Already you can feel the autumn. You know there will not be many more days like these; so let us stand, the horseboys of Wolf Hall swarming around us, Wiltshire and the western counties stretching into a haze of blue; let us stand, the king’s hand on his shoulder, Henry’s face earnest as he talks his way back through the landscape of the day, the green copses and rushing streams, the alders by the water’s edge, the early haze that lifted by nine; the brief shower, the small wind that died and settled; the stillness, the afternoon heat.

‘Sir, how are you not burned?’ Rafe Sadler demands. A redhead like the king, he has turned a mottled, freckled pink, and even his eyes look sore. He, Thomas Cromwell, shrugs; he hangs an arm around Rafe’s shoulders as they drift indoors. He went through the whole of Italy – the battlefield as well as the shaded arena of the counting house – without losing his London pallor. His ruffian childhood, the days on the river, the days in the fields: they left him as white as God made him. ‘Cromwell has the skin of a lily,’ the king pronounces. ‘The only particular in which he resembles that or any other blossom.’ Teasing him, they amble towards supper.

The king had left Whitehall the week of Thomas More’s death, a miserable dripping week in July, the hoof prints of the royal entourage sinking deep into the mud as they tacked their way across to Windsor. Since then the progress has taken in a swathe of the western counties; the Cromwell aides, having finished up the king’s business at the London end, met up with the royal train in mid-August. The king and his companions sleep sound in new houses of rosy brick, in old houses whose fortifications have crumbled away or been pulled down, and in fantasy castles like toys, castles never capable of fortification, with walls a cannonball would punch in as if they were paper. England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors’ covenant; peace is what they offer. Every household strives to put forward its best show for the king, and we’ve seen some panic-stricken plastering these last weeks, some speedy stonework, as his hosts hurry to display the Tudor rose beside their own devices. They search out and obliterate any trace of Katherine, the queen that was, smashing with hammers the pomegranates of Aragon, their splitting segments and their squashed and flying seeds. Instead – if there is no time for carving – the falcon of Anne Boleyn is crudely painted up on hatchments.

Hans has joined them on the progress, and made a drawing of Anne the queen, but it did not please her; how do you please her, these days? He has drawn Rafe Sadler, with his neat little beard and his set mouth, his fashionable hat a feathered disc balanced precariously on his cropped head. ‘Made my nose very flat, Master Holbein,’ Rafe says, and Hans says, ‘And how, Master Sadler, is it in my power to fix your nose?’

‘He broke it as a child,’ he says, ‘running at the ring. I picked him up myself from under the horse’s feet, and a sorry bundle he was, crying for his mother.’ He squeezes the boy’s shoulder. ‘Now, Rafe, take heart. I think you look very handsome. Remember what Hans did to me.’

Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer’s body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his pale impermeable skin, which seems designed to resist rain as well as sun, people sneer that his father was an Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and brawler, a drunk and a bully, a man often hauled before the justices for punching someone, for cheating someone. How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks. Some say he came up with the Boleyns, the queen’s family. Some say it was wholly through the late Cardinal Wolsey, his patron; Cromwell was in his confidence and made money for him and knew his secrets. Others say he haunts the company of sorcerers. He was out of the realm from boyhood, a hired soldier, a wool trader, a banker. No one knows where he has been and who he has met, and he is in no hurry to tell them. He never spares himself in the king’s service, he knows his worth and merits and makes sure of his reward: offices, perquisites and title deeds, manor houses and farms. He has a way of getting his way, he has a method; he will charm a man or bribe him, coax him or threaten him, he will explain to a man where his true interests lie, and he will introduce that same man to aspects of himself he didn’t know existed. Every day Master Secretary deals with grandees who, if they could, would destroy him with one vindictive swipe, as if he were a fly. Knowing this, he is distinguished by his courtesy, his calmness and his indefatigable attention to England’s business. He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.

At home in his city house at Austin Friars, his portrait broods on the wall; he is wrapped in wool and fur, his hand clenched around a document as if he were throttling it. Hans had pushed a table back to trap him and said, Thomas, you mustn’t laugh; and they had proceeded on that basis, Hans humming as he worked and he staring ferociously into the middle distance. When he saw the portrait finished he had said, ‘Christ, I look like a murderer’; and his son Gregory said, didn’t you know? Copies are being made for his friends, and for his admirers among the evangelicals in Germany. He will not part with the original – not now I’ve got used to it, he says – and so he comes into his hall to find versions of himself in various stages of becoming: a tentative outline, partly inked in. Where to begin with Cromwell? Some start with his sharp little eyes, some start with his hat. Some evade the issue and paint his seal and scissors, others pick out the turquoise ring given him by the cardinal. Wherever they begin, the final impact is the same: if he had a grievance against you, you wouldn’t like to meet him at the dark of the moon. His father Walter used to say, ‘My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he’ll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he’ll cut off your leg. But if you don’t cut across him, he’s a very gentleman. And he’ll stand anybody a drink.’

Hans has drawn the king, benign in summer silks, seated after supper with his hosts, the casements open to late birdsong, the first tapers coming in with the candied fruits. At each stage of his progress Henry stops in the principal house, with Anne the queen; his entourage beds down with the local gentlefolk. It is usual for the king’s hosts, once at least in the visit, to entertain these peripheral hosts by way of thanks, which places a strain on the housekeeping arrangements. He has counted the provision carts rolling in; he has seen kitchens thrown into turmoil, and he himself has been down in the grey-green hour before dawn, when the brick ovens are swabbed out ready for the first batch of loaves, as carcasses are spitted, pots set on trivets, poultry plucked and jointed. His uncle was a cook to an archbishop, and as a child he hung about the Lambeth Palace kitchens; he knows this business inside out, and nothing about the king’s comfort must be left to chance.

These days are perfect. The clear untroubled light picks out each berry shimmering in a hedge. Each leaf of a tree, the sun behind it, hangs like a golden pear. Riding westward in high summer, we have dipped into sylvan chases and crested the downs, emerging into that high country where, even across two counties, you can sense the shifting presence of the sea. In this part of England our forefathers the giants left their earthworks, their barrows and standing stones. We still have, every Englishman and woman, some drops of giant blood in our veins. In those ancient times, in a land undespoiled by sheep or plough, they hunted the wild boar and the elk. The forest stretched ahead for days. Sometimes antique weapons are unearthed: axes that, wielded with double fist, could cut down horse and rider. Think of the great limbs of those dead men, stirring under the soil. War was their nature, and war is always keen to come again. It’s not just the past you think of, as you ride these fields. It’s what’s latent in the soil, what’s breeding; it’s the days to come, the wars unfought, the injuries and deaths that, like seeds, the soil of England is keeping warm. You would think, to look at Henry laughing, to look at Henry praying, to look at him leading his men through the forest path, that he sits as secure on his throne as he does on his horse. Looks can deceive. By night, he lies awake; he stares at the carved roof beams; he numbers his days. He says, ‘Cromwell, Cromwell, what shall I do?’ Cromwell, save me from the Emperor. Cromwell, save me from the Pope. Then he calls in his Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and demands to know, ‘Is my soul damned?’

Back in London, the Emperor’s ambassador, Eustache Chapuys, waits daily for news that the people of England have risen against their cruel and ungodly king. It is news that he dearly wishes to hear, and he would spend labour and hard cash to make it come true. His master, the Emperor Charles, is lord of the Low Countries as well as Spain and her lands beyond the seas; Charles is rich and, from time to time, he is angry that Henry Tudor has dared to set aside his aunt, Katherine, to marry a woman whom the people on the streets call a goggle-eyed whore. Chapuys is exhorting his master in urgent dispatches to invade England, to join with the realm’s rebels, pretenders and malcontents, and to conquer this unholy island where the king by an act of Parliament has settled his own divorce and declared himself God. The Pope does not take it kindly, that he is laughed at in England and called mere ‘Bishop of Rome’, that his revenues are cut off and channelled into Henry’s coffers. A bull of excommunication, drawn up but not yet promulgated, hovers over Henry, making him an outcast among the Christian kings of Europe: who are invited, indeed, encouraged, to step across the Narrow Sea or the Scots border, and help themselves to anything that’s his. Perhaps the Emperor will come. Perhaps the King of France will come. Perhaps they will come together. It would be pleasant to say we are ready for them, but the reality is otherwise. In the case of an armed incursion we may have to dig up the giants’ bones to knock them around the head with, as we are short of ordnance, short of powder, short of steel. This is not Thomas Cromwell’s fault; as Chapuys says, grimacing, Henry’s kingdom would be in better order if Cromwell had been put in charge five years ago.

If you would defend England, and he would – for he would take the field himself, his sword in his hand – you must know what England is. In the August heat, he has stood bare-headed by the carved tombs of ancestors, men armoured cap à pie in plate and chain links, their gauntleted hands joined and perched stiffly on their surcoats, their mailed feet resting on stone lions, griffins, greyhounds: stone men, steel men, their soft wives encased beside them like snails in their shells. We think time cannot touch the dead, but it touches their monuments, leaving them snub-nosed and stub-fingered from the accidents and attrition of time. A tiny dismembered foot (as of a kneeling cherub) emerges from a swathe of drapery; the tip of a severed thumb lies on a carved cushion. ‘We must get our forefathers mended next year,’ the lords of the western counties say: but their shields and supporters, their achievements and bearings, are kept always paint-fresh, and in talk they embellish the deeds of their ancestors, who they were and what they held: the arms my forefather bore at Agincourt, the cup my forefather was given by John of Gaunt his own hand. If in the late wars of York and Lancaster, their fathers and grandfathers picked the wrong side, they keep quiet about it. A generation on, lapses must be forgiven, reputations remade; otherwise England cannot go forward, she will keep spiralling backwards into the dirty past.

He has no ancestors, of course: not the kind you’d boast about. There was once a noble family called Cromwell, and when he came up in the king’s service the heralds had urged him for the sake of appearances to adopt their coat of arms; but I am none of theirs, he had said politely, and I do not want their achievements. He had run away from his father’s fists when he was no older than fifteen; crossed the Channel, taken service in the French king’s army. He had been fighting since he could walk; and if you’re going to fight, why not be paid for it? There are more lucrative trades than soldiering, and he found them. So he decided not to hurry home.

And now, when his titled hosts want advice on the placement of a fountain, or a group of the Three Graces dancing, the king tells them, Cromwell here is your man; Cromwell, he has seen how they do things in Italy, and what will do for them will do for Wiltshire. Sometimes the king departs a place with just his riding household, the queen left behind with her ladies and musicians, as Henry and his favoured few hunt hard across the country. And that is how they come to Wolf Hall, where old Sir John Seymour is waiting to welcome them, in the midst of his flourishing family.

‘I don’t know, Cromwell,’ old Sir John says. He takes his arm, genial. ‘All these falcons named for dead women…don’t they dishearten you?’

‘I’m never disheartened, Sir John. The world is too good to me.’

‘You should marry again, and have another family. Perhaps you will find a bride while you are with us. In the forest of Savernake there are many fresh young women.’

I still have Gregory, he says, looking back over his shoulder for his son; he is always somehow anxious about Gregory. ‘Ah,’ Seymour says, ‘boys are very well, but a man needs daughters too, daughters are a consolation. Look at Jane. Such a good girl.’

He looks at Jane Seymour, as her father directs him. He knows her well from the court, as she was lady-in-waiting to Katherine, the former queen, and to Anne, the queen that is now; she is a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence, and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise. She is wearing pearls, and white brocade embroidered with stiff little sprigs of carnations. He recognises considerable expenditure; leave the pearls aside, you couldn’t turn her out like that for much under thirty pounds. No wonder she moves with gingerly concern, like a child who’s been told not to spill something on herself.

The king says, ‘Jane, now we see you at home with your people, are you less shy?’ He takes her mouse-paw in his vast hand. ‘At court we never get a word from her.’

Jane is looking up at him, blushing from her neck to her hairline. ‘Did you ever see such a blush?’ Henry asks. ‘Never unless with a little maid of twelve.’

‘I cannot claim to be twelve,’ Jane says.

At supper the king sits next to Lady Margery, his hostess. She was a beauty in her day, and by the king’s exquisite attention you would think she was one still; she has had ten children, and six of them are living, and three are in this room. Edward Seymour, the heir, has a long head, a serious expression, a clean fierce profile: a handsome man. He is well-read if not scholarly, applies himself wisely to any office he is given; he has been to war, and while he is waiting to fight again he acquits himself well in the hunting field and tilt yard. The cardinal, in his day, marked him out as better than the usual run of Seymours; and he himself, Thomas Cromwell, has sounded him out and found him in every respect the king’s man. Tom Seymour, Edward’s younger brother, is noisy and boisterous and more of interest to women; when he comes into the room, virgins giggle, and young matrons dip their heads and examine him from under their lashes.

Old Sir John is a man of notorious family feeling. Two, three years back, the gossip at court was all of how he had tupped his son’s wife, not once in the heat of passion but repeatedly since she was a bride. The queen and her confidantes had spread the story about the court. ‘We’ve worked it out at 120 times,’ Anne had sniggered. ‘Well, Thomas Cromwell has, and he’s quick with figures. We suppose they abstained on a Sunday for shame’s sake, and eased off in Lent.’ The traitor wife gave birth to two boys, and when her conduct came to light Edward said he would not have them for his heirs, as he could not be sure if they were his sons or his half-brothers. The adulteress was locked up in a convent, and soon obliged him by dying; now he has a new wife, who cultivates a forbidding manner and keeps a bodkin in her pocket in case her father-in-law gets too close.

But it is forgiven, it is forgiven. The flesh is frail. This royal visit seals the old fellow’s pardon. John Seymour has 1,300 acres including his deer park, most of the rest under sheep and worth two shilling per acre per year, bringing him in a clear twenty-five per cent on what the same acreage would make under the plough. The sheep are little black-faced animals interbred with Welsh mountain stock, gristly mutton but good enough wool. When at their arrival, the king (he is in bucolic vein) says, ‘Cromwell, what would that beast weigh?’ he says, without picking it up, ‘Thirty pounds, sir.’ Francis Weston, a young courtier, says with a sneer, ‘Master Cromwell used to be a shearsman. He wouldn’t be wrong.’

The king says, ‘We would be a poor country without our wool trade. That Master Cromwell knows the business is not to his discredit.’

But Francis Weston smirks behind his hand.

Tomorrow Jane Seymour is to hunt with the king. ‘I thought it was gentlemen only,’ he hears Weston whisper. ‘The queen would be angry if she knew.’ He murmurs, make sure she doesn’t know then, there’s a good boy.

‘At Wolf Hall we are all great hunters,’ Sir John boasts, ‘my daughters too, you think Jane is timid but put her in the saddle and I assure you, sirs, she is the goddess Diana. I never troubled my girls in the schoolroom, you know. Sir James here taught them all they needed.’

The priest at the foot of the table nods, beaming: an old fool with a white poll, a bleared eye. He, Cromwell, turns to him: ‘And was it you taught them to dance, Sir James? All praise to you. I have seen Jane’s sister Elizabeth at court, partnered with the king.’

‘Ah, they had a master for that,’ old Seymour chuckles. ‘Master for dancing, master for music, that’s enough for them. They don’t want foreign tongues. They’re not going anywhere.’

‘I think otherwise, sir,’ he says. ‘I had my daughters taught equal with my son.’

Sometimes he likes to talk about them, Anne and Grace: gone seven years now. Tom Seymour laughs. ‘What, you had them in the tilt yard with Gregory and young Master Sadler?’

He smiles. ‘Except for that.’

Edward Seymour says, ‘It is not uncommon for the daughters of a city household to learn their letters and a little beyond. You might have wanted them in the counting house. One hears of it. It would help them get good husbands, a merchant family would be glad of their training.’

‘Imagine Master Cromwell’s daughters,’ Weston says. ‘I dare not. I doubt a counting house could contain them. They would be a shrewd hand with a poleaxe, you would think. One look at them and a man’s legs would go from under him. And I do not mean he would be stricken with love.’

Gregory stirs himself. He is such a dreamer you hardly think he has been following the conversation, but his tone is rippling with hurt. ‘You insult my sisters and their memory, sir, and you never knew them. My sister Grace…’

He sees Jane Seymour put out her little hand and touch Gregory’s wrist: to save him, she will risk drawing the company’s attention. ‘I have lately,’ she says, ‘got some skill of the French tongue.’

‘Have you, Jane?’ Tom Seymour is smiling.

Jane dips her head. ‘Mary Shelton is teaching me.’

‘Mary Shelton is a kindly young woman,’ the king says; and out of the corner of his eye, he sees Weston elbow his neighbour; they say Shelton has been kind to the king in bed.

‘So you see,’ Jane says to her brothers, ‘we ladies, we do not spend all our time in idle calumny and scandal. Though God he knows, we have gossip enough to occupy a whole town of women.’

‘Have you?’ he says.

‘We talk about who is in love with the queen. Who writes her verses.’ She drops her eyes. ‘I mean to say, who is in love with us all. This gentleman or that. We know all our suitors and we make inventory head to toe, they would blush if they knew. We say their acreage and how much they have a year, and then we decide if we will let them write us a sonnet. If we do not think they will keep us in fine style, we scorn their rhymes. It is cruel, I can tell you.’

He says, a little uneasy, it is no harm to write verses to ladies, even married ones, at court it is usual. Weston says, thank you for that kind word, Master Cromwell, we thought you might try and make us stop.

Tom Seymour leans forward, laughing. ‘And who are your suitors, Jane?’

‘If you want to know that, you must put on a gown, and take up your needlework, and come and join us.’

‘Like Achilles among the women,’ the king says. ‘You must shave your fine beard, Seymour, and go and find out their lewd little secrets.’ He is laughing, but he is not happy. ‘Unless we find someone more maidenly for the task. Gregory, you are a pretty fellow, but I fear your great hands will give you away.’

‘The blacksmith’s grandson,’ Weston says.

‘That child Mark,’ the king says. ‘The musician, you know him? There is a smooth girlish countenance.’

‘Oh,’ Jane says, ‘Mark’s with us anyway. He’s always loitering. We barely count him a man. If you want to know our secrets, ask Mark.’

The conversation canters off in some other direction; he thinks, I have never known Jane have anything to say for herself; he thinks, Weston is goading me, he knows that in Henry’s presence I will not give him a check; he imagines what form the check may take, when he delivers it. Rafe Sadler looks at him out of the tail of his eye.

‘So,’ the king says to him, ‘how will tomorrow be better than today?’ To the supper table he explains, ‘Master Cromwell cannot sleep unless he is amending something.’

‘I will reform the conduct of Your Majesty’s hat. And those clouds, before noon –’

‘We wanted the shower. The rain cooled us.’

‘God send Your Majesty no worse a drenching,’ says Edward Seymour.

Henry rubs his stripe of sunburn. ‘The cardinal, he reckoned he could change the weather. A good enough morning, he would say, but by ten it will be brighter. And it was.’

Henry does this sometimes; drops Wolsey’s name into conversation, as if it were not he, but some other monarch, who had hounded the cardinal to death.

‘Some men have a weather eye,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘That’s all it is, sir. It’s not special to cardinals.’

Henry nods, smiling. ‘That’s true, Tom. I should never have stood in awe of him, should I?’

‘He was too proud, for a subject,’ old Sir John says.

The king looks down the table at him, Thomas Cromwell. He loved the cardinal. Everyone here knows it. His expression is as carefully blank as a freshly painted wall.

After supper, old Sir John tells the story of Edgar the Peaceable. He was the ruler in these parts, many hundreds of years ago, before kings had numbers: when all maids were fair maids and all knights were gallant and life was simple and violent and usually brief. Edgar had in mind a bride for himself, and sent one of his earls to appraise her. The earl, who was both false and cunning, sent back word that her beauty had been much exaggerated by poets and painters; seen in real life, he said, she had a limp and a squint. His aim was to have the tender damsel for himself, and so he seduced and married her. Upon discovering the earl’s treachery Edgar ambushed him, in a grove not far from here, and rammed a javelin into him, killing him with one blow.

‘What a false knave he was, that earl!’ says the king. ‘He was paid out.’

‘Call him rather a churl than an earl,’ Tom Seymour says.

His brother sighs, as if distancing himself from the remark.

‘And what did the lady say?’ he asks; he, Cromwell. ‘When she found the earl skewered?’

‘The damsel married Edgar,’ Sir John says. ‘They married in the greenwood, and lived happily ever after.’

‘I suppose she had no choice,’ Lady Margery sighs. ‘Women have to adapt themselves.’

‘And the country folk say,’ Sir John adds, ‘that the false earl walks the woods still, groaning, and trying to pull the lance out of his belly.’

‘Just imagine,’ Jane Seymour says. ‘Any night there is a moon, one might look out of the window and see him, tugging away and complaining all the while. Fortunately I do not believe in ghosts.’

‘More fool you, sister,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘They’ll creep up on you, my lass.’

‘Still,’ Henry says. He mimes a javelin throw: though in the restrained way one must, at a supper table. ‘One clean blow. He must have had a good throwing arm, King Edgar.’

He says – he, Cromwell: ‘I should like to know if this tale is written down, and if so, by whom, and was he on oath.’

The king says, ‘Cromwell would have had the earl before a judge and jury.’

‘Bless Your Majesty,’ Sir John chuckles, ‘I don’t think they had them in those days.’

‘Cromwell would have found one out.’ Young Weston leans forward to make his point. ‘He would dig out a jury, he would grub one from a mushroom patch. Then it would be all up with the earl, they would try him and march him out and hack off his head. They say that at Thomas More’s trial, Master Secretary here followed the jury to their deliberations, and when they were seated he closed the door behind him and he laid down the law. “Let me put you out of doubt,” he said to the jurymen. “Your task is to find Sir Thomas guilty, and you will have no dinner till you have done it.” Then out he went and shut the door again and stood outside it with a hatchet in his hand, in case they broke out in search of a boiled pudding; and being Londoners, they care about their bellies above all things, and as soon as they felt them rumbling they cried, “Guilty! He is as guilty as guilty can be!”’

Eyes focus on him, Cromwell. Rafe Sadler, by his side, is tense with displeasure. ‘It is a pretty tale,’ Rafe tells Weston, ‘but I ask you in turn, where is it written down? I think you will find my master is always correct in his dealings with a court of law.’

‘You weren’t there,’ Francis Weston says. ‘I heard it from one of those same jurymen. They cried, “Away with him, take out the traitor and bring us in a leg of mutton.” And Thomas More was led to his death.’

‘You sound as if you regret it,’ Rafe says.

‘Not I.’ Weston holds up his hands. ‘Anne the queen says, let More’s death be a warning to all such traitors. Be their credit never so great, their treason never so veiled, Thomas Cromwell will find them out.’

There is a murmur of assent; for a moment, he thinks the company will turn to him and applaud. Then Lady Margery touches a finger to her lips, and nods towards the king. Seated at the head of the table, he has begun to incline to the right; his closed eyelids flutter, and his breathing is easeful and deep.

The company exchange smiles. ‘Drunk with fresh air,’ Tom Seymour whispers.

It makes a change from drunk with drink; the king, these days, calls for the wine jug more often than he did in his lean and sporting youth. He, Cromwell, watches as Henry tilts in his chair. First forward, as if to rest his forehead on the table. Then he starts and jerks backwards. A line of drool trickles down his beard.

This would be the moment for Harry Norris, the chief among the privy chamber gentlemen; Harry with his noiseless tread and his soft unjudging hand, murmuring his sovereign back to wakefulness. But Norris has gone across country, carrying the king’s love letter to Anne. So what to do? Henry does not look like a tired child, as five years ago he might have done. He looks like any man in mid-life, lapsed into torpor after too heavy a meal; he looks bloated and puffy, and a vein is burst here and there, and even by candlelight you can see that his faded hair is greying. He, Cromwell, nods to young Weston. ‘Francis, your gentlemanly touch is required.’

Weston pretends not to hear him. His eyes are on the king and his face wears an unguarded expression of distaste. Tom Seymour whispers, ‘I think we should make a noise. To wake him naturally.’

‘What sort of noise?’ his brother Edward mouths.

Tom mimes holding his ribs.

Edward’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘You laugh if you dare. He’ll think you’re laughing at his drooling.’

The king begins to snore. He lurches to the left. He tilts dangerously over the arm of his chair.

Weston says, ‘You do it, Cromwell. No man so great with him as you are.’

He shakes his head, smiling.

‘God save His Majesty,’ says Sir John, piously. ‘He’s not as young as he was.’

Jane rises. A stiff rustle from the carnation sprigs. She leans over the king’s chair and taps the back of his hand: briskly, as if she were testing a cheese. Henry jumps and his eyes flick open. ‘I wasn’t asleep,’ he says. ‘Really. I was just resting my eyes.’

When the king has gone upstairs, Edward Seymour says, ‘Master Secretary, time for my revenge.’

Leaning back, glass in hand: ‘What I have done to you?’

‘A game of chess. Calais. I know you remember.’

Late autumn, the year 1532: the night the king first went to bed with the queen that is now. Before she lay down for him Anne made him swear an oath on the Bible, that he would marry her as soon as they were back on English soil; but the storms trapped them in port, and the king made good use of the time, trying to get a son on her.

‘You checkmated me, Master Cromwell,’ Edward says. ‘But only because you distracted me.’

‘How did I?’

‘You asked me about my sister Jane. Her age, and so on.’

‘You thought I was interested in her.’

‘And are you?’ Edward smiles, to take the edge off the crude question. ‘She is not spoken for yet, you know.’

‘Set up the pieces,’ he says. ‘Would you like the board aligned as it was when you lost your train of thought?’

Edward looks at him, carefully expressionless. Incredible things are related of Cromwell’s memory. He smiles to himself. He could set up the board, with only a little guesswork; he knows the type of game a man like Seymour plays. ‘We should begin afresh,’ he suggests. ‘The world moves on. You are happy with Italian rules? I don’t like these contests that drag out for a week.’

Their opening moves see some boldness on Edward’s part. But then, a white pawn poised between his fingertips, Seymour leans back in his chair, frowning, and takes it into his head to talk about St Augustine; and from St Augustine moves to Martin Luther. ‘It is a teaching that brings terror to the heart,’ he says. ‘That God would make us only to damn us. That his poor creatures, except some few of them, are born only for a struggle in this world and then eternal fire. Sometimes I fear it is true. But I find I hope it is not.’

‘Fat Martin has modified his position. Or so I hear. And to our comfort.’

‘What, more of us are saved? Or our good works are not entirely useless in God’s sight?’

‘I should not speak for him. You should read Philip Melanchthon. I will send you his new book. I hope he will visit us in England. We are talking to his people.’

Edward presses the pawn’s little round head to his lips. He looks as if he might tap his teeth with it. ‘Will the king allow that?’

‘He would not let in Brother Martin himself. He does not like his name mentioned. But Philip is an easier man, and it would be good for us, it would be very good for us, if we were to come into some helpful alliance with the German princes who favour the gospel. It would give the Emperor a fright, if we had friends and allies in his own domains.’

‘And that is all it means to you?’ Edward’s knight is skipping over the squares. ‘Diplomacy?’

‘I cherish diplomacy. It’s cheap.’

‘Yet they say you love the gospel yourself.’

‘It is no secret.’ He frowns. ‘Do you really mean to do that, Edward? I see my way to your queen. And I should not like to take advantage of you again, and have you say I spoiled your game with small talk about the state of your soul.’

A skewed smile. ‘And how is your queen these days?’

‘Anne? She is at outs with me. I feel my head wobble on my shoulders when she stares at me hard. She has heard that once or twice I spoke favourably of Katherine, the queen that was.’

‘And did you?’

‘Only to admire her spirit. Which, anyone must admit, is steadfast in adversity. And again, the queen thinks I am too favourable to the Princess Mary – I mean to say, to Lady Mary, as we should call her now. The king loves his elder daughter still, he says he cannot help it – and it grieves Anne, because she wants the Princess Elizabeth to be the only daughter he knows. She thinks we are too soft towards Mary and that we should tax her to admit her mother was never married lawfully to the king, and that she is a bastard.’

Edward twiddles the white pawn in his fingers, looks at it dubiously, sets it down on its square. ‘But is that not the state of affairs? I thought you had made her acknowledge it already.’

‘We solve the question by not raising it. She knows she is put out of the succession, and I do not think I should force her beyond a point. As the Emperor is Katherine’s nephew and Lady Mary’s cousin, I try not to provoke him. Charles holds us in the palm of his hand, do you see? But Anne does not understand the need to placate people. She thinks if she speaks sweetly to Henry, that is enough to do.’

‘Whereas you must speak sweetly to Europe.’ Edward laughs. His laugh has a rusty sound. His eyes say, you are being very frank, Master Cromwell: why?

‘Besides,’ his fingers hover over the black knight, ‘I am grown too great for the queen’s liking, since the king made me his deputy in church affairs. She hates Henry to listen to anyone but herself and her brother George and Monseigneur her father, and even her father gets the rough side of her tongue, and gets called lily-liver and timewaster.’

‘How does he take that?’ Edward looks down at the board. ‘Oh.’

‘Now take a careful look,’ he urges. ‘Do you want to play it out?’

‘I resign. I think.’ A sigh. ‘Yes. I resign.’

He, Cromwell, sweeps the pieces aside, stifling a yawn. ‘And I never mentioned your sister Jane, did I? So what’s your excuse now?’

When he goes upstairs he sees Rafe and Gregory jumping around near the great window. They are capering and scuffling, eyes on something invisible at their feet. At first he thinks they are playing football without a ball. But then they leap up like dancers and back-heel the thing, and he sees that it is long and thin, a fallen man. They lean down to tweak and jab, to apply torsion. ‘Ease off,’ Gregory says, ‘don’t snap his neck yet, I need to see him suffer.’

Rafe looks up, and affects to wipe his brow. Gregory rests hands on knees, getting his breath back, then nudges the victim with his foot. ‘This is Francis Weston. You think he is helping put the king to bed, but in fact we have him here in ghostly form. We stood around a corner and waited for him with a magic net.’

‘We are punishing him,’ Rafe leans down. ‘Ho, sir, are you sorry now?’ He spits on his palms. ‘What next with him, Gregory?’

‘Haul him up and out the window with him.’

‘Careful,’ he says. ‘The king favours Weston.’

‘Then he’ll favour him when he’s got a flat head,’ Rafe says. They scuffle and push each other out of the way, trying to be the first to stamp Francis flat. Rafe opens a window and both stoop for leverage, hoisting the phantom across the sill. Gregory helps it over, unsnagging its jacket where it catches, and with one shove drops it head first on the cobbles. They peer out after it. ‘He bounces,’ Rafe observes, and then they dust off their hands, smiling at him. ‘Give you good night, sir,’ Rafe says.

Later, Gregory sits at the foot of the bed in his shirt, his hair tousled, his shoes kicked off, one bare foot idly scuffing the matting: ‘So am I to be married? Am I to be married to Jane Seymour?’

‘Early in the summer you thought I was going to marry you to an old dowager with a deer park.’ People tease Gregory: Rafe Sadler, Thomas Wriothesley, the other young men of his house; his cousin, Richard Cromwell.

‘Yes, but why were you talking to her brother this last hour? First it was chess then it was talk, talk, talk. They say you liked Jane yourself.’

‘When?’

‘Last year. You liked her last year.’

‘If I did I’ve forgot.’

‘George Boleyn’s wife told me. Lady Rochford. She said, you may get a young stepmother from Wolf Hall, what will you think of that? So if you like Jane yourself,’ Gregory frowns, ‘she had better not be married to me.’

‘Do you think I’d steal your bride? Like old Sir John?’

Once his head is on the pillow, he says, ‘Hush, Gregory.’ He closes his eyes. Gregory is a good boy, though all the Latin he has learned, all the sonorous periods of the great authors, have rolled through his head and out again, like stones. Still, you think of Thomas More’s boy: offspring of a scholar all Europe admired, and poor young John can barely stumble through his Pater Noster. Gregory is a fine archer, a fine horseman, a shining star in the tilt yard, and his manners cannot be faulted. He speaks reverently to his superiors, not scuffling his feet or standing on one leg, and he is mild and polite with those below him. He knows how to bow to foreign diplomats in the manner of their own countries, sits at table without fidgeting or feeding spaniels, can neatly carve and joint any fowl if requested to serve his elders. He doesn’t slouch around with his jacket off one shoulder, or look in windows to admire himself, or stare around in church, or interrupt old men, or finish their stories for them. If anyone sneezes, he says, ‘Christ help you!’

Christ help you, sir or madam.

Gregory raises his head. ‘Thomas More,’ he says. ‘The jury. Is that truly what happened?’

He had recognised young Weston’s story: in a broad sense, even if he didn’t assent to the detail. He closes his eyes. ‘I didn’t have a hatchet,’ he says.

He is tired: he speaks to God; he says: God guide me. Sometimes when he is on the verge of sleep the cardinal’s large scarlet presence flits across his inner eye. He wishes the dead man would prophesy. But his old patron speaks only of domestic matters, office matters. Where did I put that letter from the Duke of Norfolk? he will ask the cardinal; and next day, early, it will come to his hand.

He speaks inwardly: not to Wolsey, but to George Boleyn’s wife. ‘I have no wish to marry. I have no time. I was happy with my wife but Liz is dead and that part of my life is dead with her. Who in the name of God gave you, Lady Rochford, a licence to speculate about my intentions? Madam, I have no time for wooing. I am fifty. At my age, one would be the loser on a long-term contract. If I want a woman, best to rent one by the hour.’

Yet he tries not to say ‘at my age’: not in his waking life. On a good day he thinks he has twenty years left. He often thinks he will see Henry out, though strictly it is not allowed to have that kind of thought; there is a law against speculating about the term of the king’s life, though Henry has been a life-long student of inventive ways to die. There have been several hunting accidents. When he was still a minor the council forbade him to joust, but he did it anyway, face hidden by his helmet and his armour without device, proving himself again and again the strongest man on the field. In battle against the French he has taken the honours, and his nature, as he often mentions, is warlike; no doubt he would be known as Henry the Valiant, except Thomas Cromwell says he can’t afford a war. Cost is not the whole consideration: what becomes of England if Henry dies? He was twenty years married to Katherine, this autumn it will be three with Anne, nothing to show but a daughter with each and a churchyard’s worth of dead babies, some half-formed and christened in blood, some born alive but dead within hours, within days, within weeks at most. All the turmoil, the scandal, to make the second marriage, and still. Still Henry has no son to follow him. He has a bastard, Harry Duke of Richmond, a fine boy of sixteen: but what use to him is a bastard? What use is Anne’s child, the infant Elizabeth? Some special mechanism may have to be created so Harry Richmond can reign, if anything but good should come to his father. He, Thomas Cromwell, stands very well with the young duke; but this dynasty, still new as kingship goes, is not secure enough to survive such a course. The Plantagenets were kings once and they think they will kings be again; they think the Tudors are an interlude. The old families of England are restless and ready to press their claim, especially since Henry broke with Rome; they bow the knee, but they are plotting. He can almost hear them, hidden among the trees.

You may find a bride in the forest, old Seymour had said. When he closes his eyes she slides behind them, veiled in cobwebs and splashed with dew. Her feet are bare, entwined in roots, her feather hair flies into the branches; her finger, beckoning, is a curled leaf. She points to him, as sleep overtakes him. His inner voice mocks him now: you thought you were going to get a holiday at Wolf Hall. You thought there would be nothing to do here except the usual business, war and peace, famine, traitorous connivance; a failing harvest, a stubborn populace; plague ravaging London, and the king losing his shirt at cards. You were prepared for that.

At the edge of his inner vision, behind his closed eyes, he senses something in the act of becoming. It will arrive with morning light; something shifting and breathing, its form disguised in a copse or grove.

Before he sleeps he thinks of the king’s hat on a midnight tree, roosting like a bird from paradise.

Next day, so as not to tire the ladies, they cut short the day’s sport, and return early to Wolf Hall.

For him, it is a chance to put off his riding clothes and get among the dispatches. He has hopes that the king will sit for an hour and listen to what he needs to tell him. But Henry says, ‘Lady Jane, will you walk in the garden with me?’

She is at once on her feet; but frowning, as if trying to make sense of it. Her lips move, she all but repeats his words: Walk…Jane?…In the garden?

Oh yes, of course, honoured. Her hand, a petal, hovers above his sleeve; then it descends, and flesh grazes embroidery.

There are three gardens at Wolf Hall, and they call them the great paled garden, the old lady’s garden and the young lady’s garden. When he asks who they were, no one remembers; the old lady and the young lady are dust long ago, no difference between them now. He remembers his dream: the bride made of root fibre, the bride made of mould.

He reads. He writes. Something tugs at his attention. He gets up and glances from the window at the walks below. The panes are small and there is a wobble in the glass, so he has to crane his neck to get a proper view. He thinks, I could send my glaziers down, help the Seymours get a clearer idea of the world. He has a team of Hollanders who work for him at his various properties. They worked for the cardinal before him.

Henry and Jane are walking below. Henry is a massive figure and Jane is like a little jointed puppet, her head not up to the king’s shoulders. A broad man, a high man, Henry dominates any room; he would do it even if God had not given him the gift of kingship.

Now Jane is behind a bush. Henry is nodding at her; he is speaking at her; he is impressing something on her, and he, Cromwell, watches, scratching his chin: is the king’s head becoming bigger? Is that possible, in mid-life?

Hans will have noticed, he thinks, I’ll ask him when I get back to London. Most likely I am under a mistake; probably it’s just the glass.

Clouds are coming up. A heavy raindrop hits the pane; he blinks; the drop spreads, widens, trickles against the glazing bars. Jane bobs out into his sightline. Henry has her hand clamped firmly on his arm, trapping it with his other hand. He can see the king’s mouth, still moving.

He resumes his seat. He reads that the builders working on the fortifications in Calais have downed tools and are demanding sixpence a day. That his new green velvet coat is coming down to Wiltshire by the next courier. That a Medici cardinal has been poisoned by his own brother. He yawns. He reads that hoarders on the Isle of Thanet are deliberately driving up the price of grain. Personally, he would hang hoarders, but the chief of them might be some little lordling who is promoting famine for fat profit, and so you have to tread carefully. Two years ago, at Southwark, seven Londoners were crushed to death in fighting for a dole of bread. It is a shame to England that the king’s subjects should starve. He takes up his pen and makes a note.

Very soon – this is not a big house, you can hear everything – he hears a door below, and the king’s voice, and a soft hum of solicitation around him…wet feet, Majesty? He hears Henry’s heavy tread approaching, but it seems Jane has melted away without a sound. No doubt her mother and her sisters have swept her aside, to hear all the king said to her.

As Henry comes in behind him, he pushes back his chair to rise. Henry waves a hand: carry on. ‘Majesty, the Muscovites have taken three hundred miles of Polish territory. They say fifty thousand men are dead.’

‘Oh,’ Henry says.

‘I hope they spare the libraries. The scholars. There are very fine scholars in Poland.’

‘Mm? I hope so too.’

He returns to his dispatches. Plague in town and city…the king is always very fearful of infection…Letters from foreign rulers, wishing to know if it is true that Henry is planning to cut off the heads of all his bishops. Certainly not, he notes, we have excellent bishops now, all of them conformable to the king’s wishes, all of them recognising him as head of the church in England; besides, what an uncivil question! How dare they imply that the King of England should account for himself to any foreign power? How dare they impugn his sovereign judgement? Bishop Fisher, it is true, is dead, and Thomas More, but Henry’s treatment of them, before they drove him to an extremity, was mild to a fault; if they had not evinced a traitorous stubbornness, they would be alive now, alive like you and me.

He has written a lot of these letters, since July. He doesn’t sound wholly convincing, even to himself; he finds himself repeating the same points, rather than advancing the argument into new territory. He needs new phrases…Henry stumps about behind him. ‘Majesty, the Imperial ambassador Chapuys asks may he ride up-country to visit your daughter, Lady Mary?’

‘No,’ Henry says.

He writes to Chapuys, Wait, just wait, till I am back in London, when all will be arranged…

No word from the king: just breathing, pacing, a creak from a cupboard where he rests and leans on it.

‘Majesty, I hear the Lord Mayor of London scarcely leaves his house, he is so afflicted by migraine.’

‘Mm?’ Henry says.

‘They are bleeding him. Is that what Your Majesty would advise?’

A pause. Henry focuses on him, with some effort. ‘Bleeding him, I’m sorry, for what?’

This is strange. Much as he hates news of plague, Henry always enjoys hearing of other people’s minor ailments. Admit to a sniffle or a colic, and he will make up a herbal potion with his own hands, and stand over you while you swallow it.

He puts down his pen. Turns to look his monarch in the face. It is clear that Henry’s mind is back in the garden. The king is wearing an expression he has seen before, though on beast, rather than man. He looks stunned, like a veal calf knocked on the head by the butcher.

It is to be their last night at Wolf Hall. He comes down very early, his arms full of papers. Someone is up before him. Stock-still in the great hall, a pale presence in the milky light, Jane Seymour is dressed in her stiff finery. She does not turn her head to acknowledge him, but she sees him from the tail of her eye.

If he had any feeling for her, he cannot find traces of it now. The months run away from you like a flurry of autumn leaves bowling and skittering towards the winter; the summer has gone, Thomas More’s daughter has got his head back off London Bridge and is keeping it, God knows, in a dish or bowl, and saying her prayers to it. He is not the same man he was last year, and he doesn’t acknowledge that man’s feelings; he is starting afresh, always new thoughts, new feelings. Jane, he begins to say, you’ll be able to get out of your best gown, will you be glad to see us on the road…?

Jane is facing front, like a sentry. The clouds have blown away overnight. We may have one more fine day. The early sun touches the fields, rosy. Night vapours disperse. The forms of trees swim into particularity. The house is waking up. Unstalled horses tread and whinny. A back door slams. Footsteps creak above them. Jane hardly seems to breathe. No rise and fall discernible, of that flat bosom. He feels he should walk backwards, withdraw, fade back into the night, and leave her here in the moment she occupies: looking out into England.

II. Crows. London and Kimbolton: Autumn 1535

Stephen Gardiner! Coming in as he’s going out, striding towards the king’s chamber, a folio under one arm, the other flailing the air. Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester: blowing up like a thunderstorm, when for once we have a fine day.

When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king’s tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears.

At court you might expect him. Anticipate him. But here? While we are still hunting through the countryside and (notionally) taking our ease? ‘This is a pleasure, my lord bishop,’ he says. ‘It does my heart good to see you looking so well. The court will progress to Winchester shortly, and I did not think to enjoy your company before that.’

‘I have stolen a march on you, Cromwell.’

‘Are we at war?’

The bishop’s face says, you know we are. ‘It was you who had me banished.’

‘I? Never think it, Stephen. I have missed you every day. Besides, not banished. Rusticated.’

Gardiner licks his lips. ‘You will see how I have spent my time in the country.’

When Gardiner lost the post of Mr Secretary – and lost it to him, Cromwell – it had been impressed on the bishop that a spell in his own diocese of Winchester might be advisable, for he had too often cut across the king and his second wife. As he had put it, ‘My lord of Winchester, a considered statement on the king’s supremacy might be welcome, just so that there can be no mistake about your loyalty. A firm declaration that he is head of the English church and, rightfully considered, always has been. An assertion, firmly stated, that the Pope is a foreign prince with no jurisdiction here. A written sermon, perhaps, or an open letter. To clear up any ambiguities in your opinions. To give a lead to other churchmen, and to disabuse ambassador Chapuys of the notion that you have been bought by the Emperor. You should make a statement to the whole of Christendom. In fact, why don’t you go back to your diocese and write a book?’

Now here is Gardiner, patting a manuscript as if it were the cheek of a plump baby: ‘The king will be pleased to read this. I have called it, Of True Obedience.’

‘You had better let me see it before it goes to the printer.’

‘The king himself will expound it to you. It shows why oaths to the papacy are of none effect, yet our oath to the king, as head of the church, is good. It emphasises most strongly that a king’s authority is divine, and descends to him directly from God.’

‘And not from a pope.’

‘In no wise from a pope; it descends from God without intermediary, and it does not flow upwards from his subjects, as you once stated to him.’

‘Did I? Flow upwards? There seems a difficulty there.’

‘You brought the king a book to that effect, the book of Marsiglio of Padua, his forty-two articles. The king says you belaboured him with them till his head ached.’

‘I should have made the matter shorter,’ he says, smiling. ‘In practice, Stephen, upwards, downwards – it hardly matters. “Where the word of a king is, there is power, and who may say to him, what doest thou?”’

‘Henry is not a tyrant,’ Gardiner says stiffly. ‘I rebut any notion that his regime is not lawfully grounded. If I were king, I would wish my authority to be legitimate wholly, to be respected universally and, if questioned, stoutly defended. Would not you?’

‘If I were king…’

He was going to say, if I were king I’d defenestrate you. Gardiner says, ‘Why are you looking out of the window?’

He smiles absently. ‘I wonder what Thomas More would say to your book?’

‘Oh, he would much mislike it, but for his opinion I do not give a fig,’ the bishop says heartily, ‘since his brain was eaten out by kites, and his skull made a relic his daughter worships on her knees. Why did you let her take the head off London Bridge?’

‘You know me, Stephen. The fluid of benevolence flows through my veins and sometimes overspills. But look, if you are so proud of your book, perhaps you should spend more time writing in the country?’

Gardiner scowls. ‘You should write a book yourself. That would be something to see. You with your dog Latin and your little bit of Greek.’

‘I would write it in English,’ he says. ‘A good language for all sorts of matters. Go in, Stephen, don’t keep the king waiting. You will find him in a good humour. Harry Norris is with him today. Francis Weston.’

‘Oh, that chattering coxcomb,’ Stephen says. He makes a cuffing motion. ‘Thank you for the intelligence.’

Does the phantom-self of Weston feel the slap? A gust of laughter sweeps out from Henry’s rooms.

The fine weather did not much outlast their stay at Wolf Hall. They had hardly left the Savernake forest when they were enveloped in wet mist. In England it’s been raining, more or less, for a decade, and the harvest will be poor again. The price of wheat is forecast to rise to twenty shillings a quarter. So what will the labourer do this winter, the man who earns five or six pence a day? The profiteers have moved in already, not just on the Isle of Thanet, but through the shires. His men are on their tail.

It used to surprise the cardinal, that one Englishman would starve another and take the profit. But he would say, ‘I have seen an English mercenary cut the throat of his comrade, and pull his blanket from under him while he’s still twitching, and go through his pack and pocket a holy medal along with his money.’

‘Ah, but he was a hired killer,’ the cardinal would say. ‘Such men have no soul to lose. But most Englishmen fear God.’

‘The Italians think not. They say the road between England and Hell is worn bare from treading feet, and runs downhill all the way.’

Daily he ponders the mystery of his countrymen. He has seen killers, yes; but he has seen a hungry soldier give away a loaf to a woman, a woman who is nothing to him, and turn away with a shrug. It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.

When, some days after his meeting with Stephen Gardiner, the travelling court had reached Winchester, new bishops had been consecrated in the cathedral. ‘My bishops’, Anne called them: gospellers, reformers, men who see Anne as an opportunity. Who would have thought Hugh Latimer would be a bishop? You would rather have predicted he would be burned, shrivelled at Smithfield with the gospel in his mouth. But then, who would have thought that Thomas Cromwell would be anything at all? When Wolsey fell, you might have thought that as Wolsey’s servant he was ruined. When his wife and daughters died, you might have thought his loss would kill him. But Henry has turned to him; Henry has sworn him in; Henry has put his time at his disposal and said, come, Master Cromwell, take my arm: through courtyards and throne rooms, his path in life is now made smooth and clear. As a young man he was always shouldering his way through crowds, pushing to the front to see the spectacle. But now crowds scatter as he walks through Westminster or the precincts of any of the king’s palaces. Since he was sworn councillor, trestles and packing cases and loose dogs are swept from his path. Women still their whispering and tug down their sleeves and settle their rings on their fingers, since he was named Master of the Rolls. Kitchen debris and clerks’ clutter and the footstools of the lowly are kicked into corners and out of sight, now that he is Master Secretary to the king. And no one except Stephen Gardiner corrects his Greek; not now he is Chancellor of Cambridge University.

Henry’s summer, on the whole, has been a success: through Berkshire, Wiltshire and Somerset he has shown himself to the people on the roads, and (when the rain isn’t bucketing down) they’ve stood by the roads and cheered. Why would they not? You cannot see Henry and not be amazed. Each time you see him you are struck afresh by him, as if it were the first time: a massive man, bull-necked, his hair receding, face fleshing out; blue eyes, and a small mouth that is almost coy. His height is six feet three inches, and every inch bespeaks power. His carriage, his person, are magnificent; his rages are terrifying, his vows and curses, his molten tears. But there are moments when his great body will stretch and ease itself, his brow clear; he will plump himself down next to you on a bench and talk to you like your brother. Like a brother might, if you had one. Or a father even, a father of an ideal sort: how are you? Not working too hard? Have you had your dinner? What did you dream last night?

The danger of a progress like this is that a king who sits at ordinary tables, on an ordinary chair, can be taken as an ordinary man. But Henry is not ordinary. What if his hair is receding and his belly advancing? The Emperor Charles, when he looks in the glass, would give a province to see the Tudor’s visage instead of his own crooked countenance, his hook nose almost touching his chin. King Francis, a beanpole, would pawn his dauphin to have shoulders like the King of England. Any qualities they have, Henry reflects them back, double the size. If they are learned, he is twice learned. If merciful, he is the exemplar of mercy. If they are gallant, he is the pattern of knight errantry, from the biggest book of knights you can think of.

All the same: in village alehouses up and down England, they are blaming the king and Anne Boleyn for the weather: the concubine, the great whore. If the king would take back his lawful wife Katherine, the rain would stop. And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?

They move back towards London slowly, so that by the time the king arrives the city will be free from suspicion of plague. In cold chantry chapels under the gaze of wall-eyed virgins, the king prays alone. He doesn’t like him to pray alone. He wants to know what he’s praying for; his old master, Cardinal Wolsey, would have known.

His relations with the queen, as the summer draws to its official end, are chary, uncertain, and fraught with distrust. Anne Boleyn is now thirty-four years old, an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant. Once sinuous, she has become angular. She retains her dark glitter, now rubbed a little, flaking in places. Her prominent dark eyes she uses to good effect, and in this fashion: she glances at a man’s face, then her regard flits away, as if unconcerned, indifferent. There is a pause: as it might be, a breath. Then slowly, as if compelled, she turns her gaze back to him. Her eyes rest on his face. She examines this man. She examines him as if he is the only man in the world. She looks as if she is seeing him for the first time, and considering all sorts of uses for him, all sorts of possibilities which he has not even thought of himself. To her victim the moment seems to last an age, during which shivers run up his spine. Though in fact the trick is quick, cheap, effective and repeatable, it seems to the poor fellow that he is now distinguished among all men. He smirks. He preens himself. He grows a little taller. He grows a little more foolish.

He has seen Anne work her trick on lord and commoner, on the king himself. You watch as the man’s mouth gapes a little and he becomes her creature. Almost always it works; it has never worked on him. He is not indifferent to women, God knows, just indifferent to Anne Boleyn. It galls her; he should have pretended. He has made her queen, she has made him minister; but they are uneasy now, each of them vigilant, watching each other for some slip that will betray real feeling, and so give advantage to the one or the other: as if only dissimulation will make them safe. But Anne is not good at hiding her feelings; she is the king’s quicksilver darling, slipping and sliding from anger to laughter. There have been times this summer when she would smile secretly at him behind the king’s back, or grimace to warn him that Henry was out of temper. At other times she would ignore him, turn her shoulder, her black eyes sweeping the room and resting elsewhere.

To understand this – if it bears understanding – we must go back to last spring, when Thomas More was still alive. Anne had called him in to talk of diplomacy: her object was a marriage contract, a French prince for her infant daughter Elizabeth. But the French proved skittish in negotiation. The truth is, even now they do not fully concede that Anne is queen, they are not convinced that her daughter is legitimate. Anne knows what lies behind their reluctance, and somehow it is his fault: his, Thomas Cromwell’s. She had accused him openly of sabotaging her. He did not like the French and did not want the alliance, she claimed. Did he not shirk a chance to cross the sea for face-to-face talks? The French were all ready to negotiate, she says. ‘And you were expected, Master Secretary. And you said you were ill, and my lord brother had to go.’

‘And failed,’ he had sighed. ‘Very sadly.’

‘I know you,’ Anne said. ‘You are never ill, are you, unless you wish to be? And besides, I perceive how things stand with you. You think that when you are in the city and not at the court you are not under our eye. But I know you are too friendly with the Emperor’s man. I am aware Chapuys is your neighbour. But is that a reason why your servants should be always in and out of each other’s houses?’

Anne was wearing, that day, rose pink and dove grey. The colours should have had a fresh maidenly charm; but all he could think of were stretched innards, umbles and tripes, grey-pink intestines looped out of a living body; he had a second batch of recalcitrant friars to be dispatched to Tyburn, to be slit up and gralloched by the hangman. They were traitors and deserved the death, but it is a death exceeding most in cruelty. The pearls around her long neck looked to him like little beads of fat, and as she argued she would reach up and tug them; he kept his eyes on her fingertips, nails flashing like tiny knives.

Still, as he says to Chapuys, while I am in Henry’s favour, I doubt the queen can do me any harm. She has her spites, she has her little rages; she is volatile and Henry knows it. It was what fascinated the king, to find someone so different from those soft, kind blondes who drift through men’s lives and leave not a mark behind. But now when Anne appears he sometimes looks harassed. You can see his gaze growing distant when she begins one of her rants, and if he were not such a gentleman he would pull his hat down over his ears.

No, he tells the ambassador, it’s not Anne who bothers me; it’s the men she collects about her. Her family: her father the Earl of Wiltshire, who likes to be known as ‘Monseigneur’, and her brother George, Lord Rochford, whom Henry has appointed to his privy chamber rota. George is one of the newer staff, because Henry likes to stick with men he is used to, who were his friends when he was young; from time to time the cardinal would sweep them out, but they would seep back like dirty water. Once they were young men of esprit, young men of élan. A quarter of a century has passed and they are grey or balding, flabby or paunchy, gone in the fetlock or missing some fingers, but still as arrogant as satraps and with the mental refinement of a gatepost. And now there is a new litter of pups, Weston and George Rochford and their ilk, whom Henry has taken up because he thinks they keep him young. These men – the old ones and the new – are with the king from his uprising to his downlying, and all his private hours in between. They are with him in his stool chamber, and when he cleans his teeth and spits into a silver basin; they swab him with towels and lace him into his doublet and hose; they know his person, each mole or freckle, each bristle in his beard, and they map the islands of his sweat when he comes from the tennis court and rips off his shirt. They know more than they should, as much as his laundress and his doctor, and they talk of what they know; they know when he visits the queen to try to bounce a son into her, or when, on a Friday (the day no Christian copulates) he dreams of a phantom woman and stains his sheets. They sell their knowledge at a high price: they want favours done, they want their own derelictions ignored, they think they are special and they want you to be aware of it. Ever since he, Cromwell, came up in Henry’s service, he has been mollifying these men, flattering them, cajoling them, seeking always an easy way of working, a compromise; but sometimes, when for an hour they block him from access to his king, they can’t keep the grins from their faces. I have probably, he thinks, gone as far as I can to accommodate them. Now they must accommodate me, or be removed.

The mornings are chilly now, and fat-bellied clouds bob after the royal party as they dawdle through Hampshire, the roads turning within days from dust to mud. Henry is reluctant to hurry back to business; I wish it were always August, he says. They are en route to Farnham, a small hunting party, when a report is galloped along the road: cases of plague have appeared in the town. Henry, brave on the battlefield, pales almost before their eyes and wrenches around his horse’s head: where to? Anywhere will do, anywhere but Farnham.

He leans forward in the saddle, removing his hat as he speaks to the king. ‘We can go before our time to Basing House, let me send a fast man to warn William Paulet. Then, so as not to burden him, to Elvetham for a day? Edward Seymour is at home, and I can hunt out supplies if he is unprovided.’

He drops back, letting Henry ride ahead. He says to Rafe, ‘Send to Wolf Hall. Fetch Mistress Jane.’

‘What, here?’

‘She can ride. Tell old Seymour to put her on a good horse. I shall want her at Elvetham for Wednesday evening, any later will be too late.’

Rafe reins in, poised to turn. ‘But. Sir. The Seymours will ask why Jane and why the hurry. And why we are going to Elvetham, when there are other houses nearby, the Westons at Sutton Place…’

Drown or hang the Westons, he thinks. The Westons are no part of this plan. He smiles. ‘Say they should do it because they love me.’

He sees Rafe thinking, so my master is going to ask for Jane Seymour after all. For himself or for Gregory?

He, Cromwell, had seen at Wolf Hall what Rafe could not see: silent Jane in his bed, pale and speechless Jane, that is what Henry dreams of now. You cannot account for a man’s fantasies, and Henry is no lecher, he has not taken many mistresses. No harm if he, Cromwell, helps ease the king’s way towards her. The king does not mistreat his bedfellows. He is not a man who hates a woman once he has had her. He will write her verses, and with prompting he will give her an income, he will advance her folk; there are many families who have decided, since Anne Boleyn came up in the world, that to bask in the sunshine of Henry’s regard is an Englishwoman’s highest vocation. If they play this carefully, Edward Seymour will rise within the court, and give him an ally where allies are scarce. At this stage, Edward needs advice. Because he, Cromwell, has better business sense than the Seymours. He will not let Jane sell herself cheap.

But what will Anne the queen do, if Henry takes as mistress a young woman she has laughed at since ever Jane waited upon her: whom she calls pasty-face and milksop? How will Anne counter meekness, and silence? Raging will hardly help her. She will have to ask herself what Jane can give the king, that at present he lacks. She will have to think it through. And it is always a pleasure to see Anne thinking.

When the two parties met after Wolf Hall – king’s party and queen’s party – Anne had been charming to him, laying her hand on his arm and chattering away in French about nothing very much. As if she had never mentioned, a few weeks before, that she would like to cut off his head; as if she was only making conversation. It is well to keep behind her in the hunting field. She is keen and quick but not too accurate. This summer she put a crossbow bolt in a straying cow. And Henry had to pay off the owner.

But look, never mind all this. Queens come and go. So recent history has shown us. Let us think about how to pay for England, her king’s great charges, the cost of charity and the cost of justice, the cost of keeping her enemies beyond her shores.

From last year he has been sure of his answer: monks, that parasite class of men, are going to provide. Get out to the abbeys and convents through the realm, he had told his visitors, his inspectors: put to them the questions I will give you, eighty-six questions in all. Listen more than you speak, and when you have listened, ask to see the accounts. Talk to the monks and nuns about their lives and Rule. I am not interested where they think their own salvation lies, whether through Christ’s precious blood only or through their own works and merits in part: well, yes, I am interested, but the chief matter is to know what assets they have. To know their rents and holdings, and whether, in the event it please the king as head of the church to take back what he owns, by what mechanism it is best to do it.

Don’t expect a warm welcome, he says. They will rush to liquidate their assets ahead of your arrival. Take note of what relics they have or objects of local veneration, and how they exploit them, how much revenue they bring in by the year, for all that money is made off the back of superstitious pilgrims who would do better to stay at home and earn an honest living. Press them on their loyalty, what they think of Katherine, what they think of the Lady Mary, and how they regard the Pope; because if the mother houses of their orders are outside these shores, have they not a higher loyalty, as they might term it, to some foreign power? Put this to them and show them that they are at a disadvantage; it is not enough to assert their fidelity to the king, they must be ready to show it, and they can do that by making your work easy.

His men know better than to try to cheat him, but just to make sure he sends them out in pairs, one to watch the other. The abbeys’ bursars will offer bribes, to understate their assets.

Thomas More, in his room in the Tower, had said to him, ‘Where will you strike next, Cromwell? You are going to pull all England down.’

He had said, I pray to God, grant me life only as long as I use my power to build and not destroy. Among the ignorant it is said that the king is destroying the church. In fact he is renewing it. It will be a better country, believe me, once it is purged of liars and hypocrites. ‘But you, unless you mend your manners towards Henry, will not be alive to see it.’

Nor was he. He doesn’t regret what happened; his only regret is that More wouldn’t see sense. He was offered an oath upholding Henry’s supremacy in the church; this oath is a test of loyalty. Not many things in life are simple, but this is simple. If you will not swear it, you indict yourself, by implication: traitor, rebel. More would not swear; then what could he do but die? What could he do but splash to the scaffold, on a day in July when the torrents never stopped, except for a brief hour in the evening and that too late for Thomas More; he died with his hose wet, splashed to the knees, and his feet paddling like a duck’s. He doesn’t exactly miss the man. It’s just that sometimes, he forgets he’s dead. It’s as if they’re deep in conversation, and suddenly the conversation stops, he says something and no answer comes back. As if they’d been walking along and More had dropped into a hole in the road, a pit as deep as a man, slopping with rainwater.

You do, in fact, hear of such accidents. Men have died, the track giving way under their feet. England needs better roads, and bridges that don’t collapse. He is preparing a bill for Parliament to give employment to men without work, to get them waged and out mending the roads, making the harbours, building walls against the Emperor or any other opportunist. We could pay them, he calculated, if we levied an income tax on the rich; we could provide shelter, doctors if they needed them, their subsistence; we would all have the fruits of their work, and their employment would keep them from becoming bawds or pickpockets or highway robbers, all of which men will do if they see no other way to eat. What if their fathers before them were bawds, pickpockets or highway robbers? That signifies nothing. Look at him. Is he Walter Cromwell? In a generation everything can change.

As for the monks, he believes, like Martin Luther, that the monastic life is not necessary, not useful, not commanded of Christ. There’s nothing imperishable about monasteries. They’re not part of God’s natural order. They rise and decay, like any other institutions, and sometimes their buildings fall down, or they are ruined by lax stewardship. Over the years any number of them have vanished or relocated or become swallowed into some other monastery. The number of monks is diminishing naturally, because these days the good Christian man lives out in the world. Take Battle Abbey. Two hundred monks at the height of its fortunes, and now – what? – forty at most. Forty fat fellows sitting on a fortune. The same up and down the kingdom. Resources that could be freed, that could be put to better use. Why should money lie in coffers, when it could be put into circulation among the king’s subjects?

His commissioners go out and send him back scandals; they send him monkish manuscripts, tales of ghosts and curses, meant to keep simple people in dread. The monks have relics that make it rain or make it stop, that inhibit the growth of weeds and cure diseases of cattle. They charge for the use of them, they do not give them free to their neighbours: old bones and chips of wood, bent nails from the crucifixion of Christ. He tells the king and queen what his men have found in Wiltshire at Maiden Bradley. ‘The monks have part of God’s coat, and some broken meats from the Last Supper. They have twigs that blossom on Christmas Day.’

‘That last is possible,’ Henry says reverently. ‘Think of the Glastonbury thorn.’

‘The prior has six children, and keeps his sons in his household as waiting men. He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins. And then when he was tired of them or they were with child, he found them a husband. He claims he has a licence given under papal seal, allowing him to keep a whore.’

Anne giggles: ‘And could he produce it?’

Henry is shocked. ‘Away with him. Such men are a disgrace to their calling.’

But these tonsured fools are commonly worse than other men; does Henry not know that? There are some good monks, but after a few years of exposure to the monastic ideal, they tend to run away. They flee the cloisters and become actors in the world. In times past our forefathers with their billhooks and scythes attacked the monks and their servants with the fury they would bring against an occupying army. They broke down their walls and threatened to burn them out, and what they wanted were the monks’ rent-rolls, the items of their servitude, and when they could get them they tore them and put them on bonfires, and they said, what we want is a little liberty: a little liberty, and to be treated like Englishmen, after the centuries we have been treated as beasts.

Darker reports come in. He, Cromwell, says to his visitors, just tell them this, and tell them loud: to each monk, one bed: to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them? The world-weary tell him, these sins are sure to happen, if you shut up men without recourse to women they will prey on the younger and weaker novices, they are men and it is only a man’s nature. But aren’t they supposed to rise above nature? What’s the point of all the prayer and fasting, if it leaves them insufficient when the devil comes to tempt them?

The king concedes the waste, the mismanagement; it may be necessary, he says, to reform and regroup some of the smaller houses, for the cardinal himself did so when he was alive. But surely, the great houses, we can trust them to renew themselves?

Possibly, he says. He knows the king is devout and afraid of change. He wants the church reformed, he wants it pristine; he also wants money. But as a native of the sign Cancer, he proceeds crab-wise to his objective: a side-shuffle, a weaving motion. He, Cromwell, watches Henry, as his eyes pass over the figures he has been given. It’s not a fortune, not for a king: not a king’s ransom. By and by, Henry may want to think of the larger houses, the fatter priors basted in self-regard. Let us for now make a beginning. He says, I’ve sat at too many abbots’ tables where the abbot nibbles raisins and dates, while for the monks it’s herring again. He thinks, if I had my way I would free them all to lead a different life. They claim they’re living the vita apostolica; but you didn’t find the apostles feeling each other’s bollocks. Those who want to go, let them go. Those monks who are ordained priest can be given benefices, do useful work in the parishes. Those under twenty-four, men and women both, can be sent back into the world. They are too young to bind themselves for life with vows.

He is thinking ahead: if the king had the monks’ land, not just a little but the whole of it, he would be three times the man he is now. He need no longer go cap in hand to Parliament, wheedling for a subsidy. His son Gregory says to him, ‘Sir, they say that if the Abbot of Glastonbury went to bed with the Abbess of Shaftesbury, their offspring would be the richest landowner in England.’

‘Very likely,’ he says, ‘though have you seen the Abbess of Shaftesbury?’

Gregory looks worried. ‘Should I have?’

Conversations with his son are like this: they dart off at angles, end up anywhere. He thinks of the grunts in which he and Walter communicated when he was a boy. ‘You can look at her if you like. I must visit Shaftesbury soon, I have something to do there.’

The convent at Shaftesbury is where Wolsey placed his daughter. He says, ‘Will you make a note for me, Gregory, a memorandum? Go and see Dorothea.’

Gregory longs to ask, who is Dorothea? He sees the questions chase each other across the boy’s face; then at last: ‘Is she pretty?’

‘I don’t know. Her father kept her close.’ He laughs.

But he wipes the smile from his face when he reminds Henry: when monks are traitors, they are the most recalcitrant of that cursed breed. When you threaten them, ‘I will make you suffer,’ they reply that it is for suffering they were born. Some choose to starve in prison, or go praying to Tyburn and the attentions of the hangman. He said to them, as he said to Thomas More, this is not about your God, or my God, or about God at all. This is about, which will you have: Henry Tudor or Alessandro Farnese? The King of England at Whitehall, or some fantastically corrupt foreigner in the Vatican? They had turned their heads away; died speechless, their false hearts carved out of their chests.

When he rides at last into the gates of his city house at Austin Friars, his liveried servants bunch about him, in their long-skirted coats of grey marbled cloth. Gregory is on his right hand, and on his left Humphrey, keeper of his sporting spaniels, with whom he has had easy conversation on this last mile of the journey; behind him his falconers, Hugh and James and Roger, vigilant men alert for any jostling or threat. A crowd has formed outside his gate, expecting largesse. Humphrey and the rest have money to disburse. After supper tonight there will be the usual dole to the poor. Thurston, his chief cook, says they are feeding two hundred Londoners, twice a day.

He sees a man in the press, a little bowed man, scarcely making an effort to keep his feet. This man is weeping. He loses sight of him; he spots him again, his head bobbing, as if his tears were the tide and were carrying him towards the gate. He says, ‘Humphrey, find out what ails that fellow.’

But then he forgets. His household are happy to see him, all his folk with shining faces, and a swarm of little dogs about his feet; he lifts them into his arms, writhing bodies and wafting tails, and asks them how they do. The servants cluster round Gregory, admiring him from hat to boots; all servants love him for his pleasant ways. ‘The man in charge!’ his nephew Richard says, and gives him a bone-crushing hug. Richard is a solid boy with the Cromwell eye, direct and brutal, and the Cromwell voice that can caress or contradict. He is afraid of nothing that walks the earth, and nothing that walks below it; if a demon turned up at Austin Friars, Richard would kick it downstairs on its hairy arse.

His smiling nieces, young married women now, have slackened the laces on their bodices to accommodate swelling bellies. He kisses them both, their bodies soft against his, their breath sweet, warmed by ginger comfits such as women in their condition use. He misses, for a moment…what does he miss? The pliancy of gentle, willing flesh; the absent, inconsequential conversations of early morning. He has to be careful in any dealings with women, discreet. He should not give his ill-wishers the chance to defame him. Even the king is discreet; he doesn’t want Europe to call him Harry Whoremaster. Perhaps he’d rather gaze at the unattainable, for now: Mistress Seymour.

At Elvetham Jane was like a flower, head drooping, modest as a drift of green-white hellebore. In her brother’s house, the king had praised her to her family’s face: ‘A tender, modest, shame-faced maid, such as few be in our day.’

Thomas Seymour, keen as always to crash into the conversation and talk over his elder brother: ‘For piety and modesty, I dare say Jane has few equals.’

He saw brother Edward hide a smile. Under his interested eye, Jane’s family have begun – with a certain incredulity – to sense which way the wind is blowing. Thomas Seymour said, ‘I could not brazen it out, even if I were the king I could not face it, inviting a lady like sister Jane to come to my bed. I wouldn’t know how to begin. And would you, anyway? Why would you? It would be like kissing a stone. Rolling her about from one side of the mattress to the other, and your parts growing numb from cold.’

‘A brother cannot picture his sister in a man’s embrace,’ Edward Seymour says. ‘At least, no brother can who calls himself a Christian. Though they do say at court that George Boleyn –’ He breaks off, frowning. ‘And of course the king knows how to propose himself. How to offer himself. He knows how to do it, as a gallant gentleman. As you, brother, do not.’

It’s hard to put down Tom Seymour. He just grins.

But Henry had not said much, before they rode away from Elvetham; made his hearty farewells, and never a word about the girl. Jane had whispered to him, ‘Master Cromwell, why am I here?’

‘Ask your brothers.’

‘My brothers say, ask Cromwell.’

‘So is it an utter mystery to you?’

‘Yes. Unless I am to be married at last. Am I to be married to you?’

‘I must forgo that prospect. I am too old for you, Jane. I could be your father.’

‘Could you?’ Jane says wonderingly. ‘Well, stranger things have happened at Wolf Hall. I didn’t even realise you knew my mother.’

A fleeting smile and she vanishes, leaving him looking after her. We could be married at that, he thinks; it would keep my mind agile, wondering how she might misconstrue me. Does she do it on purpose?

Though I can’t have her till Henry’s finished with her. And I once swore I would not take on his used women, did I not?

Perhaps, he had thought, I should scribble an aide-memoire for the Seymour boys, so they are clear on what presents Jane should and should not accept. The rule is simple: jewellery yes, money no. And till the deal is done, let her not take off any item of clothing in Henry’s presence. Not even, he will advise, her gloves.

Unkind people describe his house as the Tower of Babel. It is said he has servants from every nation under the sun, except Scotland; so Scots keep applying to him, in hope. Gentlemen and even noblemen from here and abroad are pressing him to take their sons into his household, and he accepts all he thinks he can train. On any given day at Austin Friars a group of German scholars will be deploying the many varieties of their tongue, frowning over the letters of evangelists from their own territories. At dinner young Cambridge men exchange snippets of Greek; they are the scholars he has helped, now come to help him. Sometimes a company of Italian merchants come in for supper, and he chats with them in those languages he learned when he worked for the bankers in Florence and Venice. The retainers of his neighbour Chapuys loll about drinking at the expense of the Cromwell buttery, and gossip in Spanish, in Flemish. He himself speaks in French to Chapuys, as it is the ambassador’s first language, and employs French of a more demotic sort to his boy Christophe, a squat little ruffian who followed him home from Calais, and who is never far from his side; he doesn’t let him far from his side, because around Christophe fights break out.

There is a summer of gossip to catch up on, and accounts to go through, receipts and expenses of his houses and lands. But first he goes out to the kitchen to see his chief cook. It’s that early-afternoon lull, dinner cleared, spits cleaned, pewter scoured and stacked, a smell of cinnamon and cloves, and Thurston standing solitary by a floured board, gazing at a ball of dough as if it were the head of the Baptist. As a shadow blocks his light, ‘Inky fingers out!’ the cook roars. Then, ‘Ah. You, sir. Not before time. We had great venison pasties made against your coming, we had to give them out to your friends before they went bad. We’d have sent some up to you, only you move around so fast.’

He holds out his hands for inspection.

‘I beg pardon,’ Thurston says. ‘But you see I have young Thomas Avery down here fresh from the account books, poking around the stores and wanting to weigh things. Then Master Rafe, look Thurston, we have some Danes coming, what can you make for Danes? Then Master Richard crashing in, Luther has sent his messengers, what sort of cakes do Germans like?’

He gives the dough a pinch. ‘Is this for Germans?’

‘Never mind what it is. If it works, you’ll eat it.’

‘Did they pick the quinces? It can’t be long before we have frost. I can feel it in my bones.’

‘Listen to you,’ Thurston says. ‘You sound like your own grandam.’

‘You didn’t know her. Or did you?’

Thurston chuckles. ‘Parish drunk?’

Probably. What sort of woman could have suckled his father Walter Cromwell, and not turned to drink? Thurston says, as if it’s just struck him, ‘Mind you, a man has two grandams. Who were your mother’s people, sir?’

‘They were northerners.’

Thurston grins. ‘Come out of a cave. You know young Francis Weston? He that waits on the king? His people are giving out that you’re a Hebrew.’ He grunts; he’s heard that one before. ‘Next time you’re at court,’ Thurston advises, ‘take your cock out and put it on the table and see what he says to that.’

‘I do that anyway,’ he says. ‘If the conversation flags.’

‘Mind you…’ Thurston hesitates. ‘It’s true, sir, you are a Hebrew because you lend money at interest.’

Mounting, in Weston’s case. ‘Anyway,’ he says. He gives the dough another nip; it’s a bit solid, is it not? ‘What’s new on the streets?’

‘They’re saying the old queen’s sick.’ Thurston waits. But his master has picked up a handful of currants and is eating them. ‘She’s sick at heart, I should think. They say she’s put a curse on Anne Boleyn, so she won’t have a boy. Or if she does have a boy, it won’t be Henry’s. They say Henry has other women and so Anne chases him around his chamber with a pair of shears, shouting she’ll geld him. Queen Katherine used to shut her eyes like wives do, but Anne’s not the same mettle and she swears he will suffer for it. So that would be a pretty revenge, wouldn’t it?’ Thurston cackles. ‘She cuckolds Henry to pay him back, and puts her own bastard on the throne.’

They have busy, buzzing minds, the Londoners: minds like middens. ‘Do they guess at who the father of this bastard will be?’

‘Thomas Wyatt?’ Thurston offers. ‘Because she was known to favour him before she was queen. Or else her old lover Harry Percy –’

‘Percy’s in his own country, is he not?’

Thurston rolls his eyes. ‘Distance don’t stop her. If she wants him down from Northumberland she just whistles and whips him down on the wind. Not that she stops at Harry Percy. They say she has all the gentlemen of the king’s privy chamber, one after another. She don’t like delay so they all stand in a line frigging their members, till she shouts, “Next.”’

‘And in they troop,’ he says. ‘One and then another.’ He laughs. Eats the final currant from his palm.

‘Welcome home,’ Thurston says. ‘London, where we believe anything.’

‘After she was crowned, I remember she called her whole household together, men and maids, and she sermonised them on how they should behave, no gambling except for tokens, no loose language and no flesh on show. It’s slid a bit from there, I agree.’

‘Sir,’ Thurston says, ‘you’ve got flour on your sleeve.’

‘Well, I must go upstairs and sit down in council. Don’t let supper be late.’

‘When is it ever?’ Thurston dusts him tenderly. ‘When is it ever?’

This is his household council, not the king’s; his familiar advisers, the young men, Rafe Sadler and Richard Cromwell, quick and ready with figures, quick to twist an argument, quick to seize a point. And also Gregory. His son.

This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation of the agents for the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the fashion. The bags are heart-shaped and so to him it always looks as if they are going wooing, but they swear they are not. Nephew Richard Cromwell sits down and gives the bags a sardonic glance. Richard is like his uncle, and keeps his effects close to his person. ‘Here’s Call-Me,’ he says. ‘Will you look at the feather in his hat?’

Thomas Wriothesley comes in, parting from his murmuring retainers; he is a tall and handsome young man with a head of burnished copper hair. A generation back, his family were called Writh, but they thought an elegant extension would give them consequence; they were heralds by office, so they were well-placed for reinvention, for the reworking of ordinary ancestors into something more knightly. The change does not go by without mockery; Thomas is known at Austin Friars as Call-Me-Risley. He has grown a trim beard recently, has fathered a son, and is accreting dignity each year. He drops his bag on the table and slides into his place. ‘And how is Gregory?’ he asks.

Gregory’s face opens in delight; he admires Call-Me, and he hardly hears the note of condescension. ‘Oh, I am well. I have been hunting all summer and now I will be back to William Fitzwilliam’s household to join in his train, for he is a gentleman close to the king and my father thinks I can learn from him. Fitz is good to me.’

‘Fitz.’ Wriothesley snorts with amusement. ‘You Cromwells!’

‘Well,’ Gregory says, ‘he calls my father Crumb.’

‘I suggest you don’t take that up, Wriothesley,’ he says amiably. ‘Or at least, Crumb me behind my back. Though I’ve just been out to the kitchens and Crumb is nothing to what they call the queen.’

Richard Cromwell says, ‘It’s the women who keep the poison pot stirred. They don’t like man-stealers. They think Anne should be punished.’

‘When we left for the progress she was all elbows,’ Gregory says, unexpectedly. ‘Elbows and points and spikes. She looks more plush now.’

‘So she does.’ He is surprised the boy has noticed such a thing. The married men, experienced, watch Anne for signs of fattening as keenly as they watch their own wives. There are glances around the table. ‘Well, we shall see. They have not been together the whole summer, but as I judge, enough.’

‘It had better be enough,’ Wriothesley says. ‘The king will grow impatient with her. How many years has he waited, for a woman to do her duty? Anne promised him a son if he would wed her, and you wonder, would he do so much for her, if it were all to do again?’

Richard Riche joins them last, with a muttered apology. No heart-shaped bag for this Richard either, though once he would have been just the kind of young gallant to have five in different colours. What a change a decade brings! Riche was once the worst kind of law student, the kind with a file of pleas in mitigation to set against his sins; the kind who seeks out low taverns where lawyers are called vermin, and so is obliged in honour to start a fight; who arrives back at his lodgings in the Temple in the small hours stinking of cheap wine and with his jacket in shreds; the kind who halloos with a pack of terriers over Lincoln’s Inn Fields. But Riche is sobered and subdued now, protégé of the Lord Chancellor Thomas Audley, and constantly to and fro between that dignitary and Thomas Cromwell. The boys call him Sir Purse; Purse is getting fatter, they say. The cares of office have fallen on him, the duties of the father of a growing family; once a golden boy, he looks to be covered by a faint patina of dust. Who would have thought he would be Solicitor General? But then he has a good lawyer’s brain, and when you want a good lawyer, he is always at hand.

‘Bishop Gardiner’s book is not to your purpose,’ Riche begins. ‘Sir.’

‘It is not wholly bad. On the king’s powers, we concur.’

‘Yes, but,’ Riche says.

‘I was moved to quote to Gardiner this text: “Where the word of a king is, there is power, and who shall say to him, what doest thou?”’

Riche raises his eyebrows. ‘Parliament shall.’

Mr Wriothesley says, ‘Trust Master Riche to know what Parliament can do.’

It was on the questions of Parliament’s powers, it seems, that Riche tripped Thomas More, tripped and tipped him and perhaps betrayed him into treason. No one knows what was said in that room, in that cell; Riche had come out, pink-faced, hoping and half-suspecting that he had got enough, and gone straight from the Tower of London to him, to Thomas Cromwell. Who had said calmly, yes, this will do; we have him, thank you. Thank you, Purse, you did well.

Now Richard Cromwell leans towards him: ‘Tell us, my little friend Purse: in your good opinion, can Parliament put an heir in the queen’s belly?’

Riche blushes a little; he is nearly forty now, but because of his complexion he can still blush. ‘I never said Parliament can do what God will not. I said it could do more than Thomas More would allow.’

‘Martyr More,’ he says. ‘The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints.’ Mr Wriothesley laughs. ‘I agree it is ridiculous,’ he says. He darts a look at his nephew: enough now, say nothing more about the queen, her belly or any other part.

For he has confided to Richard Cromwell something at least of the events at Elvetham, at Edward Seymour’s house. When the royal party was so suddenly diverted, Edward had stepped up and entertained them handsomely. But the king could not sleep that night, and sent the boy Weston to call him from his bed. A dancing candle flame, in a room of unfamiliar shape: ‘Christ, what time is it?’ Six o’clock, Weston said maliciously, and you are late.

In fact it was not four, the sky still dark. The shutter opened to let in air, Henry sat whispering to him, the planets their only witnesses: he had made sure that Weston was out of earshot, refused to speak till the door was shut. Just as well. ‘Cromwell,’ the king said, ‘what if I. What if I were to fear, what if I were to begin to suspect, there is some flaw in my marriage to Anne, some impediment, something displeasing to Almighty God?’

He had felt the years roll away: he was the cardinal, listening to the same conversation: only the queen’s name then was Katherine.

‘But what impediment?’ he had said, a little wearily. ‘What could it be, sir?’

‘I don’t know,’ the king had whispered. ‘I don’t know now but I may know. Was she not pre-contracted to Harry Percy?’

‘No, sir. He swore not, on the Bible. Your Majesty heard him swear.’

‘Ah, but you had been to see him, had you not, Cromwell, did you not trail him to some low inn and haul him up from his bench and pound his head with your fist?’

‘No, sir. I would never so mistreat any peer of the realm, let alone the Earl of Northumberland.’

‘Ah well. I am relieved to hear that. I may have got the details wrong. But that day the earl said what he thought I wanted him to say. He said that there was no union with Anne, no promise of marriage, let alone consummation. What if he lied?’

‘On oath, sir?’

‘But you are very frightening, Crumb. You would make a man forget his manners before God. What if he did lie? What if she made a contract with Percy amounting to a lawful marriage? If that were so, she cannot be married to me.’

He had kept silence, but he saw Henry’s mind running; his own was darting like a startled deer. ‘And I much suspect,’ the king had whispered. ‘I much suspect her with Thomas Wyatt.’

‘No, sir,’ he said, vehement even before he had time to think. Wyatt is his friend; his father, Sir Henry Wyatt, had charged him to make the boy’s path smooth; Wyatt is not a boy any more, but never mind.

‘You say no.’ Henry leaned towards him. ‘But did not Wyatt avoid the realm and go to Italy, because she would not favour him and he had no peace of mind while her image was before him?’

‘Well, there you have it. You say it yourself, Majesty. She would not favour him. If she had, no doubt he’d have stayed.’

‘But I cannot be sure,’ Henry insists. ‘Suppose she denied him then but favoured him some other time? Women are weak and easily conquered by flattery. Especially when men write verses to them, and there are some who say that Wyatt writes better verses than me, though I am the king.’

He blinks at him: four o’clock, sleepless; you could call it harmless vanity, God love him, if only it were not four o’clock. ‘Majesty,’ he says, ‘put your mind at rest. If Wyatt had made any inroads on that lady’s immaculate chastity, I feel sure he could not have resisted boasting about it. In verse, or common prose.’

Henry only grunts. But he looks up: Wyatt’s well-dressed shade, silken, slides across the window, blocks the cold starlight. On your way, phantom: his mind brushes it before him; who can understand Wyatt, who absolve him? The king says, ‘Well. Perhaps. Even if she did give way to Wyatt, it would be no impediment to my marriage, there can be no question of a contract between them since he himself was married as a boy and so not free to promise anything to Anne. But I tell you, it would be impediment to my trust in her. I would not take it kindly to have any woman lie to me, and say she came a virgin to my bed if she did not.’

Wolsey, where are you? You have heard all this before. Advise me now.

He stands up. He is easing this interview to an end. ‘Shall I tell them to bring you something, sir? Something to help you sleep again for an hour or two?’

‘I need something to sweeten my dreams. I wish I knew what it was. I have consulted Bishop Gardiner in this matter.’

He had tried to keep the shock off his face. Gone to Gardiner: behind my back?

‘And Gardiner said,’ Henry’s face was the picture of desolation, ‘he said there was doubt enough in the case, but that if the marriage were not good, if I were forced to put away Anne, I must return to Katherine. And I cannot do it, Cromwell. I am resolved that even if the whole of Christendom comes against me, I can never touch that stale old woman again.’

‘Well,’ he had said. He was looking at the floor, at Henry’s large white naked feet. ‘I think we can do better than that, sir. I do not pretend to follow Gardiner’s reasoning, but then the bishop knows more canon law than me. I do not believe, however, you can be constrained or compelled in any matter, as you are master of your own household, and your own country, and of your own church. Perhaps Gardiner meant only to prepare Your Majesty for the obstacles others might raise.’

Or perhaps, he thought, he just meant to make you sweat and give you nightmares. Gardiner’s like that. But Henry had sat up: ‘I can do as it pleases me,’ his monarch said. ‘God would not allow my pleasure to be contrary to his design, nor my designs to be impeded by his will.’ A shadow of cunning had crossed his face. ‘And Gardiner himself said so.’

Henry yawned. It was a signal. ‘Crumb, you don’t look very dignified, bowing in a nightgown. Will you be ready to ride at seven, or shall we leave you behind and see you at supper?’

If you’ll be ready, I’ll be ready, he thinks, as he pads back to his bed. Come sunrise, will you forget we ever had this conversation? The court will be astir, the horses tossing their heads and sniffing the wind. By mid-morning we will be reunited with the queen’s band; Anne will be chirruping atop her hunter; she will never know, unless her little friend Weston tells her, that last night at Elvetham the king sat gazing at his next mistress: Jane Seymour ignoring his pleading eyes, and placidly working her way through a chicken. Gregory had said, his eyes round: ‘Doesn’t Mistress Seymour eat a lot?’

And now the summer is over. Wolf Hall, Elvetham, fade into the dusk. His lips are sealed on the king’s doubts and fears; it is autumn, he is at Austin Friars; with bowed head he listens to the court news, watches Riche’s fingers twisting the silk tag on a document. ‘Their households have been provoking each other in the streets,’ his nephew Richard says. ‘Thumbing of noses, curses, hands on daggers.’

‘Sorry, who?’ he says.

‘Nicholas Carew’s people. Scrapping with Lord Rochford’s servants.’

‘As long as they keep it away from the court,’ he says sharply. The penalty for drawing a blade within the precincts of the royal court is amputation of the offending hand. What is the quarrel about, he begins to ask, then changes his question: ‘What is their excuse?’

For picture Carew, one of Henry’s old friends, one of his privy chamber gentlemen, and devoted to the queen that was. See him, an antique man with his long grave face, his cultivated air of having stepped straight from a book of knight-errantry. No surprise if Sir Nicholas, with his rigid sense of the fitness of things, has found it impossible to bend to George Boleyn’s parvenu pretensions. Sir Nicholas is a papist to his steel-capped toes, and is offended to his marrow by George’s support of reformed teaching. So an issue of principle lies between them; but what trivial event has sparked the quarrel into life? Did George and his evil company make a racket outside the chamber of Sir Nicholas, while he was at some solemn business like admiring himself in the looking glass? He stifles a smile. ‘Rafe, have a word with both gentlemen. Tell them to leash their dogs.’ He adds, ‘You do right to mention it.’ He is interested, always, to hear of divisions between the courtiers and how they arose.

Soon after his sister became queen, George Boleyn had called him in and given him some instruction, about how he should handle his career. The young man was flaunting a bejewelled gold chain, which he, Cromwell, weighed in his mind’s eye; in his mind’s eye he removed George’s jacket, unstitched it, wound the fabric on to the bolt and priced it; once you have been in the cloth trade, you don’t lose your eye for texture and drape, and if you are charged with raising revenue, you soon learn to estimate a man’s worth.

Young Boleyn had kept him standing, while he occupied the room’s single chair. ‘Remember, Cromwell,’ he began, ‘that though you are of the king’s council, you are not a gentleman born. You should confine yourself to speech where it is demanded of you, and for the rest, leave it alone. Do not meddle in the affairs of those set above you. His Majesty is pleased to bring you often into his presence, but remember who it was who placed you where he could see you.’

It’s interesting, George Boleyn’s version of his life. He had always supposed it was Wolsey who trained him up, Wolsey who promoted him, Wolsey who made him the man he is: but George says no, it was the Boleyns. Clearly, he has not been expressing proper gratitude. So he expresses it now, saying yes sir and no sir, and I see you are a man of singular good judgement for your years. Why, your father Monseigneur the Earl of Wiltshire, your uncle Thomas Howard Duke of Norfolk, they could not have instructed me better. ‘I shall profit by this, I assure you sir, and from now on conduct myself more humble-wise.’

George was mollified. ‘See you do.’

He smiles now, thinking of it; returns to the scribbled agenda. His son Gregory’s eyes flit about the table, as he tries to pick up what isn’t said: now cousin Richard Cromwell, now Call-Me-Risley, now his father, and the other gentlemen who have come in. Richard Riche frowns over his papers, Call-Me fiddles with his pen. Troubled men both, he thinks, Wriothesley and Riche, and alike in some ways, sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound? But he has to produce to the king men of talent; and they are agile, they are tenacious, they are unsparing in their efforts for the Crown, and for themselves.

‘One last thing,’ he says, ‘before we break up. My lord the Bishop of Winchester has so pleased the king that, at my urging, the king has sent him again to France as ambassador. It is thought his embassy will not be a short one.’

Slow smiles ripple around the table. He watches Call-Me. He was once a protégé of Stephen Gardiner. But he seems as joyful as the rest. Richard Riche turns pink, rises from the table and wrings his hand.

‘Get him on the road,’ Rafe says, ‘and let him stay away. Gardiner is double in everything.’

‘Double?’ he says. ‘He has a tongue like a three-pronged eel spear. First he is for the Pope, then Henry, then, mark what I say, he will be for the Pope again.’

‘Can we trust him abroad?’ Riche says.

‘We can trust him only to know where his advantage lies. Which is with the king for now. And we can keep an eye on him, put some of our men in his train. Master Wriothesley, you can see to that, I think?’

Only Gregory seems dubious. ‘My lord Winchester, an ambassador? Fitzwilliam tells me, an ambassador’s first duty is to give no affront.’

He nods. ‘And Stephen gives nothing but affront, does he?’

‘Is not an ambassador supposed to be a cheerful fellow and affable? So Fitzwilliam tells me. He should be pleasant in any company, conversable and easy, and he should endear himself to his hosts. So he has chances to visit their homes, sit at their boards, become friendly with their wives and their heirs, and corrupt their household to his service.’

Rafe’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘Is that what Fitz teaches you?’ The boys laugh.

‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘That is what an ambassador must do. So I hope Chapuys is not corrupting you, Gregory? If I had a wife, he would be sneaking sonnets to her, I know it, and bringing in bones for my dogs. Ah well…Chapuys, he is pleasant company, you see. Not like Stephen Gardiner. But the truth is, Gregory, we need a stout ambassador for the French, a man full of spleen and spite. And Stephen has been among them before, and done himself credit. The French are hypocrites, pretending false friendship and demanding money as the price of it. You see,’ he says, setting himself to educate his son. ‘Just now the French have a plan to take the duchy of Milan from the Emperor, and they want us to subsidise them. And we must accommodate them, or seem to, for fear they will veer about and join with the Emperor and overwhelm us. So when the day comes that they say, “Deliver over the gold you have promised,” we need that kind of ambassador, like Stephen, who will brazen it out and say, “Oh, the gold? Just take it out of what you already owe King Henry.” King Francis will be spitting fire, yet in a manner we will have kept our word. You understand? We save our fiercest champions for the French court. Recall that my lord Norfolk was sometime ambassador there.’

Gregory dips his head. ‘Any foreigner would fear Norfolk.’

‘And any Englishman too. With good reason. Now the duke is like one of those giant cannon the Turks have. The blast is shocking but it needs three hours’ cooling time before it can fire again. Whereas Bishop Gardiner, he can explode at ten-minute intervals, dawn to dusk.’

‘But sir,’ Gregory bursts out, ‘if we promise them money, and we don’t deliver it, what will they do?’

‘By then, I hope, we will be firm friends with the Emperor again.’ He sighs. ‘It is an old game and it seems we must go on playing it, until I think of something better, or the king does. You have heard of the Emperor’s recent victory at Tunis?’

‘The whole world is talking of it,’ Gregory says. ‘Every Christian knight wishes he had been there.’

He shrugs. ‘Time will tell how glorious it is. Barbarossa will soon find another base for his piracy. But with such a victory behind him, and the Turk quiet for the moment, the Emperor may turn on us and invade our shores.’

‘But how do we stop him?’ Gregory looks desperate. ‘Must we not have Queen Katherine back?

Call-Me laughs. ‘Gregory begins to perceive the difficulties of our trade, sir.’

‘I liked it better when we talked of the present queen,’ Gregory says in a low voice. ‘And I got the credit for observing she was fatter.’

Call-Me says kindly, ‘I should not laugh. You have the right of it, Gregory. All our labours, our sophistry, all our learning both acquired or pretended; the stratagems of state, the lawyers’ decrees, the churchmen’s curses, and the grave resolutions of judges, sacred and secular: all and each can be defeated by a woman’s body, can they not? God should have made their bellies transparent, and saved us the hope and fear. But perhaps what grows in there has to grow in the dark.’

‘They say that Katherine is ailing,’ Richard Riche says. ‘If she should die within the year, I wonder what world would be then?’

But look: we have sat here too long! Let’s be up and out into the gardens of Austin Friars, Master Secretary’s pride; he wants the plants he saw flowering abroad, he wants better fruit, so he nags the ambassadors to send him shoots and cuttings in the diplomatic bag. The keen young clerks stand by, ready to break a code, and all that tumbles out is a rootball, still pulsing with life after a journey through the straits of Dover.

He wants tender things to live, young men to thrive. So he has built a tennis court, a gift to Richard and Gregory and all the young men of his house. He is not quite beyond the game himself…if he could play a blind man, he says, or an opponent with one leg. Much of the game is tactics; his foot drags, he has to rely on cunning rather than speed. But he is proud of his building and glad to stand the expense. He has recently consulted with the king’s keepers of tennis at Hampton Court, and had the measurements adjusted to those Henry prefers; the king has been to Austin Friars to dine, so it is not unpossible that one day he may call in for an afternoon on the court.

In Italy, when he was a servant in Frescobaldi’s household, the boys would go out in the hot evening and play games in the street. It was tennis of a kind, a jeu de paume, no racquets but just the hand; they would jostle and push and scream, bounce the ball off the walls and run it along a tailor’s awning, till the master himself would come out and scold: ‘If you boys don’t respect my awning, I’ll shear off your testicles and hang them over the doorway on a ribbon.’ They would say sorry, master, sorry, and back off down the street, and play subdued in a back court. But half an hour later they would be back again, and he can still hear it in his dreams, the rattle as the ball’s crude seam hit metal and skimmed into the air; he can feel the slap of leather against his palm. In those days, though he was carrying an injury he tried to run the stiffness off: this injury he’d got the other year, when he was at Garigliano with the French army. The garzoni would say, look Tommaso, how is it you got the wound in the back of the leg, were you running away? He would say, Mother of God, yes: I was only paid enough for running away, if you want me facing the front you have to pay me extra.

From this massacre the French scattered, and in those days he was French; the King of France paid his wages. He had crawled then limped, he and his comrades dragging their battered bodies as fast as they could from the victorious Spanish, trying to struggle back to ground not bogged with blood; they were wild Welsh bowmen and renegade Switzers, and a few English boys like himself, all of them more or less confused and penniless, gathering their wits in the aftermath of the rout, plotting a course, changing their nation and their names at need, washing up in the cities to the north, looking for the next battle or some safer trade.

At the back gate of a great house, a steward had interrogated him: ‘French?’

‘English.’

The man had rolled his eyes. ‘So what can you do?’

‘I can fight.’

‘Evidently, not well enough.’

‘I can cook.’

‘We have no need of barbarous cuisine.’

‘I can cast accounts.’

‘This is a banking house. We are well supplied.’

‘Tell me what you want done. I can do it.’ (Already he boasts like an Italian.)

‘We want a labourer. What is your name?’

‘Hercules,’ he says.

Against his better judgement, the man laughs. ‘Come in, Ercole.’

Ercole limps in, over the threshold. The man bustles about his own duties. He sits down on a step, nearly weeping with pain. He looks around him. All he has is this floor. This floor is his world. He is hungry, he is thirsty, he is over seven hundred miles from home. But this floor can be improved. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ he shouts. ‘Water! Bucket! Allez, allez!’

They go. Quick they go. A pail arrives. He improves this floor. He improves this house. He does not improve it without resistance. They start him off in the kitchen, where as a foreigner he is ill-received, and where with the blades and spits and boiling water there is so much possibility for violence. But he is better at fighting than you would think: lacking in height, without skill or craft, but almost impossible to knock over. And what aids him is the fame of his countrymen, feared through Europe as brawlers and looters and rapists and thieves. As he cannot abuse his colleagues in their own language, he uses Putney. He teaches them terrible English oaths – ‘By the bleeding nail-holes of Christ’ – which they can use to relieve their feelings behind the backs of their masters. When the girl comes in the mornings, the herbs in her basket damp with dew, they step back, appreciate her and ask, ‘Well, sweetheart, and how are you today?’ When somebody interrupts a tricky task, they say, ‘Why don’t you fuck off out of here, or I’ll boil your head in this pot.’

Before long he understood that fortune had brought him to the door of one of the city’s ancient families, who not only dealt in money and silk, wool and wine, but also had great poets in their lineage. Francisco Frescobaldi, the master, came to the kitchen to talk to him. He did not share the general prejudice against Englishmen, rather he thought of them as lucky; although, he said, some of his ancestors had been brought close to ruin by the unpaid debts of kings of England long ago dead. He had little English himself and he said, we can always use your countrymen, there are many letters to write; you can write, I hope? When he, Tommaso or Ercole, had improved in Tuscan so much that he was able to express himself and make jokes, Frescobaldi had promised, one day I will call you to the counting house. I will make trial of you.

That day came. He was tried and he won. From Florence he went to Venice, to Rome: and when he dreams of those cities, as sometimes he does, a residual swagger trails him into his day, a trace of the young Italian he was. He thinks back to his younger self with no indulgence, but no blame either. He has always done what was needed to survive, and if his judgement of what was necessary was sometimes questionable…that is what it is to be young. Nowadays he takes poor scholars into his family. There’s always a job for them, some niche where they can scribble away at tracts on good government or translations of the psalms. But he will also take in young men who are rough and wild, as he was rough and wild, because he knows if he is patient with them they will be loyal to him. Even now, he loves Frescobaldi like a father. Custom stales the intimacies of marriage, children grow truculent and rebel, but a good master gives more than he takes and his benevolence guides you through your life. Think of Wolsey. To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.

Thurston’s cake must have failed because it doesn’t appear that evening at supper, but there is a very good jelly in the shape of a castle. ‘Thurston has a licence to crenellate,’ Richard Cromwell says, and immediately throws himself into a dispute with an Italian across the table: which is the best shape for a fort, circular or star-shaped?

The castle is made in stripes of red and white, the red a deep crimson and the white perfectly clear, so the walls seem to float. There are edible archers peeping from the battlements, shooting candied arrows. It even makes the Solicitor General smile. ‘I wish my little girls could see it.’

‘I’ll send the moulds to your house. Though perhaps not a fort. A flower garden?’ What pleases little girls? He’s forgotten.

After supper, if there are no messengers pounding at the door, he will often steal an hour to be among his books. He keeps them at all his properties: at Austin Friars, at the Rolls House at Chancery Lane, at Stepney, at Hackney. There are books these days on all sorts of subjects. Books that advise you how to be a good prince, or a bad one. Poetry books and volumes that tell you how to keep accounts, books of phrases for use abroad, dictionaries, books that tell you how to wipe your sins clean and books that tell you how to preserve fish. His friend Andrew Boorde, the physician, is writing a book on beards; he is against them. He thinks of what Gardiner said: you should write a book yourself, that would be something to see.

If he did, it would be The Book Called Henry: how to read him, how to serve him, how best to preserve him. In his mind he writes the preamble. ‘Who shall number the qualities, both public and private, of this most blessed of men? Among priests, he is devout: among soldiers, valiant: among scholars, erudite: among courtiers, most gentle and refined: and all these qualities, King Henry possesses in such a remarkable degree that the like was never seen since the world began.’

Erasmus says that you should praise a ruler even for qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on them.

He looks up as the door opens. It is his little Welsh boy, backing in: ‘Ready for your candles, master?’

‘Yes, more than ready.’ The light shivers, then settles against dark wood like discs pared from a pearl. ‘You see that stool,’ he says. ‘Sit on it.’

The boy flops down. The demands of the household have had him on the run since early morning. Why is it always little legs that have to save big legs? Just run upstairs and fetch me… It flattered you, when you were young. You thought you were important, indeed essential. He used to hurtle around Putney, on errands for Walter. More fool him. Now it pleases him to say to a boy, take your ease. ‘I used to speak a bit of Welsh when I was a boy. I can’t now.’

He thinks, that’s the bleat of the man of fifty: Welsh, tennis, I used to, I can’t now. There are compensations: the head is better stored with information, the heart better proof against chips and fractures. Just now he is undertaking a survey of the queen’s Welsh properties. For this and weightier reasons, he keeps a keen eye on the principality. ‘Tell me your life,’ he asks the child. ‘Tell me how you came here.’ With the boy’s own bit of English, he pieces together his tale: arson, cattle raids, the usual borderlands story, ending in destitution, the making of orphans.

‘Can you say the Pater Noster?’ he asks.

‘Pater Noster,’ says the boy. ‘Or, Our Father.’

‘In Welsh?’

‘No, sir. There are no prayers in Welsh.’

‘Dear Jesus. I’ll get a man on it.’

‘Do, sir. Then I can pray for my father and mother.’

‘Do you know John ap Rice? He was at supper with us tonight.’

‘Married to your niece Johane, sir?’

The boy darts off. Little legs at work again. It’s his aim that all the Welsh will speak English, but that can’t be yet, and meanwhile they need God on their side. Brigands cover the whole principality, and bribe and threaten their way out of gaol; pirates savage the coasts. Those gentlemen with territory there, like Norris and Brereton of the king’s privy chamber, seem resistant to his interest. They put their own dealings before the king’s peace. They do not care to have their activities overseen. They do not care for justice: whereas he means to make an equal justice, from Essex to Anglesey, Cornwall to the Scots border.

Rice brings in with him a little velvet box, which he puts down on the desk: ‘Present. You have to guess.’

He rattles it. Something like grains. His finger explores fragments, scaly, grey. Rice has been surveying abbeys for him. ‘It wouldn’t be St Apollonia’s teeth?’

‘Guess again.’

‘Is it teeth from the comb of Mary Magdalene?’

Rice relents. ‘St Edmund’s nail parings.’

‘Ah. Tip them in with the rest. The man must have had five hundred fingers.’

In the year 1257, an elephant died in the Tower menagerie and was buried in a pit near the chapel. But the following year he was dug up and his remains sent to Westminster Abbey. Now, what did they want at Westminster Abbey, with the remains of an elephant? If not to carve a ton of relics out of him, and make his animal bones into the bones of saints?

According to the custodians of holy relics, part of the power of these artefacts is that they are able to multiply. Bone, wood and stone have, like animals, the ability to breed, yet keep their intact nature; the offspring are in no wise inferior to the originals. So the crown of thorns blossoms. The cross of Christ puts out buds; it flourishes, like a living tree. Christ’s seamless coat weaves copies of itself. Nails give birth to nails.

John ap Rice says, ‘Reason cannot win against these people. You try to open their eyes. But ranged against you are statues of the virgin that weep tears of blood.’

‘And they say I play tricks!’ He broods. ‘John, you must sit down and write. Your compatriots must have prayers.’

‘They must have a Bible, sir, in their own tongue.’

‘Let me first get the king’s assured blessing for the English to have it.’ It is his daily, covert crusade: for Henry to sponsor a great Bible, put it in every church. He is very close now and he thinks he can win Henry to it. His ideal would be a single country, single coinage, just one method of weighing and measuring, and above all one language that everybody owns. You don’t have to go to Wales to be misunderstood. There are parts of this realm not fifty miles from London, where if you ask them to cook you a herring they give you a blank look instead. Only when you’ve pointed to the pan and impersonated a fish do they say, ah, now I see what you mean.

But his greatest ambition for England is this: the prince and his commonwealth should be in accord. He doesn’t want the kingdom to be run like Walter’s house in Putney, with fighting all the time and the sound of banging and shrieking day and night. He wants it to be a household where everybody knows what they have to do, and feels safe doing it. He says to Rice, ‘Stephen Gardiner says I should write a book. What do you think? Perhaps I might if one day I retire. Till then, why should I give my secrets away?’

He remembers reading Machiavelli’s book, shut up in the dark days after his wife’s death: that book which now begins to make such a stir in the world, though it is more talked about than actually read. He had been confined to the house, he, Rafe, the immediate household, so as not to take fever into the city; turning the book over, he had said, you cannot really pluck out lessons from Italian principalities and apply them to Wales and the northern border. We don’t work the same way. The book seemed almost trite to him, nothing in it but abstractions – virtue, terror – and small particular instances of base conduct or flawed calculation. Perhaps he could improve on it, but he has no time; all he can do, when business is so pressing, is to toss phrases to clerks, poised with their pens for his dictation: ‘I heartily commend me to you…your assured friend, your loving friend, your friend Thomas Cromwell.’ No fee attaches to the post of Secretary. The scope of the job is ill-defined and this suits him; whereas the Lord Chancellor has his circumscribed role, Mr Secretary can inquire into any office of state or corner of government. He has letters from throughout the shires, asking him to arbitrate in land disputes or lend his name to some stranger’s cause. People he doesn’t know send him tittle-tattle about their neighbours, monks send accounts of disloyal words spoken by their superiors, priests sift for him the utterances of their bishops. The affairs of the whole realm are whispered in his ear, and so plural are his offices under the Crown that the great business of England, parchment and roll awaiting stamp and signet, is pushed or pulled across his desk, to himself or from himself. His petitioners send him malmsey and muscatel, geldings, game and gold; gifts and grants and warrants, lucky charms and spells. They want favours and they expect to pay for them. This has been going on since first he came into the king’s favour. He is rich.

And naturally, envy follows. His enemies dig out what they can, about his early life. ‘So, I went down to Putney,’ Gardiner had said. ‘Or, to be accurate, I sent a man. They said down there, who’d have thought that Put-an-edge-on-it would have risen so high? We all thought he’d be hanged by now.’

His father would sharpen knives; people would hale him in the street: Tom, can you take this, ask your father can he do aught with it? And he’d scoop it up, whatever blunt instrument: leave it with me, he’ll put an edge on it.

‘It’s a skill,’ he told Gardiner. ‘Honing a blade.’

‘You’ve killed men. I know it.’

‘Not in this jurisdiction.’

‘Abroad doesn’t count?’

‘No court in Europe would convict a man who struck in self-defence.’

‘But do you ask yourself why people want to kill you?’

He had laughed. ‘Why, Stephen – much in this life is a mystery but that is no mystery at all. I was always first up in the morning. I was always the last man standing. I was always in the money. I always got the girl. Show me a heap, and I’m on top of it.’

‘Or a whore,’ Stephen murmured.

‘You were young once. Have you been to the king with your findings?’

‘He should know what kind of man he employs.’ But then, Gardiner had broken off; he, Cromwell, approached him smiling. ‘Do your worst, Stephen. Put your men on the road. Lay out money. Search Europe. You will not hear of any talent I possess, that England cannot use.’ He had eased from within his coat an imaginary knife; he pressed it home, softly, easily, under Gardiner’s ribs. ‘Stephen, have I not begged you often and often to reconcile with me? And have you not refused?’

Credit to Gardiner, he didn’t flinch. Only with a kind of creeping of his flesh, and a pull on his robe, eased himself away from the airy blade. ‘The lad you knifed in Putney died,’ he said. ‘You did well to run, Cromwell. His family had a noose for you. Your father bought them off.’

He is amazed. ‘What? Walter? Walter did?’

‘He didn’t pay much. They had other children.’

‘Even so.’ He had stood dumbfounded. Walter. Walter paid them off. Walter, who never gave him anything more than a kick.

Gardiner laughed. ‘You see. I know things about your life you don’t know yourself.’

It is late now; he will finish up at his desk, then go to his cabinet to read. Before him is an inventory from the abbey at Worcester. His men are thorough; everything is here, from a fireball to warm the hands to a mortar for crushing garlic. And a chasuble of changeable satin, an alb of cloth of gold, the Lamb of God cut out in black silk; an ivory comb, a brass lamp, three leather bottles and a scythe; psalm books, song books, six fox-nets with bells, two wheelbarrows, sundry shovels and spades, some relics of St Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins, together with St Oswald’s mitre and a stack of trestle tables.

These are sounds of Austin Friars, in the autumn of 1535: the singing children rehearsing a motet, breaking off, beginning again. The voices of these children, small boys, calling out to each other from staircases, and nearer at hand the scrabbling of dogs’ paws on the boards. The chink of gold pieces into a chest. The susurration, tapestry-muffled, of polyglot conversation. The whisper of ink across paper. Beyond the walls the noises of the city: the milling of the crowds at his gate, distant cries from the river. His inner monologue, running on, soft-voiced: it is in public rooms that he thinks of the cardinal, his footsteps echoing in lofty vaulted chambers. It is in private spaces that he thinks of his wife Elizabeth. She is a blur now in his mind, a whisk of skirts around a corner. That last morning of her life, as he left the house he thought he saw her following him, caught a flash of her white cap. He had half turned, saying to her, ‘Go back to bed’: but no one was there. By the time he came home that night her jaw was bound and there were candles at her head and feet.

It was only a year before his girls died of the same cause. In his house at Stepney he keeps in a locked box their necklaces of pearl and coral, Anne’s copy books with her Latin exercises. And in the store room where they keep their play costumes for Christmas, he still has the wings made of peacock feathers that Grace wore in a parish play. After the play she walked upstairs, still in her wings; frost glittered at the window. I am going to say my prayers, she said: walking away from him, furled in her feathers, fading into dusk.

And now night falls on Austin Friars. Snap of bolts, click of key in lock, rattle of strong chain across wicket, and the great bar fallen across the main gate. The boy Dick Purser lets out the watchdogs. They pounce and race, they snap at the moonlight, they flop under the fruit trees, heads on paws and ears twitching. When the house is quiet – when all his houses are quiet – then dead people walk about on the stairs.

Anne the queen sends for him to her own chamber; it is after supper. Only a step for him, as at every major palace rooms are reserved for him now, near the king’s. Just a staircase: and there, with the light of a sconce lapping at its gold trim, is the stiff new doublet of Mark Smeaton. Mark himself is lurking inside it.

What brings Mark here? He is without musical instruments as an excuse, and he is got up as gorgeously as any of the young lords who wait on Anne. Is there justice? he wonders. Mark does naught and gets more bonny each time I see him, and I do everything and get more grey and paunchy by the day.

Since unpleasantness usually ensues between them, it is in his mind to pass by with a nod, but Mark stands up straight and smiles: ‘Lord Cromwell, how are you?’

‘Ah, no,’ he says. ‘Still plain master.’

‘It is a natural mistake. You seem every inch the lord. And surely, the king will do something for you soon.’

‘Perhaps not. He needs me in the House of Commons.’

‘Even so,’ the boy murmurs, ‘it would seem ungracious in him, when others are rewarded for much less service. Tell me, they say you have got music scholars in your house?’

A dozen or so merry little boys, saved from the cloister. They work at their books and practise their instruments, and at table they learn their manners; at supper they entertain his guests. They practise with the bow, and play fetch with the spaniels, and the littlest ones drag their hobby horses over the cobbles, and follow him about, sir, sir, sir, look at me, do you want to see me stand on my hands? ‘They keep the household lively,’ he says.

‘If you should ever want someone to put a polish on their performance, think of me.’

‘I will, Mark.’ He thinks, I wouldn’t trust you around my little boys.

‘You will find the queen discontented,’ the young man says. ‘You know her brother Rochford has lately gone into France on a special embassy, and today he has sent a letter; it seems to be the common talk over there that Katherine has been writing to the Pope, asking him to put into effect that wicked sentence of excommunication he has pronounced against our master. And which would result in untold hurts and perils to our realm.’ He nods, yes, yes, yes; he does not need Mark to tell him what excommunication is; can he not make it short? ‘The queen is angry,’ the boy says, ‘for if this is so, Katherine is a plain traitor, and the queen wonders, why do we not act against her?’

‘Suppose I tell you the reason, Mark? Would you take it in to her? It seems you could save me an hour or two.’

‘If you would entrust me –’ the boy begins; then sees his cold smile. He blushes.

‘I’d trust you with a motet, Mark. Although.’ He looks at him thoughtfully. ‘It does seem to me that you must stand high in the queen’s favour.’

‘Master Secretary, I believe that I do.’ Flattened, Mark is already bouncing back. ‘It is we lesser men, often, who are most fit for royal confidence.’

‘Well then. Baron Smeaton, eh, before long? I shall be the first to congratulate you. Even if I am still toiling on the benches of the Commons.’

With a whisk of her hand, Anne shoos away the ladies around her, who bob to him and whisper out. Her sister-in-law, George’s wife, lingers: Anne says, ‘Thank you, Lady Rochford, I shall not need you again tonight.’

Only her fool stays with her: a dwarf woman, peeping at him from behind the queen’s chair. Anne’s hair is loose beneath a cap of silver tissue shaped like a crescent moon. He makes a mental note of it; the women about him always enquire what Anne is wearing. This is how she receives her husband, the dark tresses displayed only for him, and incidentally for Cromwell, who is a tradesman’s son and doesn’t matter, any more than the boy Mark does.

She begins, as she often does, as if in the middle of a sentence. ‘So I want you to go. Up-country to see her. Very secret. Only take the men you need. Here, you may read my brother Rochford’s letter.’ She flourishes it at her fingers’ ends, then changes her mind, whips it back. ‘Or…no,’ she says, and decides to sit on it instead. Perhaps, amid the news, it contains dispraise of Thomas Cromwell? ‘I am very suspicious of Katherine, very suspicious. It seems they know in France what we only guess at. Your people are not vigilant, perhaps? My lord brother believes the queen is urging the Emperor to invade, as is the ambassador Chapuys, who by the way should be banished this kingdom.’

‘Well, you know,’ he says. ‘We can’t go throwing ambassadors out. Because then we don’t get to know anything at all.’

Truth is, he is not afraid of Katherine’s intrigues: the mood between France and the Empire is at the moment unremittingly hostile, and if open war breaks out, the Emperor will have no troops to spare for invading England. These things swing about in a week, and the Boleyn reading of any situation, he has noticed, is always a little behind the times, and influenced by the fact that they pretend to have special friends at the Valois court. Anne is still in pursuit of a royal marriage for her ginger little daughter. He used to admire her as a person who learned from her mistakes, who would pull back, re-calculate; but she has a streak of stubbornness to equal that of Katherine, the old queen, and it seems in this matter she will never learn. George Boleyn has been over to France again, intriguing for the match, but with no result. What’s George Boleyn for? That’s a question he asks himself. He says, ‘Highness, the king could not compromise his honour by any ill-treatment of the queen that was. If it became known, it would be a personal embarrassment to him.’

Anne looks sceptical; she does not grasp the idea of embarrassment. The lights are low; her silver head bobs, glittering and small; the dwarf fusses and chuckles, muttering to herself out of sight; seated on her velvet cushions, Anne dangles her velvet slipper, like a child about to dip a toe in a stream. ‘If I were Katherine, I too would intrigue. I would not forgive. I would do as she does.’ She gives him a dangerous smile. ‘You see, I know her mind. Though she is a Spaniard, I can put myself in her place. You would not see me meek, if Henry cast me off. I too would want war.’ She takes a strand of hair between fingers and thumb, runs its length, thoughtful. ‘However. The king believes she is ailing. She and her daughter both, they are always mewling, their stomachs are disordered or their teeth falling out, they have agues or rheum, they are up all night puking and down all day moaning, and all their pain is due to Anne Boleyn. So look. Do you, Cremuel, go and see her without warning. Then tell me if she is feigning, or no.’

She maintains, as an affectation, a skittish slur in her speech, the odd French intonation, her inability to say his name. There is a stir at the door: the king is coming in. He makes a reverence. Anne does not rise or curtsey; she says without preliminary, ‘I have told him, Henry, to go.’

‘I wish you would, Cromwell. And give us your own report. There is no one like you for seeing into the nature of things. When the Emperor wants a stick to beat me with, he says his aunt is dying, of neglect and cold, and shame. Well, she has servants. She has firewood.’

‘And as for shame,’ Anne says, ‘she should die inside, when she thinks of the lies she has told.’

‘Majesty,’ he says, ‘I shall ride at dawn and tomorrow send Rafe Sadler to you, if you permit, with the day’s agenda.’

The king groans. ‘No escape from your big lists?’

‘No, sir, for if I gave you a respite you would forever have me on the road, on some pretext. Till I return, would you just…sit on the situation?’

Anne shifts in her chair, brother George’s letter under her. ‘I shall do nothing without you,’ Henry says. ‘Take care, the roads are treacherous. I shall be your beadsman. Good night.’

He looks about the outer chamber, but Mark has vanished, and there is only a knot of matrons and maids: Mary Shelton, Jane Seymour and Elizabeth, the Earl of Worcester’s wife. Who’s missing? ‘Where is Lady Rochford?’ he says, smiling. ‘Do I see her shape behind the arras?’ He indicates Anne’s chamber. ‘Going to bed, I think. So you girls get her installed and then you will have the rest of the night for your ill behaviour.’

They giggle. Lady Worcester makes creepy motions with her finger. ‘Nine of the clock, and here comes Harry Norris, bare beneath his shirt. Run, Mary Shelton. Run rather slowly…’

‘Who do you run from, Lady Worcester?’

‘Thomas Cromwell, I could not possibly tell you. A married woman like myself?’ Teasing, smiling, she creeps her fingers along his upper arm. ‘We all know where Harry Norris would like to lie tonight. Shelton is only his bedwarmer for now. He has royal ambitions. He will tell anyone. He is sick with love for the queen.’

‘I shall play cards,’ Jane Seymour says. ‘With myself, so there will be no undue losses. Master, is there any news of the Lady Katherine?’

‘I have nothing to tell you. Sorry.’

Lady Worcester’s glance follows him. She is a fine woman, careless and rather free-spending, no older than the queen. Her husband is away and he feels she too could run rather slowly, if he gave her the nod. But then, a countess. And he a humble master. And sworn to the road before sunrise.

They ride up-country towards Katherine without banner or display, a tight knot of armed men. It is a clear day and bitter cold. The brown tussocky land shows through layers of hard frost, and herons flap from frozen pools. Clouds stack and shift on the horizon, slate-grey and a mild deceptive rose; leading them from early afternoon is a silvered moon as mean as a clipped coin. Christophe rides beside him, growing more voluble and disgusted the further they travel from urban comfort. ‘On dit the king chose a hard country for Katherine. He hopes the mould will get into her bones and she will die.’

‘He has no such thought. Kimbolton is an old house but very sound. She has every comfort. Her household costs the king four thousand pounds a year. It is no mean sum.’

He leaves Christophe to ponder that locution: no mean sum. At last the boy says, ‘Spaniards are merde, anyway.’

‘You watch the track and keep Jenny’s feet out of holes. Any spills and I’ll have you follow me home on a donkey.’

‘Hi-han,’ Christophe bellows, loud enough to make the men at arms turn in their saddles. ‘French donkey,’ he explains.

French fuckwit, one says, amiably enough. Riding beneath dark trees at the close of that first day’s travel, they sing; it lifts the tired heart, and dispels spirits lurking in the verges; never underestimate the superstition of the average Englishman. As this year closes, the favourite will be variations on the song the king wrote himself, ‘Pastime with good company/I love and shall until I die.’ The variations are only mildly obscene, or he would feel obliged to check them.

The landlord of their inn is a harassed wisp of a man, who does his futile best to find out whom he is entertaining. His wife is a strong, discontented young woman, with angry blue eyes and a loud voice. He has brought his own travelling cook. ‘What, my lord?’ she says. ‘You think we’d poison you?’ He can hear her banging around in the kitchen, laying down what shall and shan’t be done with her skillets.

She comes to his chamber late and asks, do you want anything? He says no, but she comes back: what, really, nothing? You might lower your voice, he says. This far from London, the king’s deputy in church affairs can perhaps relax his caution? ‘Stay, then,’ he tells her. Noisy she may be, but safer than Lady Worcester.

He wakes before dawn, so suddenly that he doesn’t know where he is. He can hear a woman’s voice from below, and for a moment he thinks he is back at the sign of the Pegasus, with his sister Kat crashing about, and that it is the morning of his flight from his father: that all his life is before him. But cautiously, in the dark chamber without a candle, he moves each limb: no bruises; he is not cut; he remembers where he is and what he is, and moves into the warmth the woman’s body has left, and dozes, an arm thrown across the bolster.

Soon he hears his landlady singing on the stairs. Twelve virgins went out on a May morning, it seems. And none of them came back. She has scooped up the money he left her. On her face, as she greets him, no sign of the night’s transaction; but she comes out and speaks to him, her voice low, as they prepare to ride. Christophe, with a lordly air, pays the reckoning to their host. The day is milder and their progress swift and without event. Certain images will be all that remain from his ride into middle England. The holly berries burning in their bushes. The startled flight of a woodcock, flushed from almost beneath their hooves. The feeling of venturing into a watery place, where soil and marsh are the same colour and nothing is solid under your feet.

Kimbolton is a busy market town, but at twilight the streets are empty. They have made no great speed, but it is futile to wear out horses on a task that is important, but not urgent; Katherine will live or die at her own pace. Besides, it is good for him to get out to the country. Squeezed in London’s alleys, edging horse or mule under her jetties and gables, the mean canvas of her sky pierced by broken roofs, one forgets what England is: how broad the fields, how wide the sky, how squalid and ignorant the populace. They pass a wayside cross that shows recent signs of excavation at its base. One of the men at arms says, ‘They think the monks are burying their treasure. Hiding it from our master here.’

‘So they are,’ he says. ‘But not under crosses. They’re not that foolish.’

In the main street they draw rein at the church. ‘What for?’ says Christophe.

‘I need a blessing,’ he says.

‘You need to make your confession, sir,’ one of the men says.

Smiles are exchanged. It is harmless, no one thinks the worse of him: only that their own beds were cold. He has noticed this: that men who have not met him dislike him, but when they have met him, only some of them do. We could have put up at a monastery, one of his guard had complained; but no girls in a monastery, I suppose. He had turned in the saddle: ‘You really think that?’ Knowing laughter from the men.

In the church’s frigid interior, his escort flap their arms across their bodies; they stamp their feet and cry ‘Brr,’ like bad actors. ‘I’ll whistle for a priest,’ Christophe says.

‘You will do no such thing.’ But he grins; can imagine his young self saying it, and doing it too.

But there is no need to whistle. Some suspicious janitor is edging in with a light. No doubt a messenger is stumbling towards the great house with news: watch out, make ready, lords are here. It is decorous for Katherine to have some warning, he feels, but not too much. ‘Imagine it,’ Christophe says, ‘we might burst in on her when she is plucking her whiskers. Which women of that age do.’

To Christophe, the former queen is a broken jade, a crone. He thinks, Katherine would be my age, or thereabouts. But life is harsher to women, particularly women who, like Katherine, have been blessed with many children and seen them die.

Silently the priest arrives at his elbow, a timid fellow who wants to show the church’s treasures. ‘Now you must be…’ He runs through a list in his head. ‘William Lord?’

‘Ah. No.’ This is some other William. A long explanation ensues. He cuts it short. ‘As long as your bishop knows who you are.’ Behind him is an image of St Edmund, the man with five hundred fingers; the saint’s feet are pointed daintily, as if he is dancing. ‘Hold up the lights,’ he says. ‘Is that a mermaid?’

‘Yes, my lord.’ A shadow of anxiety crosses the priest’s face. ‘Must she come down? Is she forbidden?’

He smiles. ‘I just thought she’s a long way from the sea.’

‘She’s stinking fish.’ Christophe yells with laughter.

‘Forgive the boy. He’s no poet.’

A feeble smile from the priest. On an oak screen St Anne holds a book for the instruction of her little daughter, the Virgin Mary; St Michael the Archangel hacks away with a scimitar at a devil entwining his feet. ‘Are you here to see the queen, sir? I mean,’ the priest corrects himself, ‘the Lady Katherine?’

This priest doesn’t know me from Adam, he thinks. I could be any emissary. I could be Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. I could be Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. They have both tried on Katherine their scant persuasive powers and their best bully-boy tricks.

He doesn’t give his name, but he leaves an offering. The priest’s hand enfolds the coins as if to warm them. ‘You will forgive my slip, my lord? Over the lady’s title? I swear I meant no harm by it. For an old countryman such as I am, it is hard to keep up with the changes. By the time we have understood one report from London, it is contradicted by the next.’

‘It’s hard for us all,’ he says, shrugging. ‘You pray for Queen Anne every Sunday?’

‘Of course, my lord.’

‘And what do your parishioners say to that?’

The priest looks embarrassed. ‘Well, sir, they are simple people. I would not pay heed to what they say. Though they are all very loyal,’ he adds hastily. ‘Very loyal.’

‘No doubt. Will you please me now, and this Sunday in your prayers remember Tom Wolsey?’

The late cardinal? He sees the old fellow revising his ideas. This can’t be Thomas Howard or Charles Brandon: for if you speak the name of Wolsey, they can hardly restrain themselves from spitting at your feet.

When they leave the church, the last light is vanishing into the sky, and a stray snowflake drifts along towards the south. They remount; it has been a long day; his clothes feel heavy on his back. He doesn’t believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there’s no harm in hedging your bets. When the woodcock flew up in its flash of reddish brown, his heart had knocked hard. As they rode he was aware of it, each beat a heavy wing-beat; as the bird found the concealment of trees, its tracing of feathers inked out to black.

They arrive in the half-dark: a hallooing from the walls, and an answering shout from Christophe: ‘Thomas Cremuel, Secretary to the king and Master of the Rolls.’

‘How do we know you?’ a sentry bellows. ‘Show your colours.’

‘Tell him show a light and let me in,’ he says, ‘or I’ll show his backside my boot.’

He has to say these things, when he’s up-country; it’s expected of him, the king’s common adviser.

The drawbridge must come down for them: an antique scrape, a creak and rattling of bolts and chains. At Kimbolton they lock in early: good. ‘Remember,’ he says to his party, ‘do not make the priest’s mistake. When you talk to her household she is the Dowager Princess of Wales.’

‘What?’ Christophe says.

‘She is not the king’s wife. She never was the king’s wife. She is the wife of the king’s deceased brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales.’

‘Deceased means dead,’ Christophe says. ‘I know it.’

‘She is not a queen, or former queen, as her second so-called marriage was not licit.’

‘That is, not permissible,’ Christophe says. ‘She make the mistake of conjugation with both brothers, Arthur first then Henry.’

‘And what are we to think of such a woman?’ he says, smiling.

Flare of torches and, taking form out of dimness, Sir Edmund Bedingfield: Katherine’s keeper. ‘I think you might have warned us, Cromwell!’

‘Grace, you didn’t want warning of me, did you?’ He kisses Lady Bedingfield. ‘I didn’t bring my supper. But there’s a mule cart behind me, it will be here tomorrow. I have venison for your own table, and some almonds for the queen, and a sweet wine that Chapuys says she favours.’

‘I am glad of anything that will tempt her appetite.’ Grace Bedingfield leads the way into the great hall. In the firelight she stops and turns to him: ‘Her doctor suspects she has a growth in her belly. But it may take a long course. When you would think she has suffered enough, poor lady.’

He hands his gloves, his riding coat, to Christophe. ‘Will you wait upon her straight away?’ Bedingfield asks. ‘Though we were not expecting you, she may be. It is hard for us, because the townspeople favour her and word slips in with servants, you cannot prevent it, I believe they stand and signal from beyond the moat. I think she knows most of what goes on, who passes on the road.’

Two ladies, Spanish by their dress and well-advanced in age, press themselves against a plaster wall and look at him with resentment. He bows to them, and one remarks in her own tongue that this is the man who has sold the King of England’s soul. The wall behind them is painted, he sees, with the fading figures of a scene from paradise: Adam and Eve, hand in hand, stroll among beasts so new to creation they have not yet learned their names. A small elephant with a rolling eye peeps shyly through the foliage. He has never seen an elephant, but understood them to be higher by far than a warhorse; perhaps it’s not had time to grow yet. Branches bowed with fruit hang above its head.

‘Well, you know the form,’ Bedingfield says. ‘She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps.’

Katherine is sitting by the fire shrunk into a cape of very good ermines. The king will want that back, he thinks, if she dies. She glances up, and puts out a hand for him to kiss: unwilling, but more because of the chill, he thinks, than because she is reluctant to acknowledge him. She is jaundiced, and there is an invalid fug in the room – the faint animal scent of the furs, a vegetal stench of undrained cooking water, and the sour reek from a bowl with which a girl hurries away: containing, he suspects, the evacuated contents of the dowager’s stomach. If she is ill in the night, perhaps she dreams of the gardens of the Alhambra, where she grew up: the marble pavements, the bubbling of crystal water into basins, the drag of a white peacock’s tail and the scent of lemons. I could have brought her a lemon in my saddlebag, he thinks.

As if reading his thoughts, she speaks to him in Castilian. ‘Master Cromwell, let us abandon this weary pretence that you do not speak my language.’

He nods. ‘It has been hard in times past, standing by while your maids talked about me. “Jesu, isn’t he ugly, do you think he has a hairy body like Satan?”’

‘My maids said that?’ Katherine seems amused. She withdraws her hand, out of his sight. ‘They are long gone, those lively girls. Only old women remain, and a handful of licensed traitors.’

‘Madam, those about you love you.’

‘They report on me. All my words. They even listen in to my prayers. Well, master.’ She raises her face to the light. ‘How do you think I look? What will you say of me when the king asks you? I have not seen myself in a mirror these many months.’ She pats her fur cap, pulls its lappets over her ears; laughs. ‘The king used to call me an angel. He used to call me a flower. When my first son was born, it was the depths of winter. All England lay under snow. There were no flowers to be had, I thought. But Henry gave me six dozen roses made of the purest white silk. “White as your hand, my love,” he said, and kissed my fingertips.’ A twitch beneath the ermine tells him where a bunched fist lies now. ‘I keep them in a chest, the roses. They at least do not fade. Over the years I have given them to those who have done me some service.’ She pauses; her lips move, a silent invocation: prayers for departed souls. ‘Tell me, how is Boleyn’s daughter? They say she prays a good deal, to her reformed God.’

‘She has indeed a reputation for piety. As she has the approbation of the scholars and bishops.’

‘They are using her. As she is using them. If they were true churchmen they would shrink from her in horror, as they would shrink from an infidel. But I expect she is praying for a son. She lost the last child, I am told. Ah well, I know how that is. I pity her from the bottom of my heart.’

‘She and the king have hopes of another child soon.’

‘What? Particular hope, or general hope?’

He pauses; nothing definite has been said; Gregory could be wrong. ‘I thought she confided in you,’ Katherine says sharply. She scans his face: is there some rift, some froideur? ‘They say Henry pursues other women.’ Katherine’s finger strokes the fur: absently round and round, rubbing at the pelt. ‘It is so soon. They have only been married such a little space. I suppose she looks at the women about her, and says to herself, always questioning, is it you, madam? Or you? It has always surprised me that those who are untrustworthy themselves are blind when placing their own trust. La Ana thinks she has friends. But if she does not give the king a son soon, they will turn on her.’

He nods. ‘You may be right. Who will turn first?’

‘Why should I alert her?’ Katherine asks drily. ‘They say that when she is crossed she carps like a common scold. I am not surprised. A queen, and she calls herself a queen, must live and suffer under the world’s eye. No woman is above her but the Queen of Heaven, so she can look for no companionship in her troubles. If she suffers she suffers alone, and she needs a special grace to bear it. It appears Boleyn’s daughter has not received this grace. I ask myself why that could be.’

She breaks off; her lips open and her flesh draws itself together, as if squirming away from her clothes. You are in pain, he starts to say, but she waves him to silence, it’s nothing, nothing. ‘Gentlemen about the king, who swear now they will lay down their lives for her smile, will soon offer their devotion to another. They used to offer that same devotion to me. It was because I was the king’s wife, it was nothing to do with my person. But La Ana takes it as a tribute to her charms. And besides, it is not just the men she should fear. Her sister-in-law, Jane Rochford, now there is a vigilant young woman…when she served me she often brought secrets to me, love secrets, secrets I would perhaps rather not know, and I doubt her ears and eyes are less sharp nowadays.’ Still her fingers work away, now massaging a spot near her breastbone. ‘You wonder, how can Katherine, who is banished, know the workings of the court? That is for you to ponder.’

I don’t have to ponder long, he thinks. It is Nicholas Carew’s wife, a particular friend of yours. And it is Gertrude Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter’s wife; I caught her out in plotting last year, I should have locked her up. Perhaps even little Jane Seymour; though Jane has her own career to serve, since Wolf Hall. ‘I know you have your sources,’ he says. ‘But should you trust them? They act in your name, but not in your best interests. Or those of your daughter.’

‘Will you let the princess visit me? If you think she needs counsel to steady her, who better than I?’

‘If it stood to me, madam…’

‘What harm can it do the king?’

‘Put yourself in his place. I believe your ambassador Chapuys has written to Lady Mary, saying he can get her out of the country.’

‘Never! Chapuys can have no such thought. I guarantee it in my own person.’

‘The king thinks that perhaps Mary might corrupt her guards, and if permitted to make a journey to see you she might spur away, and take ship for the territories of her cousin the Emperor.’

It almost brings a smile to his lips, to think of the skinny, scared little princess embarking on such a desperate and criminal course of action. Katherine smiles too; a twisted, malicious smile. ‘And then what? Does Henry fear my daughter will come riding back, with a foreign husband by her side, and turn him out of his kingdom? You can assure him, she has no such intention. I will answer for her, again, with my own person.’

‘Your own person must do a good deal, madam. Guarantee this, answer for that. You have only one death to suffer.’

‘I wish it might do Henry good. When my death arrives, in whatever manner, I hope to meet it in such a way as to set him an example when the time comes for his own.’

‘I see. Do you think a lot about the king’s death?’

‘I think about his afterlife.’

‘If you want to do his soul good, why do you continually obstruct him? It hardly makes him a better man. Do you never think that, if you had bowed to the king’s wishes years ago, if you had entered a convent and allowed him to remarry, he would never have broken with Rome? There would have been no need. Sufficient doubt was cast upon your marriage for you to retire with a good grace. You would have been honoured by all. But now the titles you cling to are empty. Henry was a good son of Rome. You drove him to this extremity. You, not he, split Christendom. And I expect that you know that, and that you think about it in the silence of the night.’

There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word. ‘What you say, Cromwell, is…contemptible.’

She’s probably right, he thinks. But I will keep tormenting her, revealing her to herself, stripping her of any illusions, and I will do it for her daughter’s sake: Mary is the future, the only grown child the king has, England’s only prospect if God calls away Henry and the throne is suddenly empty. ‘So you won’t be giving me one of those silk roses,’ he says. ‘I thought you might.’

A long look. ‘At least, as an enemy, you stand in plain sight. I wish my friends could bear to be as conspicuous. The English are a nation of hypocrites.’

‘Ingrates,’ he agrees. ‘Natural liars. I’ve found it myself. I would rather the Italians. The Florentines, so modest. The Venetians, transparent in all their dealing. And your own race, the Spaniards. Such an honest people. They used to say of your royal father Ferdinand, that his open heart would undo him.’

‘You are amusing yourself,’ she says, ‘at the expense of a dying woman.’

‘You want a great deal of credit for dying. You offer guarantees on the one hand, you want privileges on the other.’

‘A state such as mine, it usually buys kindness.’

‘I am trying to be kind, but you do not see it. At the last, madam, can you not put your own will aside, and for the sake of your daughter, reconcile with the king? If you leave this world at odds with him, blame will be visited on her. And she is young and has her life to live.’

‘He will not blame Mary. I know the king. He is not so mean a man.’

He is silent. She still loves her husband, he thinks: in some kink or crevice of her old leathern heart, she is still hoping for his footstep, his voice. And with his gift to her hand, how can she forget that he once loved her? After all, there must have been weeks of work in the silk roses, he must have ordered them long before he knew the child was a boy. ‘We called him the New Year’s prince,’ Wolsey had said. ‘He lived fifty-two days, and I counted every one.’ England in winter: the pall of sliding snow, blanketing the fields and palace roofs, smothering tile and gable, slipping silent over window glass; feathering the rutted tracks, weighting the boughs of oak and yew, sealing the fishes under ice and freezing the bird to the branch. He imagines the cradle, curtained in crimson, gilded with the arms of England: the rockers huddled into their clothes: a brazier burning and the air fresh with the New Year scents of cinnamon and juniper. The roses brought to her triumphant bedside – how? In a gilded basket? In a long box like a coffin, a casket inlaid with polished shells? Or tumbled to her coverlet from a silk sheath embroidered with pomegranates? Two happy months pass. The child thrives. It is understood through the world that the Tudors have an heir. And then on the fifty-second day, a silence behind a curtain: a breath, not a breath. The women of the chamber snatch up the prince, crying in shock and fear; hopelessly crossing themselves, they cower by the cradle to pray.

‘I will see what can be done,’ he says. ‘About your daughter. About a visit.’ How perilous can it be to bring one little girl across country? ‘I do think the king would permit it, if you would advise Lady Mary to be in all respect conformable to his will, and recognise him, as now she does not, as head of the church.’

‘In that matter the Princess Mary must consult her own conscience.’ She holds up a hand, palm towards him. ‘I see you pity me, Cromwell. You should not. I have been prepared for death a long time. I believe that Almighty God will reward my efforts to serve him. And I shall see my little children again, who have gone before me.’

Your heart could break for her, he thinks: if it were not proof against breaking. She wants a martyr’s death on the scaffold. Instead she will die in the Fens, alone: choke on her own vomit, like as not. He says, ‘What about Lady Mary, is she also ready to die?’

‘The Princess Mary has meditated on Christ’s passion since she was an infant in the nursery. She will be ready when he calls.’

‘You are an unnatural parent,’ he says. ‘What parent would risk a child’s death?’

But he remembers Walter Cromwell. Walter used to jump on me with his big boots: on me, his only son. He gathers himself for one last effort. ‘I have instanced to you, madam, a case where your stubbornness in setting yourself against the king and his council served only to bring about a result you most abhor. So you can be wrong, do you see? I ask you to consider that you may be wrong more than once. For the love of God, advise Mary to obey the king.’

‘The Princess Mary,’ she says, dully. She does not seem to have the breath for any further protest. He watches her for a moment, and prepares to withdraw. But then she looks up. ‘I have wondered, master, in what language do you confess? Or do you not confess?’

‘God knows our hearts, madam. There is no need for an idle formula, or for an intermediary.’ No need for language either, he thinks: God is beyond translation.

He falls out of the door and almost into the arms of Katherine’s keeper: ‘Is my chamber ready?’

‘But your supper…’

‘Send me up a bowl of broth. I am talked out. All I want is my bed.’

‘Anything in it?’ Bedingfield looks roguish.

So, his escort has informed on him. ‘Just a pillow, Edmund.’

Grace Bedingfield is disappointed he has retired so early. She thought she would get all the court news; she resents being stuck out here with the silent Spaniards, a long winter ahead. He must repeat the king’s instructions: utmost vigilance against the outside world. ‘I don’t mind if Chapuys’s letters get through, it will keep her occupied working the cipher. She isn’t important to the Emperor now, it’s Mary he cares about. But no visitors, except under the king’s seal or mine. Although –’ He breaks off; he can see the day, next spring and if Katherine is still alive, when the Emperor’s army is riding up-country, and it is necessary to snatch her out of their path and hold her hostage; it would be a poor show if Edmund refused to yield her. ‘Look.’ He shows his turquoise ring. ‘You see this? The late cardinal gave it me, and I am known to wear it.’

‘Is that it, the magic one?’ Grace Bedingfield takes his hand. ‘Melts stone walls, makes princesses fall in love with you?’

‘This is the one. If any messenger brings you this, let him in.’

When he closes his eyes that night a vault rises above him, the carved roof of Kimbolton’s church. A man ringing handbells. A swan, a lamb, a cripple with a stick, two lovers’ hearts entwined. And a pomegranate tree. Katherine’s emblem. That might have to go. He yawns. Chisel them into apples, that’ll fix it. I’m too tired for unnecessary effort. He remembers the woman at the inn and feels guilty. He pulls a pillow towards him: just a pillow, Edmund.

When the innkeeper’s wife spoke to him as they were mounting their horses, she had said, ‘Send me a present. Send me a present from London, something you can’t get here.’ It will have to be something she can wear on her back, otherwise it will be vanished away by some light-fingered traveller. He will remember his obligation, but very likely by the time he returns to London he will have forgotten what she looked like. He had seen her by candlelight, and then the candle was out. When he saw her by daylight she could have been a different woman. Perhaps she was.

When he sleeps he dreams of the fruit of the Garden of Eden, outstretched in Eve’s plump hand. He wakes momentarily: if the fruit is ripe, when did those boughs blossom? In what possible month, in what possible spring? Schoolmen will have addressed the question. A dozen furrowed generations. Tonsured heads bent. Chilblained fingers fumbling scrolls. It’s the sort of silly question monks are made for. I’ll ask Cranmer, he thinks: my archbishop. Why doesn’t Henry ask Cranmer’s advice, if he wants to be rid of Anne? It was Cranmer who divorced him from Katherine; he would never tell him he must go back to her stale bed.

But no, Henry cannot speak of his doubts in that quarter. Cranmer loves Anne, he thinks her the pattern of a Christian woman, the hope of good Bible readers all over Europe.

He sleeps again and dreams of the flowers made before the dawn of the world. They are made of white silk. There is no bush or stem to pluck them from. They lie on the bare uncreated ground.

He looks closely at Anne the queen, the day he brings back his report; she looks sleek, contented, and the benign domestic hum of their voices, as he approaches, tell him that she and Henry are in harmony. They are busy, their heads together. The king has his drawing instruments to hand: his compasses and pencils, his rules, inks and penknives. The table is covered in unscrolling plans, and in artificers’ moulds and batons.

He makes them his reverence, and comes to the point: ‘She is not well, and I believe it would be a kindness to let her have a visit from ambassador Chapuys.’

Anne shoots out of her chair. ‘What, so he can intrigue with her more conveniently?’

‘Her doctors suggest, madam, that she will soon be in her grave, and not able to work you any displeasure.’

‘She would come out of it, flapping in her shroud, if she saw the chance to thwart me.’

Henry stretches out a hand: ‘Sweetheart, Chapuys has never acknowledged you. But when Katherine is gone, and can no longer make trouble for us, I will make sure he bends his knee.’

‘Nevertheless, I do not think he should go out of London. He encourages Katherine in her perversity, and she encourages her daughter.’ She darts a glance at him. ‘Cremuel, you agree, do you not? Mary should be brought to court and made to kneel before her father and swear the oath, and there on her knees she should beg pardon for her treasonous obstinacy, and acknowledge that my daughter, and not she, is heir to England.’

He indicates the plans. ‘Not building, sir?’

Henry looks like a child caught with its fingers in the sugar box. He pushes one of the batons towards him. The designs, still novel to the English eye, are those he grew accustomed to in Italy: fluted urns and vases, mantled and winged, and the sightless heads of emperors and gods. These days the native flowers and trees, the winding stems and blossoms, are disdained for wreathed arms, for the laurels of victory, the shaft of the lictor’s axe, the shaft of the spear. He sees that Anne’s status is not served by simplicity; for more than seven years now, Henry has been adapting his taste to hers. Henry used to enjoy hedge wines, the fruits of the English summer, but now the wines he favours are heavy, perfumed, drowsy; his body is heavy, so sometimes he seems to block out the light. ‘Are we building from the foundations?’ he enquires. ‘Or just a layer of ornamentation? Both cost money.’

‘How ungracious you are,’ Anne says. ‘The king is sending you some oak for your own building at Hackney. And some for Master Sadler, for his new house.’

With a dip of his head he signals his thanks. But the king’s mind is up-country, with the woman who still claims to be his wife. ‘What use is Katherine’s life to her, now?’ Henry asks. ‘I am sure she is tired of contention. God knows, I am tired of it. She were better to join the saints and holy martyrs.’

‘They have waited for her long enough.’ Anne laughs: too loudly.

‘I picture the lady dying,’ the king says. ‘She will be making speeches and forgiving me. She is always forgiving me. It is she who needs forgiveness. For her blighted womb. For poisoning my children before they were born.’

He, Cromwell, flits his eyes to Anne. Surely now, if she has anything to tell, is the moment? But she turns away, leans down and scoops her spaniel Purkoy into her lap. She buries her face in his fur, and the little dog, startled from his sleep, whimpers and twists in her hands and watches Master Secretary bow himself out.

Outside waiting for him, George Boleyn’s wife: her confiding hand, drawing him aside, her whisper. If someone said to Lady Rochford, ‘It’s raining,’ she would turn it into a conspiracy; as she passed the news on, she would make it sound somehow indecent, unlikely, but sadly true.

‘Well?’ he says. ‘Is she?’

‘Ah. Has she said nothing still? Of course, the wise woman says nothing till she feels it quickening.’ He regards her: stony-eyed. ‘Yes,’ she says at last, casting a nervous glance over her shoulder. ‘She has been wrong before. But yes.’

‘Does the king know?’

‘You should tell him, Cromwell. Be the man with good news. Who knows, he might knight you on the spot.’

He is thinking, fetch me Rafe Sadler, fetch me Thomas Wriothesley, send a letter to Edward Seymour, whistle up my nephew Richard, cancel supper with Chapuys, but don’t let our dishes go to waste: let’s invite Sir Thomas Boleyn.

‘I suppose it is to be expected,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘She was with the king for much of the summer, was she not? A week here, a week there. And when he was not with her, he would write her love letters, and send them by the hand of Harry Norris.’

‘My lady, I must leave you, I have business.’

‘I’m sure you have. Ah well. And you are usually such a good listener. You always attend to what I say. And I say that this summer he wrote her love letters, and sent them by the hand of Harry Norris.’

He is moving too fast to make much of her last sentence; though, as he will admit later, the detail will affix itself and adhere to certain sentences of his own, not yet formed. Phrases only. Elliptic. Conditional. As everything is conditional now. Anne blossoming as Katherine fails. He pictures them, their faces intent and skirts bunched, two little girls in a muddy track, playing teeter-totter with a plank balanced on a stone.

Thomas Seymour says at once, ‘This is Jane’s chance, now. He will hesitate no more, he will want a new bedfellow. He will not touch the queen till she gives birth. He cannot. There is too much to lose.’

He thinks, already perhaps the secret king of England has fingers, has a face. But I thought that before, he reminds himself. At her coronation, when Anne carried her belly so proudly; and after all, it was only a girl.

‘I still don’t see it,’ says old Sir John, the adulterer. ‘I don’t see how he’d want Jane. Now if it were my daughter Bess. The king has danced with her. He liked her very well.’

‘Bess is married,’ Edward says.

Tom Seymour laughs. ‘The more fit for his purpose.’

Edward is irate. ‘Don’t talk of Bess. Bess would not have him. Bess is not in question.’

‘It could turn to good,’ Sir John says, tentative. ‘For until now Jane’s never been any use to us.’

‘True,’ Edward says. ‘Jane is as much use as a blancmange. Now let her earn her keep. The king will need a companion. But we do not push her in his way. Let it be as Cromwell here has advised. Henry has seen her. He has formed his intent. Now she must avoid him. No, she must repel him.’

‘Oh, hoity-toity,’ old Seymour says. ‘If you can afford it.’

‘Afford what’s chaste, what’s seemly?’ Edward snaps. ‘You never could. Be quiet, you old lecher. The king pretends to forget your crimes, but no one really forgets. You are pointed at: the old goat who stole his son’s bride.’

‘Yes, hold your peace, Father,’ Tom says. ‘We’re talking to Cromwell.’

‘One thing I am afraid of,’ he says. ‘Your sister loves her old mistress, Katherine. This is well known to the present queen, who spares no opportunity for harshness. If she sees that the king is looking at Jane, I am afraid she will be further persecuted. Anne is not one to sit by while her husband makes a – a companion – of another woman. Even if she thought it a temporary arrangement.’

‘Jane will pay no heed,’ Edward says. ‘What though she gets a pinch or a slap? She will know how to bear herself patiently.’

‘She will play him for some great reward,’ says old Seymour.

Tom Seymour says, ‘He made Anne a marquise before he had her.’

Edward’s face is as grim as if he is ordering up an execution. ‘You know what he made her. Marquise first. Queen thereafter.’

Parliament is prorogued, but London lawyers, flapping their black gowns like crows, settle to their winter term. The happy news seeps and leaks through the court. Anne lets out her bodices. Bets are laid. Pens scribble. Letters are folded. Seals pressed to wax. Horses are mounted. Ships set sail. The old families of England kneel and ask God why he favours the Tudors. King Francis frowns. Emperor Charles sucks his lip. King Henry dances.

The conversation at Elvetham, that early hour’s confabulation: it is as if it had never been. The king’s doubts about his marriage, it seems, have vanished.

Though in the desolate winter gardens, he has been seen walking with Jane.

Her family surround her; they call him in. ‘What did he say, sister?’ Edward Seymour demands. ‘Tell me everything, everything he said.’

Jane says, ‘He asked me if I would be his good mistress.’

They exchange glances. There is a difference between a mistress and a good mistress: does Jane know that? The first implies concubinage. The second, something less immediate: an exchange of tokens, a chaste and languorous admiration, a prolonged courtship…though it can’t be very prolonged, of course, or Anne will have given birth and Jane will have missed her chance. The women cannot predict when the heir will see the light, and he can get no further with Anne’s doctors.

‘Look, Jane,’ Edward tells her, ‘this is no time to be shy. You must give us particulars.’

‘He asked me if I would look kindly on him.’

‘Kindly on him when?’

‘For instance, if he wrote me a poem. Praising my beauty. So I said I would. I would thank him for it. I wouldn’t laugh, even behind my hand. And I wouldn’t raise any objection to any statements he might make in verse. Even if they were exaggerated. Because in poems it is usual to exaggerate.’

He, Cromwell, congratulates her. ‘You have it covered from every angle, Mistress Seymour. You would have made a sharp lawyer.’

‘You mean, if I had been born a man?’ She frowns. ‘But still, it is not likely, Master Secretary. The Seymours are not tradesmen.’

Edward Seymour says, ‘Good mistress. Write you verse. Very well. Good so far. But if he attempts anything on your person, you must scream.’

Jane says, ‘What if nobody came?’

He puts his hand on Edward’s arm. He wants to stop this scene developing any further. ‘Listen, Jane. Don’t scream. Pray. Pray aloud, I mean. Mental prayer will not do it. Say a prayer with the Holy Virgin in it. Something that will appeal to His Majesty’s piety and sense of honour.’

‘I understand,’ Jane says. ‘Do you have a prayer book on your person, Master Secretary? Brothers? No matter. I will go and look for mine. I am sure I can find something that will fit the bill.’

In early December, he receives word from Katherine’s doctors that she is eating better, though praying no less. Death has moved, perhaps, from the head of the bed to its foot. Her recent pains have eased and she is lucid; she uses the time to make her bequests. She leaves her daughter Mary a gold collar she brought from Spain, and her furs. She asks for five hundred masses to be said for her soul, and for a pilgrimage to be made to Walsingham.

Details of the dispositions make their way back to Whitehall. ‘These furs,’ Henry says, ‘have you seen them, Cromwell? Are they any good? If they are, I want them sent down to me.’

Teeter-totter.

The women around Anne say, you would not think she was enceinte. In October she looked well enough, but now she seems to be losing flesh, rather than gaining. Jane Rochford tells him, ‘You would almost think she is ashamed of her condition. And His Majesty is not attentive to her, as formerly he was attentive when her belly was big. Then, he could not do enough for her. He would cater to her whims and wait on her like a maid. I once came in to find her feet in his lap, and he rubbing them like an ostler nursing some splay-hooved mare.’

‘Rubbing doesn’t help a splayed hoof,’ he says, earnest. ‘You have to trim it and fit a special shoe.’

Rochford stares at him. ‘Have you been talking to Jane Seymour?’

‘Why?’

‘Never mind,’ she says.

He has seen Anne’s face as she watches the king, as she watches the king watching Jane. You expect black anger, and the enactment of it: scissored-up sewing, broken glass. Instead, her face is narrow; she holds her jewelled sleeve across her body, where the child is growing. ‘I must not disturb myself,’ she says. ‘It could injure the prince.’ She pulls her skirts aside when Jane passes. She huddles into herself, narrow shoulders shrinking; she looks cold as a doorstep orphan.

Teeter-totter.

The rumour in the country is that Master Secretary has brought a woman back from his recent trip to Hertfordshire, or Bedfordshire, and set her up in his house at Stepney, or at Austin Friars, or at King’s Place in Hackney, which he is rebuilding for her in lavish style. She is the keeper of an inn, and her husband has been seized and locked up, for a new crime invented by Thomas Cromwell. The poor cuckold is to be charged and hanged at the next assize; though, by some reports, he has already been found dead in his prison, bludgeoned, poisoned, and with his throat cut.

III. Angels. London: Christmas 1535–New Year 1536

Christmas morning: he comes hurtling out in pursuit of whatever trouble is next. A huge toad blocks his path. ‘Is that Matthew?’

From the amphibian mouth, a juvenile chortle. ‘Simon. Merry Christmas, sir, how do you?’

He sighs. ‘Overworked. Did you send your duties to your mother and father?’

The singing children go home in the summer. At Christmas, they are busy singing. ‘Will you be going to see the king, sir?’ Simon croaks. ‘I bet their plays at court are not so good as ours. We are playing Robin Hood, and King Arthur is in it. I play Merlin’s toad. Master Richard Cromwell plays the Pope and has a begging bowl. He cries “Mumpsimus sumpsimus, hocus pocus.” We give him stones for alms. He threatens us with Hell.’

He pats Simon’s warty skin. The toad clears his path with a ponderous hop.

Since his return from Kimbolton, London has closed around him: late autumn, her fading and melancholy evenings, her early dark. The sedate and ponderous arrangements of the court have enfolded him, entrapped him into desk-bound days prolonged by candlelight into desk-bound nights; sometimes he would give a king’s ransom to see the sun. He is buying land in the lusher parts of England, but he has no leisure to visit it; so these farms, these ancient manors in their walled gardens, these watercourses with their little quays, these ponds with their gilded fish rising to the hook; these vineyards, flower gardens, arbours and walks, remain to him flat, each one a paper construct, a set of figures on a page of accounts: not sheep-nibbled margins, nor meadows where kine stand knee-deep in grass, not coppices nor groves where a white doe shivers, a hoof poised; but parchment domains, leases and freeholds delimited by inky clauses, not by ancient hedges or boundary stones. His acres are notional acres, sources of income, sources of dissatisfaction in the small hours, when he wakes up and his mind explores their geography: in these waking nights before sullen or frozen dawns, he thinks not of the freedom his holdings allow, but of the trampling intrusion of others, their easements and rights of way, their fences and vantage points, that allow them to impinge on his boundaries and interfere with his quiet possession of his future. Christ knows, he is no country boy: though where he grew up, in the streets near the quays, Putney Heath was at his back, a place to go missing. He spent long days there, running with his brethren, boys as rough as himself: all of them in flight from their fathers, from their belts and fists, and from the education they were threatened with if they ever stood still. But London pulled him to her urban gut; long before he sailed the Thames in Master Secretary’s barge, he knew the currents and the tide, and he knew how much could be picked up, casually, at watermen’s trades, by unloading boats and running crates in barrows uphill to the fine houses that lined the Strand, the houses of lords and bishops: the houses of men with whom, daily, he now sits down at the council board.

The winter court perambulates, its accustomed circuit: Greenwich and Eltham, the houses of Henry’s childhood: Whitehall and Hampton Court, once the cardinal’s houses. It is usual these days for the king, wherever the court resides, to dine alone in his private rooms. Outside the royal apartments, in the outer Watching Chamber or the Guard Chamber – in whatever that outer hall is named, in the palaces in which we find ourselves – there is a top table, where the Lord Chamberlain, head of the king’s private household, holds court for the nobility. Uncle Norfolk sits at this table, when he is with us at court; so does Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and the queen’s father, the Earl of Wiltshire. There is a table, somewhat lower in status, but served with due honour, for functionaries like himself, and for the old friends of the king who happen not to be peers. Nicholas Carew sits there, Master of the Horse; and William Fitzwilliam, Master Treasurer, who of course has known Henry since he was a boy. William Paulet, Master Comptroller, presides at the head of this board: and he wonders, until it is explained to him, at their habit of lifting their goblets (and their eyebrows) in a toast to someone not there. Till Paulet explains, half-embarrassed, ‘We toast the man who sat here before me. Master Comptroller who was. Sir Henry Guildford, his blessed memory. You knew him, Cromwell, of course.’

Indeed: who did not know Guildford, that practised diplomat, that most studied of courtiers? A man of the king’s own age, he had been Henry’s right arm since he came to the throne, he an unpractised, well-meaning, optimistic prince of nineteen. Two glowing spirits, earnest in pursuit of glory and a good time, the master and servant had aged together. You would have backed Guildford to survive an earthquake; but he did not survive Anne Boleyn. His partisanship was clear: he loved Queen Katherine and said so. (And if I did not love her, he said, then propriety alone, and my Christian conscience, would compel me to back her case.) The king had excused him out of long friendship; only let us, he had pleaded, leave the matter unmentioned, the disagreement unstated. Do not mention Anne Boleyn. Make it possible for us to stay friends.

But silence had not been enough for Anne. The day I am queen, she had told Guildford, is the day you lose your job.

Madam, said Sir Henry Guildford: the day you become queen, is the day I resign.

And so he did. Henry said: Come on, man! Don’t let a woman nag you out of your post! It’s just women’s jealousy and spite, ignore it.

But I fear for myself, Guildford said. For my family and my name.

Do not abandon me, said the king.

Blame your new wife, Henry Guildford said.

And so he quit the court. And went home to the country. ‘And died,’ says William Fitzwilliam, ‘within a few short months. They say, of a broken heart.’

A sigh runs around the table. That’s the way it takes men; life’s work over, rural ennui stretching ahead: a procession of days, Sunday to Sunday, all without shape. What is there, without Henry? Without the radiance of his smile? It’s like perpetual November, a life in the dark.

‘Wherefore we remember him,’ Sir Nicholas Carew says. ‘Our old friend. And we drink a toast – Paulet here does not mind – to the man who would still be Master Comptroller, if the times were not out of joint.’

He has a gloomy way of making a toast, Sir Nicholas Carew. Levity is unknown to one so dignified. He, Cromwell, had been sitting at table for a week before Sir Nicholas deigned to turn a cold eye upon him, and nudge the mutton his way. But their relations have eased since then; after all, he, Cromwell, is an easy man to get along with. He sees that there is a camaraderie among men such as these, men who have lost out to the Boleyns: a defiant camaraderie, such as exists among those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand.

He knew Henry Guildford himself, as Paulet reminds him. It must be five years ago now that he had been entertained by him handsomely, at Leeds Castle down in Kent. It was only because Guildford wanted something, of course: a favour, from my lord cardinal. But still, he had learned from Guildford’s table talk, from the way he ordered his household, from his prudence and discreet wit. More lately, he had learned from Guildford’s example how Anne Boleyn could break a career; and how far they were from forgiving her, his companions at table. Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne’s rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to include him in their companionship; he only wants them not to spit in his dinner. But Carew’s stiffness bends a little, as he joins them in talk; sometimes the Master of the Horse swivels towards him his long, indeed somewhat equine head; sometimes he gives him a slow courser’s blink and says, ‘Well, Master Secretary, and how are you today?’

And as he searches for a reply that Nicholas will understand, William Fitzwilliam will catch his eye, and grin.

During December a landslide, an avalanche of papers has crossed his desk. Often he ends the day smarting and thwarted, because he has sent Henry vital and urgent messages and the gentlemen of the privy chamber have decided it’s easier for them if they keep the business back till Henry’s in the mood. Despite the good news he has had from the queen, Henry is testy, capricious. At any moment he may demand the oddest item of information, or pose questions with no answer. What’s the market price of Berkshire wool? Do you speak Turkish? Why not? Who does speak Turkish? Who was the founder of the monastery at Hexham?

Seven shilling the sack, and rising, Majesty. No. Because I was never in those parts. I will find a man if one can be got. St Wilfred, sir. He closes his eyes. ‘I believe the Scots razed it, and it was built up again in the time of the first Henry.’

‘Why does Luther think,’ the king demands, ‘that I should come into conformity with his church? Should he not think of coming into conformity with me?’

About St Lucy’s Day, Anne calls him in, taking him from the affairs of Cambridge University. But Lady Rochford is there to check him before he reaches her, put a hand on his arm. ‘She is a sorry sight. She cannot stop blubbing. Have you not heard? Her little dog is dead. We could not face telling her. We had to ask the king himself to do it.’

Purkoy? Her favourite? Jane Rochford conducts him in, glances at Anne. Poor lady: her eyes are cried to slits. ‘Do you know,’ Lady Rochford murmurs, ‘when she miscarried her last child, she did not shed a tear?’

The women skirt around Anne, keeping their distance as if she were barbed. He remembers what Gregory said: Anne is all elbows and points. You could not comfort her; even a hand extended, she would regard as a presumption, or a threat. Katherine is right. A queen is alone, whether in the loss of her husband, her spaniel or her child.

She turns her head: ‘Cremuel.’ She orders her women out: a vehement gesture, a child scaring crows. Unhurried, like bold corvines of some new and silky kind, the ladies gather their trains, flap languidly away; their voices, like voices from the air, trail behind them: their gossip broken off, their knowing cackles of laughter. Lady Rochford is the last to take wing, trailing her feathers, reluctant to yield the ground.

Now there is no one in the room but himself and Anne and her dwarf, humming in the corner, waggling her fingers before her face.

‘I am so sorry,’ he says, his eyes down. He knows better than to say, you can get another dog.

‘They found him –’ Anne throws out a hand, ‘out there. Down in the courtyard. The window was open above. His neck was broken.’

She does not say, he must have fallen. Because clearly this is not what she thinks. ‘Do you remember, you were here, that day my cousin Francis Bryan brought him from Calais? Francis walked in and I had Purkoy off his arm before you could blink. He was a creature who did no one harm. What monster would find it in their heart to pick him up and kill him?’

He wants to soothe her; she seems as torn, as injured, as if the attack had been on her person. ‘Probably he crept out on the sill and then his paws slipped. Those little dogs, you expect them to fall on their feet like a cat, but they don’t. I had a spaniel jumped out of my son’s arms because she saw a mouse, and she snapped her leg. It’s easily done.’

‘What happened to her?’

He says gently, ‘We could not mend her.’ He glances up at the fool. She is grinning in her corner, and jerking her fists apart in a snapping motion. Why does Anne keep the thing? She should be sent to a hospital. Anne scrubs at her cheeks; all her fine French manners fallen away, she uses her knuckles, like a little girl. ‘What is the news from Kimbolton?’ She finds a handkerchief and blows her nose. ‘They say Katherine could live six months.’

He does not know what to say. Perhaps she wants him to send a man to Kimbolton to drop Katherine from a height?

‘The French ambassador complains he came twice to your house and you would not see him.’

‘I was busy,’ he shrugs.

‘With?’

‘I was playing bowls in the garden. Yes, twice. I practise constantly, because if I lose a game I am in a rage all day, and I go looking for papists to kick.’

Once, Anne would have laughed. Not now. ‘I myself do not care for this ambassador. He does not give me his respect, as the envoy before did. None the less, you must be careful of him. You must do him all honour, because it is only King Francis who is keeping the Pope from our throats.’

Farnese as wolf. Snarling and dripping bloody drool. He is not sure she is in a mood to be talked to, but he will try. ‘It is not for love of us that Francis helps us.’

‘I know it is not for love.’ She teases out her wet handkerchief, looking for a dry bit. ‘Not for love of me, anyway. I am not such a fool.’

‘It is only that he does not want the Emperor Charles to overrun us and make himself master of the world. And he does not like the bull of excommunication. He does not think it right that the Bishop of Rome or any priest should set himself up to deprive a king of his own country. But I wish France would see his own interest. It is a pity there is not a skilled man to open to him the advantages of doing as our sovereign lord has done, and taking the headship of his own church.’

‘But there are not two Cremuels.’ She manages a sour smile.

He waits. Does she know how the French now see her? They no longer believe she can influence Henry. They think she is a spent force. And though the whole of England has taken an oath to uphold her children, no one abroad believes that, if she fails to give Henry a son, the little Elizabeth can reign. As the French ambassador said to him (the last time he let him in): if the choice is between two females, why not prefer the elder? If Mary’s blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.

From her corner the creature, the dwarf, comes shuffling towards Anne on her bottom; she pulls at her mistress’s skirts. ‘Get away, Mary,’ Anne says. She laughs at his expression. ‘Did you not know I have rebaptised my fool? The king’s daughter is almost a dwarf, is she not? Even more squat than her mother. The French would be shocked if they saw her, I think a glimpse of her would scuttle their intentions. Oh, I know, Cremuel, I know what they are trying to do behind my back. They had my brother to and fro for talks, but they never meant to make a marriage with Elizabeth.’ Ah, he thinks, she grasps it at last. ‘They are trying for a match between the dauphin and the Spanish bastard. All the time they are smiling to my face and are working away behind my back. You knew this and you did not tell me.’

‘Madam,’ he murmurs, ‘I tried.’

‘It is as if I did not exist. As if my daughter had never been born. As if Katherine were still queen.’ Her voice sharpens. ‘I will not endure it.’

So what will you do? In the next breath she tells him. ‘I have thought of a way. With Mary.’ He waits. ‘I might visit her,’ she says. ‘And not alone. With some gallant young gentlemen.’

‘You do not lack for those.’

‘Or why should you not visit her, Cremuel? You have some handsome boys in your train. Do you know the wretch has never had a compliment in her life?’

‘From her father she has, I believe.’

‘When a girl is eighteen, her father no longer counts with her. She craves other company. Believe me, I know, because once I was as foolish as any girl. A maiden of that age, she wants someone to write her a verse. Someone who turns his eyes to her and sighs when she enters the room. Admit now, this is what we have not tried. To flatter her, seduce her.’

‘You want me to compromise her?’

‘Between us we can contrive it. Do it yourself even, I care not, someone told me she liked you. And I should like to see Cremuel pretending to be in love.’

‘It would be a foolish man who came near Mary. I think the king would kill him.’

‘I am not suggesting he bed her. God save me, I would not impose it on any friend of mine. All that is needed is to have her make a fool of herself, and do it in public, so she loses her reputation.’

‘No,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘That is not my aim and those are not my methods.’

Anne flushes. Anger mottles her throat. She will do anything, he thinks. Anne has no limits. ‘You will be sorry,’ she says, ‘for the way you speak to me. You think you are grown great and that you no longer need me.’ Her voice is shaking. ‘I know you are talking to the Seymours. You think it is secret but nothing is secret from me. It shocked me when I heard it, I can tell you, I did not think you would put your money on such a bad risk. What has Jane Seymour got but a maidenhead, and what use is a maidenhead, the morning after? Before the event she is the queen of his heart, and after it she is just another drab who could not keep her skirts down. Jane has neither looks nor wit. She will not hold Henry a week. She will be packed off to Wolf Hall and forgotten.’

‘Perhaps so,’ he says. There is a chance that she is right; he would not discount it. ‘Madam, things were once happier between us. You used to listen to my advice. Let me advise you now. Drop your plans and schemes. Lay down the burden of them. Keep yourself in quietness till the child is born. Do not risk its wellbeing by agitating your mind. You have said yourself, strife and contention can mark a child even before it sees the light. Bend your mind to the king’s desires. As for Jane, she is pale and inconspicuous, is she not? Pretend you do not see her. Turn your head from sights that are not for you.’

She leans forward in her chair, hands clenched on her knees. ‘I will advise you, Cremuel. Make terms with me before my child is born. Even if it is a girl I will have another. Henry will never abandon me. He waited for me long enough. I have made the wait worth his while. And if he turns his back on me he will turn his back on the great and marvellous work done in this realm since I became queen – I mean the work for the gospel. Henry will never return to Rome. He will never bow his knee. Since my coronation there is a new England. It cannot subsist without me.’

Not so, madam, he thinks. If need be, I can separate you from history. He says, ‘I hope we are not at odds. I give you homely advice, as friend to friend. You know I am, or I was, the father of a family. I always did counsel my wife to calmness at such a time. If there is anything I can do for you, tell me and I will do it.’ He looks up at her. His eyes glitter. ‘But do not threaten me, good madam. I find it uncomfortable.’

She snaps, ‘Your comfort is not my concern. You must study your advantage, Master Secretary. Those who are made can be unmade.’

He says, ‘I entirely agree.’

He bows himself out. He pities her; she is fighting with the women’s weapons that are all she has. In the anteroom to her presence chamber, Lady Rochford is alone. ‘Still snivelling?’ she asks.

‘I think she has gathered herself.’

‘She is losing her looks, don’t you think? Was she too much in the sun this summer? She is beginning to line.’

‘I don’t look at her, my lady. Well, no more than a subject ought.’

‘Oh, you don’t?’ She is amused. ‘Then I’ll tell you. She looks every day of her age and more. Faces are not incidental. Our sins are written on them.’

‘Jesus! What have I done?’

She laughs. ‘Mr Secretary, that is what we all would like to know. But then, perhaps it is not always true. Mary Boleyn down in the country, I hear she blossoms like the month of May. Fair and plump, they say. How is it possible? A jade like Mary, through so many hands you can’t find a stable lad who hasn’t had her. But put the two side by side, and it is Anne who looks – how would you express it? Well-used.’

Chattering, the other ladies flock into the room. ‘Have you left her alone?’ says Mary Shelton: as if Anne ought not to be alone. She picks up her skirts and flits back to the inner chamber.

He takes his leave of Lady Rochford. But something is scuffling about his feet, impeding him. It is the dwarf woman, on all fours. She growls in her throat and makes as if to nip him. He just restrains himself from kicking her away.

He goes about his day. He wonders, how can it be for Lady Rochford, to be married to a man who humiliates her, preferring to be with his whores and making no secret of it? He has no means of answering the question, he admits; no point of entry into her feelings at all. He knows he doesn’t like her hand on his arm. Misery seems to leak and seep from her pores. She laughs but her eyes never laugh; they flit from face to face, they take in everything.

The day Purkoy came from Calais to the court, he had held Francis Bryan by the sleeve: ‘Where can I get one?’ Ah, for your mistress, that one-eyed devil had enquired: fishing for gossip. No, he had said, smiling, just for myself.

Soon Calais was in an uproar. Letters flitting across the Narrow Sea. Master Secretary would like a pretty dog. Find him one, find him one quick, before someone else gets the credit. Lady Lisle, the governor’s wife, wondered if she should part with her own dog. By one hand and another, a half-dozen spaniels were whisked in. Each was parti-coloured and smiling, with a feathered tail and delicate miniature feet. Not one of them was like Purkoy, with his ears pricked, his habit of interrogation. Pourquoi?

Good question.

Advent: first the fast and then the feast. In the store rooms, raisins, almonds, nutmegs, mace, cloves, liquorice, figs and ginger. The King of England’s envoys are in Germany, holding talks with the League of Schmalkald, the confederation of Protestant princes. The Emperor is at Naples. Barbarossa is at Constantinople. The servant Anthony is in the great hall at Stepney, perched on a ladder and wearing a robe embroidered with the moon and stars. ‘All right, Tom?’ he shouts.

The Christmas star sways above his head. He, Cromwell, stands looking up at its silvered edges: sharp as blades.

It was only last month that Anthony joined the household, but it is hard to think of him as a beggar at the gate. When he had rode back from his visit to Katherine, the usual press of Londoners had gathered outside Austin Friars. They might not know him up-country, but they know him here. They come to stare at his servants, at his horses and their tack, at his colours flying; but today he rides in with an anonymous guard, a bunch of tired men coming from nowhere. ‘Where’ve you been, Lord Cromwell?’ a man bawls: as if he owes the Londoners an explanation. Sometimes he sees himself, in his mind’s eye, dressed in filched cast-offs, a soldier from a broken army: a starving boy, a stranger, a gawper at his own gate.

They are about to pass into the courtyard, when he says, wait; a wan face bobs by his side; a little man has weaselled through the crowd, and catches at his stirrup. He is weeping, and so evidently harmless that no one even raises a hand to him; only he, Cromwell, feels his neck bristle: this is how you are trapped, your attention snared by some staged incident while the killer comes behind with the knife. But the men at arms are a wall at his back, and this bowed wretch is shaking so much that if he whipped out a blade he would peel his own knees. He leans down. ‘Do I know you? I saw you here before.’

Tears trickle down the man’s face. He has no visible teeth, a state that would upset anyone. ‘God bless you, my lord. May he cherish you and increase your wealth.’

‘Oh, he does.’ He is tired of telling people he is not their lord.

‘Give me a place,’ the man begs. ‘I am in rags, as you see. I will sleep with the dogs if it please you.’

‘The dogs might not like it.’

One of his escort closes in: ‘Shall I whip him off, sir?’

At this, the man sets up a fresh wailing. ‘Oh, hush,’ he says, as if to a child. The lament redoubles, the tears spurt as if he had a pump behind his nose. Perhaps he cried his teeth right out of his head? Is that possible?

‘I am a masterless man,’ the poor creature sobs. ‘My dear lord was killed in an explosion.’

‘God forgive us, what kind of explosion?’ His attention is riveted: are people wasting gunpowder? We may need that if the Emperor comes.

The man is rocking himself, his arms clasped across his chest; his legs seem about to give way. He, Cromwell, reaches down and hauls him up by his sagging jerkin; he doesn’t want him rolling on the ground and panicking the horses. ‘Stand up. Give your name.’

A choked sob: ‘Anthony.’

‘What can you do, besides weep?’

‘If it please you, I was much valued before…alas!’ He breaks down entirely, wracked and swaying.

‘Before the explosion,’ he says patiently. ‘Now, what was it you did? Water the orchard? Swill out the privies?’

‘Alas,’ the man wails. ‘Neither of those. Nothing so useful.’ His chest heaves. ‘Sir, I was a jester.’

He lets go of his jerkin, stares at him, and begins to laugh. A disbelieving snigger runs from man to man through the crowd. His escort bow over their saddles, giggling.

The little man seems to bounce from his grip. He regains his balance and looks up at him. His cheeks are quite dry, and a sly smile has replaced the lineaments of despair. ‘So,’ he says, ‘am I coming in?’

Now as Christmas approaches Anthony keeps the household open-mouthed with stories of the horrors that have come to people he knows, round and about the time of the Nativity: assault by innkeepers, stables catching fire, livestock wandering the hills. He does different voices for men and women, can make dogs talk impertinently to their masters, can mimic ambassador Chapuys and anyone else you name. ‘Do you impersonate me?’ he asks.

‘You grudge me the opportunity,’ Anthony says. ‘A man could wish for a master who rolls his words around his mouth, or is always crossing himself and crying Jesu-Maria, or grinning, or frowning, or a man with a twitch. But you don’t hum, or shuffle your feet or twirl your thumbs.’

‘My father had a savage temper. I learned as a child to be still. If he noticed me, he hit me.’

‘As for what is in there,’ Anthony looks him in the eye, taps his forehead, ‘as for what’s in there, who knows? I may as well impersonate a shutter. A plank has more expression. A water butt.’

‘I’ll give you a good character, if you want a new master.’

‘I’ll get you in the end. When I learn to imitate a gatepost. A standing stone. A statue. There are statues who move their eyes. In the north country.’

‘I have some of them in custody. In the strong rooms.’

‘Can I have the key? I want to see if they are still moving their eyes, in the dark without their keepers.’

‘Are you a papist, Anthony?’

‘I may be. I like miracles. I have been a pilgrim in my time. But the fist of Cromwell is more proximate than the hand of God.’

On Christmas Eve Anthony sings ‘Pastime With Good Company’, in the person of the king and wearing a dish for a crown. He expands before your eyes, his meagre limbs fleshing out. The king has a silly voice, too high for a big man. It’s something we pretend not to notice. But now he laughs at Anthony, his hand covering his mouth. When has Anthony seen the king? He seems to know his every gesture. I wouldn’t be surprised, he thinks, if Anthony has been bustling about the court these many years, drawing a per diem and nobody asking what he’s for or how he got on to the payroll. If he can imitate a king, he can easily imitate a busy useful fellow with places to be and business to see to.

Christmas Day comes. The bells peal at Dunstan’s church. Snowflakes drift on the wind. Spaniels wear ribbons. It is Master Wriothesley who is first to arrive; he was a great actor when he was at Cambridge, and these last years he has been in charge of the plays in their household. ‘Give me just a small role,’ he had begged him. ‘I could be a tree? Then I need not learn anything. Trees have an impromptu wit.’

‘In the Indies,’ Gregory says, ‘trees can ambulate. They lift themselves up by their roots and if the wind blows they can move to a more sheltered spot.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘I’m afraid it was me,’ says Call-Me-Risley. ‘But he was so pleased to hear of it, I’m sure it was none harm.’

Wriothesley’s pretty wife is dressed as Maid Marion, her hair loose and falling to her waist. Wriothesley is simpering in skirts, to which his toddling daughter clings. ‘I’ve come as a virgin,’ he says. ‘They’re so rare these days that they send unicorns out looking for them.’

‘Go and change,’ he says. ‘I don’t like it.’ He lifts Master Wriothesley’s veil. ‘You’re not very convincing, with that beard.’

Call-Me drops a curtsey. ‘But I must have a disguise, sir.’

‘We have a worm costume left,’ Anthony says. ‘Or you could be a giant striped rose.’

‘St Uncumber was a virgin and grew a beard,’ Gregory volunteers. ‘The beard was to repulse her suitors and so guard her chastity. Women pray to her if they wish to be rid of their husbands.’

Call-Me goes to change. Worm or flower? ‘You could be the worm in the bud,’ Anthony suggests.

Rafe and his nephew Richard have come in; he sees them exchange a glance. He lifts Wriothesley’s child in his arms, asks after her baby brother and admires her cap. ‘Mistress, I have forgot your name.’

‘I am called Elizabeth,’ the child says.

Richard Cromwell says, ‘Aren’t you all, these days?’

I will win Call-Me, he thinks. I will win him away from Stephen Gardiner completely, and he will see where his true interest lies, and be loyal only to me and to his king.

When Richard Riche comes in with his wife he admires her new sleeves of russet satin. ‘Robert Packington charged me six shillings,’ she says, her tone outraged. ‘And fourpence to line them.’

‘Has Riche paid him?’ He is laughing. ‘You don’t want to pay Packington. It only encourages him.’

When Packington himself arrives, it’s with a grave face; it’s clear he has something to say, and it’s not just ‘How do you?’ His friend Humphrey Monmouth is by his side, a stalwart of the Drapers’ Guild. ‘William Tyndale is still in prison, and likely to be killed as I hear.’ Packington hesitates, but clearly he must speak. ‘I think of him in durance, as we enjoy our feast. What will you do for him, Thomas Cromwell?’

Packington is a gospel man, a reformer, one of his oldest friends. As a friend, he lays his difficulties before him: he himself cannot negotiate with the authorities in the Low Countries, he needs Henry’s permission. And Henry will not grant it, as Tyndale would never give him a good opinion in the matter of his divorce. Like Martin Luther, Tyndale believes Henry’s marriage to Katherine is valid, and no consideration of policy will sway him. You would think he would bend, to suit the King of England, to make a friend of him; but Tyndale is an obdurate man, plain and stubborn as a boulder.

‘So must our brother burn? This is what you are telling me? A merry Christmas to you, Master Secretary.’ He turns away. ‘They say money follows you these days like a spaniel his master.’

He puts a hand on his arm: ‘Rob –’ Then pulls back, says heartily, ‘They’re not wrong.’

He knows what his friend thinks. Master Secretary is so powerful that he can move the king’s conscience; and if he can, why does he not, unless he is too busy lining his pocket? He wants to ask, give me a day off, in Christ’s name.

Monmouth says, ‘You have not forgot our brothers whom Thomas More burned? And those he hounded to death? Those broken by months in prison?’

‘He didn’t break you. You lived to see More come down.’

‘But his arm reached out of his grave,’ Packington says. ‘More had men everywhere, all about Tyndale. It was More’s agents who betrayed him. If you cannot move the king, perhaps the queen can?’

‘The queen needs help herself. And if you want to help her, tell your wives to curb their poisoned tongues.’

He moves away. Rafe’s children – his stepchildren rather – are crying out to him to come and see their disguises. But the conversation, broken off, leaves a sour taste in his mouth that persists throughout the festival. Anthony pursues him with jokes, but he turns his eyes to the child dressed as an angel: it is Rafe’s step-daughter, the elder child of his wife Helen. She is wearing the peacock wings he made long ago for Grace.

Long ago? It is not ten years, not nearly ten. The feathers’ eyes gleam; the day is dark, but banks of candles pick out threads of gold, the scarlet splash of holly berries bound on the wall, the points of the silver star. That night, as snowflakes float to earth, Gregory asks him, ‘Where do the dead live now? Do we have Purgatory or not? They say it still exists, but no one knows where. They say we do no good by praying for the suffering souls. We cannot pray them out, as once we could.’

When his family died, he had done everything as was the custom in those days: offerings, masses. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘The king will not allow preaching on Purgatory, it is so contentious. You can talk to Archbishop Cranmer.’ A twist of his mouth. ‘He’ll tell you the latest thinking.’

‘I take it very hard if I cannot pray for my mother. Or if they let me pray but say I am wasting my breath because nobody hears me.’

Imagine the silence now, in that place which is no-place, that anteroom to God where each hour is ten thousand years long. Once you imagined the souls held in a great net, a web spun by God, held safe till their release into his radiance. But if the net is cut and the web broken, do they spill into freezing space, each year falling further into silence, until there is no trace of them at all?

He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you.

Four days later, Eustache Chapuys, the ambassador of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, arrives in Stepney. He comes in to a warm welcome from the household, who approach him and wish him well in Latin and French. Chapuys is a Savoyard, speaks some Spanish but English hardly at all, though he is beginning to understand more than he speaks.

Back in the city their two households have been fraternising since a gusty autumn night when a fire started at the ambassador’s lodging, and his wailing attendants, soot-blackened and carrying all they could salvage, came banging at the gates of Austin Friars. The ambassador lost his furniture and his wardrobe; one could not help laughing at the sight of him, wrapped in a scorched curtain with only a shirt beneath. His entourage spent the night on pallets on the floor of the hall, brother-in-law John Williamson having quit his chamber to allow the unexpected dignitary to occupy it. Next day the ambassador suffered the embarrassment of going into company in borrowed clothes too large for him; it was either that, or take the Cromwell livery, a spectacle from which an ambassador’s career could never recover. He had set tailors to work at once. ‘I don’t know where we will replicate that violent flame-coloured silk you favour. But I’ll put the word out in Venice.’ Next day, he and Chapuys had walked over the ground together, under the blackened beams. The ambassador gave a low moan as he stirred with a stick the wet black sludge that had been his official papers. ‘Do you think,’ he had said, glancing up, ‘that the Boleyns did this?’

The ambassador has never acknowledged Anne Boleyn, never been presented to her; he must forgo that pleasure, Henry has decreed, till he is ready to kiss her hand and call her queen. His allegiance is to the other queen, the exile at Kimbolton; but Henry says, Cromwell, sometime we will practise to bring Chapuys face to face with the truth. I should like to see what he would do, the king says, if he were put in Anne’s path and could not avoid her.

Today the ambassador is wearing a startling hat. More like the sort that George Boleyn sports, than a hat for a grave councillor. ‘What do you think, Cremuel?’ He tilts it.

‘Very becoming. I must get one of those.’

‘Allow me to present you…’ Chapuys removes it from his head with a flourish, then reconsiders. ‘No, it would not fit your big head. I shall have one made for you.’ He takes his arm. ‘Mon cher, your household is a delight as always. But may we talk apart?’

In a private room, the ambassador attacks. ‘They say that the king will command priests to marry.’

He is caught off-guard; but he does not mean to be jolted out of his good humour. ‘There is some merit in it, for the avoiding of hypocrisy. But I can be clear with you, that will not happen. The king will not hear of it.’ He looks closely at Chapuys; has he perhaps heard that Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, has a secret wife? Surely he cannot know. If he did, he would denounce and ruin him. They hate Thomas Cranmer, these so-called Catholics, almost as much as they hate Thomas Cromwell. He indicates the best chair to the ambassador. ‘Will you not sit and take a glass of claret?’

But Chapuys will not be diverted. ‘I hear you are going to put all the monks and nuns out on the road.’

‘From whom did you hear that?’

‘From the mouths of the king’s own subjects.’

‘Listen to me, Monsieur. As my commissioners go about, I hear little from the monks but petitions to be let go. And nuns too, they cannot endure their bondage, they come to my men weeping and asking for their liberty. I have it in hand to pension the monks, or find them useful posts. If they are scholars they can be given stipends. If they are ordained priests, the parishes will use them. And the money the monks are sitting on, I should like to see some of that go to the parish priests. I do not know how it may be in your country, but some benefices only bring a man four or five shillings a year. Who will take on a cure of souls, for a sum that won’t pay for his firewood? And when I have got the clergy an income they can live on, I mean to make each priest mentor to a poor scholar, so he helps him through the university. The next generation of priests will be learned, and they will instruct in their turn. Tell your master this. Tell him I mean good religion to increase, not wither.’

But Chapuys turns away. He is plucking nervously at his sleeve and his words fall over each other. ‘I do not tell my master lies. I tell him what I see. I see a restless population, Cremuel, I see discontent, I see misery; I see famine, before the spring. You are buying corn from Flanders. Be thankful to the Emperor that he allows his territories to feed yours. That trade could be stopped, you know.’

‘What would he gain by starving my countrymen?’

‘He would gain this, that they would see how evilly they are governed, and how opprobrious are the king’s proceedings. What are your envoys doing with the German princes? Talk, talk, talk, month after month. I know they hope to conclude some treaty with the Lutherans and import their practices here.’

‘The king will not have the form of the Mass varied. He is clear on it.’

‘Yet,’ Chapuys stabs a finger in the air, ‘the heretic Melanchthon has dedicated a book to him! You cannot hide a book, can you? No, deny it as you will, Henry will end by abolishing half the sacraments and making common cause with these heretics, on purpose to upset my master, who is their emperor and overlord. Henry begins by mocking the Pope, and he will end up embracing the devil.’

‘You appear to know him better than I do. Henry, I mean. Not the devil.’

He is amazed by the turn the conversation has taken. It is only ten days since he enjoyed a genial supper with the ambassador, and Chapuys assured him that the Emperor’s only thought was for the realm’s tranquillity. There was no talk of blockades then, no talk of starving England. ‘Eustache,’ he says, ‘what has happened?’

Chapuys sits down abruptly, slumps forward with his elbows on his knees. His hat sinks lower, till he removes it altogether, and puts it on the table; not without a glance of regret. ‘Thomas, I have heard from Kimbolton. They say the queen cannot keep her food down, she cannot even take water. In six nights she has not slept two hours together.’ Chapuys grinds his fists into his eyes. ‘I fear she cannot live more than a day or two. I do not want her to die alone, without anyone who loves her. I fear the king will not let me go. Will you let me go?’

The man’s grief touches him; it comes from the heart, it is beyond his remit as envoy. ‘We’ll go to Greenwich and ask him,’ he says. ‘This very day. We’ll go now. Put your hat back on.’

On the barge he says, ‘That’s a thaw wind.’ Chapuys seems not to appreciate it. He huddles into himself, wrapped in layers of lambskin.

‘The king intended to joust today,’ he says.

Chapuys sniffs, ‘In the snow?’

‘He can have the field cleared.’

‘No doubt by toiling monks.’

He has to laugh, at the ambassador’s tenacity. ‘We must hope the sport went forward, then Henry will be in a good humour. He has just come from the little princess at Eltham. You must ask after her health. And you must make her a New Year’s gift, have you thought of it?’

The ambassador glowers at him. All he would give Elizabeth is a knock on the head.

‘I am glad we are not iced up. Sometimes we cannot use the river for weeks. Have you seen it when it’s frozen over?’ No reply. ‘Katherine is strong, you know. If there is no more snow and the king permits, you can ride tomorrow. She has been ill before and she has regained her ground. You will find her sitting up in bed and asking why you’ve come.’

‘Why are you chattering?’ Chapuys says gloomily. ‘It is not like you.’

Why indeed? If Katherine dies it will be a great thing for England. Charles may be her fond nephew but he will not keep up a quarrel for a dead woman. The threat of war will vanish. It will be a new era. Only he hopes she does not suffer. There would be no point in that.

They tie up at the king’s landing stage. Chapuys says, ‘Your winters are so long. I wish I was still a young man in Italy.’

The snow is banked up on the quay, the fields are still blanketed. The ambassador received his education in Turin. You don’t get this sort of wind there, shrieking around the towers like a soul in torment. ‘You forget the swamps and the bad air, don’t you?’ he says. ‘I’m like you, I only remember the sunshine.’ He puts a hand under the ambassador’s elbow to steer him on to dry land. Chapuys himself keeps a firm hold on his hat. Its tassels are damp and drooping, and the ambassador himself looks as if he might cry.

Harry Norris is the gentleman who greets them. ‘Ah, “gentle Norris”,’ Chapuys whispers. ‘One could do worse.’

Norris is, as always, the pattern of courtesy. ‘We ran a few courses,’ he says, in answer to enquiry. ‘His Majesty had the best of it. You will find him cheerful. Now we are getting dressed for the masque.’

He never sees Norris but he remembers Wolsey stumbling from his own home before the king’s men, fleeing to a cold empty house at Esher: the cardinal kneeling in the mud and gibbering his thanks, because the king by way of Norris had sent him a token of goodwill. Wolsey was kneeling to thank God, but it looked as if he were kneeling to Norris. It doesn’t matter how Norris oils around him now; he can never wipe that scene from his mind’s eye.

Inside the palace, a roaring heat, stampeding feet; musicians toting their instruments, upper servants bawling brutish orders at lower. When the king comes out to greet them, it is with the French ambassador at his side. Chapuys is taken aback. An effusive greeting is de rigueur; kiss-kiss. How smoothly, easily, Chapuys has slipped back into his persona; with what a courteous flourish he makes his reverence to His Majesty. Such a practised diplomat can even cajole his stiff knee joints; not for the first time, Chapuys reminds him of a dancing master. The remarkable hat he holds by his side.

‘Merry Christmas, ambassador,’ the king says. He adds hopefully, ‘The French have already made me great gifts.’

‘And the Emperor’s gifts will be with Your Majesty at New Year,’ Chapuys boasts. ‘You will find them even more magnificent.’

The French ambassador eyes him. ‘Merry Christmas, Cremuel. Not bowling today?’

‘Today I am at your disposal, Monsieur.’

‘I take my leave,’ the Frenchman says. He looks sardonic; the king has already linked his arm with Chapuys’s. ‘Majesty, may I assure you in parting that my master King François has knit his heart to yours?’ His glance sweeps over Chapuys. ‘With the friendship of France, you may be assured you will reign unmolested, and need no longer fear Rome.’

‘Unmolested?’ he says: he, Cromwell. ‘Well, ambassador, that’s gracious of you.’

The Frenchman skims by him with a curt nod. Chapuys stiffens as French brocade grazes his own person; snatches his hat away, as if to save it from contamination. ‘Shall I hold that for you?’ Norris whispers.

But Chapuys has fastened his attention on the king. ‘Katherine the queen…’ he begins.

‘The Dowager Princess of Wales,’ Henry says sternly. ‘Yes, I hear the old woman is off her food again. Is that what you’re here about?’

Harry Norris whispers, ‘I have to dress up as a Moor. Will you excuse me, Mr Secretary?’

‘Gladly, in this case,’ he says. Norris melts away. For the next ten minutes he has to stand and hear the king lying fluently. The French, he says, have made him great promises, all of which he believes. The Duke of Milan is dead, both Charles and Francis claim the duchy, and unless they can resolve it there will be war. Of course, he is always a friend to the Emperor, but the French have promised him towns, they have promised him castles, a seaport even, so in duty to the commonweal he must think seriously about a formal alliance. However, he knows the Emperor has it in his power to make offers as good, if not better…

‘I will not dissemble with you,’ Henry tells Chapuys. ‘As an Englishman, I am always straight in my dealings. An Englishman never lies nor deceives, even for his own profit.’

‘It seems,’ Chapuys snaps, ‘that you are too good to live. If you cannot mind your country’s interests, I must mind them for you. They will not give you territory, whatever they say. May I remind you what poor friends the French have been to you these last months while you have not been able to feed your people? If it were not for the shipments of grain my master permits, your subjects would be corpses piled from here to the Scots border.’

Some exaggeration there. Lucky that Henry is in holiday humour. He likes feasts, pastimes, an hour in the lists, a masque in prospect; he likes even more the idea that his former wife is lying in the fens gasping her last. ‘Come, Chapuys,’ he says. ‘We will have private conference in my chamber.’ He draws the ambassador with him and, over his head, winks.

But Chapuys stops dead. The king must stop too. ‘Majesty, we can speak of this hereafter. My mission now brooks no delay. I beg for permission to ride where the…where Katherine is. And I implore you to allow her daughter to see her. It may be for the last time.’

‘Oh, I could not be moving the Lady Mary around without my council’s advice. And I see no hope of convening them today. The roads, you know. As for you, how do you propose to travel? Have you wings?’ The king chuckles. He reasserts his grip and bears the ambassador away. A door closes. He, Cromwell, stands glaring at it. What further lies will be told behind it? Chapuys will have to bargain his mother’s bones away to match these great offers Henry claims he has from the French.

He thinks, what would the cardinal do? Wolsey used to say, ‘Never let me hear you claim, “You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.” Find out.’

So. He is going to think of some reason to follow them in there. But here is Norris blocking his path. In his Moorish drapery, his face blacked, he is playful, smiling, but still vigilant. Prime Christmas game: let’s fuck about with Cromwell. He is about to spin away Norris by his silken shoulder, when a small dragon comes waggling along. ‘Who is in that dragon?’ he asks.

Norris snorts. ‘Francis Weston.’ He pushes back his woolly wig to reveal his noble forehead. ‘Said dragon is going to waggle waggle to the queen’s apartments to beg for sweetmeats.’

He grins. ‘You sound bitter, Harry Norris.’

Why would he not? He’s served his time at the queen’s door. On her threshold.

Norris says, ‘She will play with him and pat his little rump. She’s fond of puppy dogs.’

‘Did you find out who killed Purkoy?’

‘Don’t say that,’ the Moor beseeches. ‘It was an accident.’

At his elbow, causing him to turn, is William Brereton. ‘Where’s that thrice-blasted dragon?’ he enquires. ‘I’m supposed to get after it.’

Brereton is dressed as an antique huntsman, wearing the skin of one of his victims. ‘Is that real leopard skin, William? Where did you catch it, up in Chester?’ He feels it critically. Brereton seems to be naked beneath it. ‘Is that proper?’ he asks.

Brereton snarls, ‘It’s the season of licence. If you were forced to impersonate an antique hunter, would you wear a jerkin?’

‘As long as the queen is not treated to the sight of your attributi.’

The Moor giggles. ‘He wouldn’t be showing her anything she hasn’t seen.’

He raises an eyebrow. ‘Has she?’

Norris blushes easily, for a Moor. ‘You know what I meant. Not William’s. The king’s.’

He holds up a hand. ‘Please take note, I am not the one who introduced this topic. By the way, the dragon went in that direction.’

He remembers last year, Brereton swaggering through Whitehall, whistling like a stable boy; breaking off to say to him, ‘I hear the king, when he does not like the papers you bring in to him, knocks you well about the pate.’

You’ll be knocked, he had said to himself. Something in this man makes him feel he is a boy again, a sullen belligerent little ruffian fighting on the riverbank at Putney. He has heard it before, this rumour put about to demean him. Anyone who knows Henry knows it is impossible. He is the first gentleman of Europe, his courtesy unflawed. If he wants someone stricken, he employs a subject to do it; he would not sully his own hand. It is true they sometimes disagree. But if Henry were to touch him, he would walk away. There are princes in Europe who want him. They make him offers; he could have castles.

Now he watches Brereton, as he heads towards the queen’s suite, bow slung over his furry shoulder. He turns to speak to Norris, but his voice is drowned out by a metallic clatter, a clash as of guardsmen: shouts of ‘Make way for my lord the Duke of Suffolk.’

The duke’s upper body is still armed; perhaps he has been out there in the yard, jousting by himself. His large face is flushed, his beard – more impressive year on year – spreads over his breastplate. The valiant Moor steps forward to say, ‘His Majesty is in conference with –’ but Brandon knocks him aside, as if he were on a crusade.

He, Cromwell, follows on the duke’s heels. If he had a net, he would drop it over him. Brandon bangs once on the king’s door with his fist, then throws it open before him. ‘Leave what you’re doing, Majesty. You want to hear this, by God. You’re quit of the old lady. She is on her deathbed. You will soon be a widower. Then you can get rid of the other one, and marry into France, by God, and lay your hands on Normandy as dowry…’ He notices Chapuys. ‘Oh. Ambassador. Well, you can take yourself off. No use you staying for scraps. Go home and make your own Christmas, we don’t want you here.’

Henry has turned white. ‘Think what you are saying.’ He approaches Brandon as if he might knock him down; which, if he had a poleaxe, he could. ‘My wife is carrying a child. I am lawfully married.’

‘Oh.’ Charles blows out his cheeks. ‘Yes, as far as that goes. But I thought you said –’

He, Cromwell, hurls himself towards the duke. Where in the name of Satan’s sister did Charles get this notion? Marry into France? It must be the king’s plan, as Brandon has none of his own. It looks as if Henry is carrying on two foreign policies: one he knows about and one he doesn’t. He takes a grip on Brandon. He is a head shorter. He doesn’t think he can move half a ton of idiot, still padded and partly armed. But it seems he can, he can move him fast, fast, and try to get him out of earshot of the ambassador, whose face is astonished. Only when he has propelled Brandon across the presence chamber does he stop and demand, ‘Suffolk, where do you get this from?’

‘Ah, we noble lords know more than you do. The king makes plain to us his real intentions. You think you know all his secrets, but you are mistaken, Cromwell.’

‘You heard what he said. Anne is carrying his child. You are mad if you think he will turn her out now.’

‘He’s mad if he thinks it’s his.’

‘What?’ He pulls back from Brandon as if the breastplate were hot. ‘If you know anything against the queen’s honour, you are bound as a subject to speak plainly.’

Brandon wrenches his arm away. ‘I spoke plain before and look where it got me. I told him about her and Wyatt, and he kicked me out of the court and back to the east country.’

‘Drag Wyatt into this, and I’ll kick you to China.’

The duke’s face is congested with rage. How has it come to this? Only weeks ago, Brandon was asking him to be godfather to the son he has with his new little wife. But now the duke snarls, ‘Get back to your abacus, Cromwell. You are only for fetching in money, when it comes to the affairs of nations you cannot deal, you are a common man of no status, and the king himself says so, you are not fit to talk to princes.’

Brandon’s hand in his chest, shoving him back: once again, the duke is making for the king’s person. It is Chapuys, frozen in dignity and sorrow, who imposes some order, stepping between the king and the heaving, boiling mass of the duke. ‘I take my leave, Majesty. As always I find you a most gracious prince. If I am in time, as I trust I shall be, my master will be consoled to have news of his aunt’s final hours from the hand of his own envoy.’

‘I can do no less,’ Henry says, sobered. ‘God speed.’

‘I ride at first light,’ Chapuys tells him; rapidly, they walk away, through the morris men and the bobbing hobby horses, through a merman and his shoal, skirting round a castle that rumbles towards them, painted masonry on oiled wheels.

Outside on the quay Chapuys turns to him. Within his mind, oiled wheels must be revolving; what he has heard about the woman he calls the concubine, he will already be coding into dispatches. They cannot pretend between them that he did not hear; when Brandon bawls, trees fall in Germany. It would not be surprising if the ambassador were cawing in triumph: not at the thought of a French marriage, to be sure, but at the thought of Anne’s eclipse.

But Chapuys keeps his countenance; he is very pale, very earnest. ‘Cremuel,’ he says, ‘I note the duke’s comments. About your person. About your position.’ He clears his throat. ‘For what it is worth, I am myself a man of humble origins. Though not perhaps so low…’

He knows Chapuys’s history. His people are petty lawyers, two generations away from the soil.

‘And again for what it is worth, I believe you are fit to deal. I would back you in any assemblage this side of Heaven. You are an eloquent and learned man. If I wanted an advocate to argue for my life, I would give you the brief.’

‘You dazzle me, Eustache.’

‘Go back to Henry. Move him that the princess might see her mother. A dying woman, what policy can it hurt, what interest…’ One angry, dry sob breaks out of the poor man’s throat. In a moment he recovers himself. He removes his hat, stares at it, as if he cannot think where he got it. ‘I do not think I should wear this hat,’ he says. ‘It is more a Christmas hat, would you say? Still, I am loath to lose it, it is quite unique.’

‘Give it to me. I will have it sent to your house and you can wear it on your return.’ When you are out of mourning, he thinks. ‘Look…I will not raise your hopes about Mary.’

‘You being an Englishman, who never lies or deceives.’ Chapuys gives a bark of laughter. ‘Jesu-Maria!’

‘The king will not permit any meeting that could strengthen Mary’s spirit of disobedience.’

‘Even if her mother is on her deathbed?’

‘Especially then. We do not wants oaths, deathbed promises. You see that?’

He speaks to his bargemaster: I shall stay here and see how it goes with the dragon, whether he eats the hunter or what. Convey the ambassador up to London, he must prepare for a journey. ‘But how will you get back yourself?’ Chapuys says.

‘Crawl, if Brandon has his way.’ He puts his hand on the little man’s shoulder. Says softly, ‘This clears the way, you know? For an alliance with your master. Which will be very good for England and her trade, and is what you and I both want. Katherine has come between us.’

‘And what about the French marriage?’

‘There will be no French marriage. It is a fairy tale. Go. It will be dark in an hour. I hope you rest tonight.’

Already, twilight steals across the Thames; there are crepuscular deeps in the lapping waves, and a blue dusk creeps along the banks. He says to one of the boatmen, do you think the roads north will be open? God help me, sir, the man says: I only know the river, and anyway I’ve never stirred north of Enfield.

When he arrives back in Stepney torchlight spills out of the house, and the singing children, in a state of high excitement, are carolling in the garden; dogs are barking, black shapes bobbing against the snow, and a dozen mounds, ghostly white, tower over the frozen hedges. One, taller than the rest, wears a mitre; it has a stub of blue-tinged carrot for its nose, and a smaller stub for its cock. Gregory pitches towards him, a swirl of excitement: ‘Look, sir, we have made the Pope out of snow.’

‘First we made the Pope.’ The glowing face beside him belongs to Dick Purser, the boy who keeps the watchdogs. ‘We made the Pope, sir, and then he looked harmless by himself and so we made a set of cardinals. Do you like them?’

His kitchen boys swarm about him, frosted and dripping. The whole household has turned out, or at least everyone under thirty. They have lit a bonfire – well away from the snowmen – and appear to be dancing around it, led by his boy Christophe.

Gregory gets his breath. ‘We only did it for the better setting forth of the king’s supremacy. I do not think it is wrong, because we can blow a trumpet then kick them flat, and cousin Richard said we may, and he himself moulded the Pope’s head, and Master Wriothesley who was here looking for you thrust in the Pope’s little member and laughed at it.’

‘Such children you are!’ he says. ‘I like them very much. We will have the fanfare tomorrow when there’s more light, shall we?’

‘And can we fire a cannon?’

‘Where would I get a cannon?’

‘Speak to the king, sir.’ Gregory is laughing; he knows the cannon is a step too far.

Dick Purser’s sharp eye has fallen on the ambassador’s hat. ‘Might we borrow that? We have done ill with the Pope’s tiara, because we did not know how it should look.’

He spins the hat in his hand. ‘You’re right, this is more the sort of thing Farnese wears. But no. This hat is a sacred charge. I have to answer to the Emperor for it. Now, let me go,’ he says, laughing, ‘I must write letters, we look for great changes soon.’

‘Stephen Vaughan is here,’ Gregory says.

‘Is he? Ah. Good. I have a use for him.’

He tramps towards the house, firelight licking his heels. ‘Pity Master Vaughan,’ Gregory says. ‘I think he came for his supper.’

‘Stephen!’ A hasty embrace. ‘No time,’ he says. ‘Katherine is dying.’

‘What?’ his friend says. ‘I heard nothing of this in Antwerp.’

Vaughan is always in transit. He is about to be in transit again. He is Cromwell’s servant, he is the king’s servant, he is the king’s eyes and ears across the Narrow Sea; nothing passes with the Flemish merchants or the guilds at Calais that Stephen does not know and report. ‘I am bound to say, Master Secretary, you keep a disorderly household. One might as well eat supper in a field.’

‘You are in a field,’ he says. ‘More or less. Or you soon will be. You must get on the road.’

‘But I am just off the ship!’

This is how Stephen manifests his friendship: constant complaints, carping and grumbles. He turns and issues orders: feed Vaughan, water Vaughan, bed down Vaughan, have a good horse ready to go at dawn. ‘Don’t fret, you can sleep the night. Then you must escort Chapuys up to Kimbolton. You speak the languages, Stephen! Nothing must pass in French or Spanish or Latin, but I know every word.’

‘Ah. I see.’ Stephen draws his person together.

‘Because I think that if Katherine dies, Mary will be desperate to take ship for the Emperor’s domains. He is her cousin, after all, and though she should not trust him, she cannot be convinced of that. And we can hardly chain her to the wall.’

‘Keep her up-country. Keep her where there is no port in two days’ ride.’

‘If Chapuys saw an exit for her, she would fly on the wind and set to sea in a sieve.’

‘Thomas.’ Vaughan, a grave man, lays a hand upon him. ‘What is all this agitation? It is not like you. You are afraid of being bested by a little girl?’

He would like to tell Vaughan what has passed, but how to convey the texture of it: the smoothness of Henry’s lies, the solid weight of Brandon when he shoved him, dragged him, manhandled him away from the king; the raw wetness of the wind on his face, the taste of blood in his mouth. It will always be like this, he thinks. It will go on being like this. Advent, Lent, Whitsuntide. ‘Look,’ he sighs, ‘I must go and write to Stephen Gardiner in France. If this is the end of Katherine, I must make sure he knows it from me.’

‘No more grovelling to Frenchmen for our salvation,’ Stephen says. Is that a grin? It is a wolfish one. Stephen is a merchant, and he values the Low Countries trade. When relations with the Emperor founder, England runs out of money. When the Emperor is on our side, we grow rich. ‘We can patch all the quarrels,’ Stephen says. ‘Katherine was the cause of all. Her nephew will be as relieved as we are. He never wanted to invade us. And now he has enough to do with Milan. Let him scrap with the French if he must. Our king will be free. A free hand to do as he likes.’

That is what worries me, he thinks. This free hand. He makes his apologies to Stephen. Vaughan stops him. ‘Thomas. You will wreck yourself with this pace you keep up. Do you ever consider, that half your years be spent?’

‘Half? Stephen, I am fifty.’

‘I forget.’ A little laugh. ‘Fifty already? I don’t know you have changed much since ever I knew you.’

‘That is an illusion,’ he says. ‘But I promise to take a rest, when you do.’

In his cabinet it is warm. He closes the shutters, insulating himself from the white glare without. He sits down to write to Gardiner, commending him. The king is very pleased with his embassy to France. He is sending funds.

He puts down his pen. Whatever possessed Charles Brandon? He knows there has been gossip that Anne’s child is not Henry’s. There has even been gossip that she is not with child at all, only pretending; and it is true she seems very uncertain when it will be born. But he had thought these rumours were blowing from France into England; and what would they know at the French court? He has dismissed it as empty malice. It is what Anne attracts; that is her misfortune, or one of them.

Under his hand there is a letter from Calais, from Lord Lisle. He feels exhausted at the thought of it. Lisle is telling him all about his Christmas Day, from his first waking in the frosty dawn. At some point in the festivities, Lord Lisle received an insult: the Mayor of Calais kept him waiting. So he, in his turn, kept the Mayor waiting…and now both parties are writing to him: which is more important, Master Secretary, governor or mayor? Say it is me, say it is me!

Arthur Lord Lisle is the pleasantest man in the world; except, clearly, when the mayor cuts across him. But he is in debt to the king and has not paid a penny in seven years. He should perhaps do something about that; the treasurer of the king’s chamber has sent him a note about it. And on that subject…Harry Norris, by virtue of his position in the king’s immediate household, by some custom the origin and use of which he has never fathomed, is in charge of the secret funds which the king has stashed in his principal houses, for use in some exigency; it is not clear what would free up these funds, or where they come from, or how much coin is stored, or who has access if Norris were to…if Norris were to be off duty when the need arose. Or if Norris were to meet with some accident. Once again he lays down his quill. He starts to imagine accidents. He puts his head in his hands, fingertips over tired eyes. He sees Norris flying from his horse. Sees Norris tumbled in the mud. Says to himself, ‘Get back to your abacus, Cromwell.’

His New Year gifts have started to come in already. A supporter in Ireland has sent him a roll of white Irish blankets and a flask of aqua vitae. He would like to swaddle himself in the blankets, drain the flask, roll over on the floor and sleep.

Ireland is quiet this Christmas, in greater peace than she has seen for forty years. Mainly he has brought this about by hanging people. Not many: just the right ones. It’s an art, a necessary art; the Irish chiefs have been begging the Emperor to use the country as a landing stage, for his invasion of England.

He takes a breath. Lisle, mayor, insults, Lisle. Calais, Dublin, secret funds. He wants Chapuys to get to Kimbolton in time. But he doesn’t want Katherine to rally. You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.

He sifts his papers. More chronicles of monks who sit in the alehouse all night and come reeling to the cloister at dawn; more priors found under hedges with prostitutes; more prayers, more pleas; tales of neglectful clergy who won’t christen children or bury the dead. He sweeps them away. Enough. A stranger writes to him – an old man judging by his hand – to say that the conversion of the Mohammedans is imminent. But what sort of church can we offer them? Unless there is sweeping change soon, the letter says, the heathens will be in more darkness than before. And you are Vicar General, Master Cromwell, you are the king’s vicegerent: what are you going to do about it?

He wonders, does the Turk work his people as hard as Henry works me? If I had been born an infidel I could have been a pirate. I could have sailed the Middle Sea.

As he turns up the next paper he almost laughs; some hand has laid before him a fat land grant, from the king to Charles Brandon. It is pastureland and woodland, furze and heath, and the manors sprinkled through it: Harry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, has made over this land to the Crown in part payment of his massive debts. Harry Percy, he thinks: I told him I would bring him down for his part in destroying Wolsey. And by God, I have not broken sweat; with his manner of life he has destroyed himself. It only remains to take his earldom away, as I swore I would.

The door opens, discreetly; it is Rafe Sadler. He looks up, surprised. ‘You should be with your household.’

‘I heard you had been at court, sir. I thought there might be letters to write.’

‘Go through these, but not tonight.’ He bundles over the papers for the grants. ‘Brandon may not get many such presents this New Year.’ He tells Rafe what has passed: Suffolk’s outburst, Chapuys’s amazed face. He does not tell him what Suffolk said, about how he was not fit to deal in the affairs of his betters; he shakes his head and says, ‘Charles Brandon, I was looking at him today…you know how he used to be cried up as a handsome fellow? The king’s own sister fell in love with him. But now, that big slab face of his…he has no more grace than a dripping pan.’

Rafe pulls up a low stool and sits thinking, forearms laid on the desk, his head pillowed on them. They are used to each other’s silent company. He inches a candle closer and frowns at some more papers, makes marginal marks. The king’s face rises before him: not Henry as he was today, but Henry as he was at Wolf Hall, coming from the garden, his expression dazed, drops of rain on his jacket: and the pale circle of Jane Seymour’s face by his side.

After a time he glances at Rafe: ‘Are you all right down there, little man?’

Rafe says, ‘This house always smells of apples.’

It is true; Great Place is set among orchards, and the summer seems to linger in the garrets where the fruit is stored. At Austin Friars the gardens are raw, saplings bound to stakes. But this is an old house; it was a cottage once, but it was built up for his own use by Sir Henry Colet, father of the learned Dean of St Paul’s. When Sir Henry died Lady Christian lived out her days here, and then by Sir Henry’s will the house devolved to the Mercers’ Guild. He holds it on a fifty-year sub-lease, which should see him out, and Gregory in. Gregory’s children can grow up wrapped in the aroma of baking, of honey and sliced apples, raisins and cloves. He says, ‘Rafe. I must get Gregory married.’

‘I’ll make a memorandum,’ Rafe says, and laughs.

A year ago, Rafe could not laugh. Thomas, his first child, had lived only a day or two after he was baptised. Rafe took it like a Christian man, but it sobered him, and he was a sober young man already. Helen had children by her first husband, but had never lost one; she took it badly. Yet this year, after a long and harsh labour that frightened her, she has another son in the cradle, and they have called him Thomas too. May it bring him better fortune than his brother; reluctant as he was to come out and face the world, he seems strong, and Rafe has relaxed into fatherhood.

‘Sir,’ Rafe says. ‘I have been wanting to ask. Is that your new hat?’

‘No,’ he says gravely. ‘It is the hat of the ambassador of Spain and the Empire. Would you like to try it on?’

A commotion at the door. It is Christophe. He cannot enter in the ordinary way; he treats doors as his foe. His face is still black from the bonfire. ‘A woman is here for you, sir. Very urgent. She will not be sent away.’

‘What manner of woman?’

‘Quite old. But not so old you would kick her downstairs. Not on a cold night like this.’

‘Oh, for shame,’ he says. ‘Wash your face, Christophe.’ He turns to Rafe. ‘An unknown woman. Am I inky?’

‘You’ll do.’

In his great hall, waiting for him by the light of sconces, a lady who lifts her veil and speaks to him in Castilian: Maria, Lady Willoughby, once Maria de Salinas. He is aghast: how is this possible, he asks, she has come alone from her house in London, at night, in the snow?

She cuts him short. ‘I come to you in desperation. I cannot get to the king. There is no time to lose. I must have a pass. You must give me a paper. Or when I arrive at Kimbolton they will not let me in.’

But he switches her to English; in any dealings with Katherine’s friends, he wants witnesses. ‘My lady, you cannot travel in this weather.’

‘Here.’ She fumbles for a letter. ‘Read this, it is from the queen’s physician, his own hand. My mistress is in pain and afraid and alone.’

He takes the paper. Some twenty-five years ago, when Katherine’s entourage had first arrived in England, Thomas More had described them as hunchbacked pygmies, refugees from Hell. He cannot comment; he was still out of England himself, and far from the court, but it sounds like one of More’s poetic exaggerations. This lady came a little later; she was Katherine’s favourite; only her marriage to an Englishman had parted them. She was beautiful then, and now, a widow, she is beautiful still; she knows it and will use it, even when she is shrinking with misery and blue with cold. She swirls out of her cloak, and gives it to Rafe Sadler, as if he stood there for that purpose. She crosses the room and takes his hands. ‘Mother of God, Thomas Cromwell, let me go. You will not refuse me this.’

He glances at Rafe. The boy is as immune to Spanish passion as he might be to a wet dog buffeting the door. ‘You must understand, Lady Willoughby,’ Rafe says coolly, ‘that this is a family matter, not even a council matter. You may beseech Master Secretary all you like, but it is for the king to say who visits the dowager.’

‘Look, my lady,’ he says. ‘The weather is filthy. Even if it thaws tonight, it will be worse up-country. I cannot guarantee your safety, even if I give you an escort. You might fall from your horse.’

‘I will walk there!’ she says. ‘How will you stop me, Master Secretary? Keep me in chains? Will you have your black-faced peasant tie me up and lock me in a closet till the queen is dead?’

‘You are ridiculous, madam,’ Rafe says. He seems to feel some need to step in and protect him, Cromwell, from women’s wiles. ‘It is as Master Secretary says. You cannot ride in this weather. You are no longer young.’

Under her breath she utters a prayer, or curse. ‘Thank you for your gallant reminder, Master Sadler, without your advice I might have thought myself sixteen. Ah, do you see, I am an Englishwoman now! I know how to say the opposite of what I mean.’ A shadow of calculation crosses her face. ‘The cardinal would have let me go.’

‘Then what a pity he is not here to tell us about it.’ But he takes the cloak from Rafe, places it around her shoulders. ‘Go, then. I see you are determined. Chapuys is riding up there with a pass, so perhaps…’

‘I am sworn to be on the road at dawn. God turn his back on me, if I am not. I shall outpace Chapuys, he is not impelled as I am.’

‘Even if you get there…it is a harsh country and the roads barely worth the name. You might reach the castle itself and have a fall. Even under the walls.’

‘What?’ she says. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘Bedingfield has his orders. But he could not leave a lady in a snowdrift.’

She kisses him. ‘Thomas Cromwell. God and the Emperor will requite you.’

He nods. ‘I trust in God.’

She sweeps out. They can hear her voice raised in enquiry: ‘What are these strange mounds of snow?’

‘I hope they do not tell her,’ he says to Rafe. ‘She is a papist.’

‘One never kisses me like that,’ Christophe complains.

‘Perhaps if you washed your face,’ he says. He looks keenly at Rafe. ‘You would not have let her go.’

‘I would not,’ Rafe says stiffly. ‘The ruse would not have occurred to me. And even if it had…no, I would not, I would have been afraid to cross the king.’

‘That’s why you will thrive and live to be old.’ He shrugs. ‘She will ride. Chapuys will ride. And Stephen Vaughan will watch them both. Are you coming tomorrow morning? Bring Helen and her daughters. Not the baby, it’s too cold. We are going to have a fanfare, Gregory says, and then trample the papal court into the ground.’

‘She loved the wings,’ Rafe says. ‘Our little girl. She wants to know if she can wear them every year.’

‘I don’t see why not. Till Gregory has a daughter big enough.’

They embrace. ‘Try to sleep, sir.’

He knows Brandon’s words will go round in his head when that head touches the pillow. ‘When it comes to the affairs of nations you cannot deal, you are not fit to talk to princes.’ Useless to swear vengeance on Duke Dripping Pan. He will undo himself, and perhaps for good this time, shouting around Greenwich that Henry is a cuckold. Surely even an old favourite cannot get away with that?

Besides, Brandon’s right. A duke can represent his master at the court of a foreign king. Or a cardinal; even if he is low-born like Wolsey, his office in the church dignifies him. A bishop like Gardiner; he may be of dubious provenance, but by his office he is Stephen Winchester, incumbent of England’s richest see. But Cremuel remains a nobody. The king gives him titles that no one abroad understands, and jobs that no one at home can do. He multiplies offices, duties pile on him: plain Master Cromwell goes out at morning, plain Master Cromwell comes in at night. Henry had offered him the Lord Chancellor’s post; no, don’t disturb Lord Audley, he had said. Audley does a good job; Audley, in fact, does as he’s told. Perhaps, though, he should have agreed? He sighs, at the thought of wearing the chain. You cannot, surely, be both Lord Chancellor and Master Secretary? And he will not give up that post. It doesn’t matter if it gives him a lesser status. It doesn’t matter if the French don’t comprehend. Let them judge by results. Brandon can make a racket, unreproved, near the royal person; he can slap the king on the back and call him Harry; he can chuckle with him over ancient jests and tilt-yard escapades. But chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

Last thing, he opens the shutter to say good night to the Pope. He hears a drip from a drainage spout above, he hears the deep groan as snow slides across the tiles above him, and falls in a clean sheet of white that for a second obliterates his view. His eyes follow it; with a little puff like white smoke, the fallen snow joins the trodden slush on the ground. He was right about the wind on the river. He draws the shutter closed. The thaw has begun. The great spoiler of souls, with his conclave, is left dripping in the dark.

At New Year he visits Rafe in his new house at Hackney, three storeys of brick and glass by St Augustine’s church. On his first visit at summer’s end, he had noted everything in place for Rafe’s happy life: pots of basil on the kitchen sills, garden plots seeded and the bees in their hives, the doves in their cote and the frames in place for the roses that will climb them; the pale oak-panelled walls gleaming in expectation of paint.

Now the house is settled, bedded in, scenes from the gospels glowing on the wall: Christ as fisher of men, a startled steward tasting the good wine at Cana. In an upper room reached by the steep steps from the parlour, Helen reads Tyndale’s gospel as her maids sew: ‘…by grace are ye saved.’ St Paul may not suffer a woman to teach, but it is not exactly teaching. Helen has put off the poverty of her early life. The husband who beat her is dead, or gone so far away that we count him dead. She can become Sadler’s wife, a rising man in Henry’s service; she can become a serene hostess, a learned woman. But she cannot lose her history. One day the king will say, ‘Sadler, why do you not bring your wife to court, is she very ugly?’

He will interrupt: ‘No sir; very beautiful.’ But Rafe will add, ‘Helen is lowly born and does not know court manners.’

‘Why did you wed her?’ Henry will demand. And then his face will soften: Ah, I see, for love.

Now Helen takes his hands and wishes him a continuance of good fortune. ‘I pray to God every day for you, for you were the origin of my happiness when you took me into your house. I pray him send you health and good luck and the king’s listening ear.’

He kisses her and holds her close as if she were his daughter. His godson is howling in the next room.

On Twelfth Night the last marzipan moon is eaten up. The star is taken down, Anthony supervising. Its wicked points are fitted into their sleeves, and it is carried carefully to its store room. The peacock wings sigh into their linen shroud, and are hung on their peg behind the door.

Reports come from Vaughan that the old queen is better. Chapuys thinks so well of her that he is on the road back to London. He found her wasted, so weak that she could not sit up. But now she is eating again, taking comfort in the company of her friend Maria de Salinas; her gaolers were forced to admit this lady, after she suffered an accident under the very walls.

But later he, Cromwell, will hear of how on the evening of 6 January – just about the time, he thinks, that we were seeing our Christmas into store – Katherine grew restless. She felt herself failing, and during the night she told her chaplain that she would like to take communion: asking anxiously, what hour is it now? It is not yet four o’clock, he told her, but in case of urgency, the canonical hour can be advanced. Katherine waits it out, lips moving, a holy medal folded in her palm.

She will die that day, she says. She has studied death, many times anticipated it, and she is not shy at its approach. She dictates her wishes about her burial arrangements, which she does not expect to be observed. She asks for her household to be paid off, her debts to be settled.

At ten in the morning a priest anoints her, touching the holy oil to her eyelids and lips, her hands and feet. These lids will now seal and not reopen, she will neither look nor see. These lips have finished their prayers. These hands will sign no more papers. These feet have finished their journey. By noon her breathing is stertorous, she is labouring to her end. At two o’clock, light cast into her chamber by the fields of snow, she resigns from life. As she draws her last breath, the sombre forms of her keepers close in. They are reluctant to disturb the aged chaplain, and the old women shuffling from her bedside. Before they have washed her, Bedingfield has put his fastest rider on the road.

8 January: the news arrives at court. It filters out from the king’s rooms then runs riot up staircases to the rooms where the queen’s maids are dressing, and through the cubby holes where kitchen boys huddle to doze, and along lanes and passages through the breweries and the cold rooms for keeping fish, and up again through the gardens to the galleries and bounces up to the carpeted chambers where Anne Boleyn sinks to her knees and says, ‘At last God, not before time!’ The musicians tune up for the celebrations.

Anne the queen wears yellow, as she did when she first appeared at court, dancing in a masque: the year, 1521. Everyone remembers it, or they say they do: Boleyn’s second daughter with her bold dark eyes, her speed, her grace. The fashion for yellow had started among the wealthy in Basle; for a few months, if a draper could get hold of it, he could make a killing. And then suddenly it was everywhere, in sleeves and hose and even hair-bands for those who couldn’t afford more than a sliver. By the time of Anne’s debut it had slid down the scale abroad; in the domains of the Emperor, you’d see a woman in a brothel hoisting her fat dugs and tight-lacing her yellow bodice.

Does Anne know this? Today her gown is worth five times the one she wore when her father was her only banker. It is sewn over with pearls, so that she moves in a blur of primrose light. He says to Lady Rochford, do we call it a new colour, or an old colour come back? Will you be wearing it, my lady?

She says, I don’t think it suits any complexion, myself. And Anne should stick to black.

On this happy occasion, Henry wants to show off the princess. You would think such a small child – she is now almost two and a half – would be looking about her for her nurse, but Elizabeth chuckles as she is passed hand-to-hand by the gentlemen, scuffing up their beards and batting at their hats. Her father bounces her in his arms. ‘She looks forward to seeing her little brother, don’t you, dumpling?’

There is a stir from the courtiers; all Europe knows Anne’s condition, but it is the first time it has been mentioned in public. ‘And I share her impatience,’ the king says. ‘It’s been long enough to wait.’

Elizabeth’s face is losing its baby roundness. Hail Princess Ferret Face. The older courtiers say they can see the king’s father in her, and his brother, Prince Arthur. She has her mother’s eyes though, busy and full in their orbits. He thinks Anne’s eyes beautiful, though best when they gleam with interest, as a cat’s do when she sees the whisk of some small creature’s tail.

The king seizes back his darling and coos to her. ‘Up to the sky!’ he says, and tosses her up, then swoops her down and plants a kiss on her head.

Lady Rochford says, ‘Henry has a tender heart, does he not? Of course, he is pleased with any child. I have seen him kiss a stranger’s baby in much the same way.’

At the first sign of fractiousness the child is taken away, wrapped tight in furs. Anne’s eyes follow her. Henry says, as if remembering his manners, ‘We must accept that the country will mourn for the dowager.’

Anne says, ‘They didn’t know her. How can they mourn? What was she to them? A foreigner.’

‘I suppose it is proper,’ the king says, reluctant. ‘As she was once given the title of queen.’

‘Mistakenly,’ Anne says. She is relentless.

The musicians strike up. The king tows Mary Shelton into the dance. Mary is laughing. She has been missing this last half hour, and now she’s pink-cheeked, her eyes brilliant; no mistaking what she’s been doing. He thinks, if old Bishop Fisher could see this kick-up, he would think the Antichrist has arrived. He is surprised to find himself, even for a moment, viewing the world through Bishop Fisher’s eyes.

On London Bridge after his execution, Fisher’s head remained in such a state of preservation that the Londoners began to talk of a miracle. Eventually he had the bridge keeper pull it down and drop it in a weighted sack into the Thames.

At Kimbolton, Katherine’s body has been turned over to the embalmers. He imagines a rustle in the dark, a sigh, as the nation arranges itself to pray. ‘She sent me a letter,’ Henry says. He slides it from among the folds of his yellow jacket. ‘I don’t want it. Here, Cromwell, take it away.’

As he folds it he glances at it: ‘And lastly I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things.’

After the dancing, Anne calls him in. She is sombre, dry, attentive: all business. ‘I wish to make my thoughts known to Lady Mary the king’s daughter.’ He notes the respectful address. It isn’t ‘the Princess Mary’. But it isn’t ‘the Spanish bastard’ either. ‘Now that her mother is gone and cannot influence her,’ Anne says, ‘we may hope she will be less stiff in maintaining her errors. I have no need to conciliate her, God knows. But I think if I could put an end to the ill-feeling between the king and Mary, he would thank me for it.’

‘He would be beholden to you, madam. And it would be an act of charity.’

‘I wish to be a mother to her.’ Anne flushes; it does sound unlikely. ‘I do not expect her to call me “my lady mother”, but I expect her to call me Your Highness. If she will conform herself to her father I shall be pleased to have her at court. She will have an honoured place, and not much below mine. I shall not expect a deep reverence from her, but the ordinary form of courtesy which royal persons use among themselves, within their families, the younger to the elder. Assure her, I shall not make her carry my train. She will not have to sit at table with her sister the Princess Elizabeth, so no question of her lower rank will arise. I think this is a fair offer.’ He waits. ‘If she will render me the respect which is my due, I shall not walk before her on ordinary occasions, but we will walk hand in hand.’

For one so tender about her dignities as Anne the queen, it is an unparalleled set of concessions. But he imagines Mary’s face when it is put to her. He is glad he will not be there to see it in person.

He makes a respectful good night, but Anne calls him back. She says, in a low voice: ‘Cremuel, this is my offer, I will go no further. I am resolved to make it and then I cannot be blamed. But I do not think she will take it, and then we will both be sorry, for we are condemned to fight till the breath goes out of our bodies. She is my death, and I am hers. So tell her, I shall make sure she does not live to laugh at me after I am gone.’

He goes to Chapuys’s house to pay his condolences. The ambassador is wrapped in black. A draught is cutting through his rooms that seems to blow straight from the river, and his mood is one of self-reproach. ‘How I wish I had not left her! But she seemed better. She sat up that morning and they dressed her hair. I had seen her eat some bread, a mouthful or two, I thought that was an advance. I rode away in hope, and within hours she was failing.’

‘You must not blame yourself. Your master will know you did all you could. After all, you are sent here to watch the king, you cannot be too long from London in the winter.’

He thinks, I have been there since Katherine’s trials began: a hundred scholars, a thousand lawyers, ten thousand hours of argument. Almost since the first word was spoken against her marriage, for the cardinal kept me informed; late at night with a glass of wine, he would talk about the king’s great matter and how he saw it would work out.

Badly, he said.

‘Oh, this fire,’ Chapuys says. ‘Do you call this a fire? Do you call this a climate?’ Smoke from the wood eddies past them. ‘Smoke and smells and no heat!’

‘Get a stove. I’ve got stoves.’

‘Oh, yes,’ the ambassador moans, ‘but then the servants stuff them with rubbish and they blow up. Or the chimneys fall apart and you have to send across the sea for a man to fix them. I know all about stoves.’ He rubs his blue hands. ‘I told her chaplain, you know. When she is on her deathbed, I said, ask her whether Prince Arthur left her a virgin or not. All the world must believe a declaration made by a dying woman. But he is an old man. In his grief and trouble he forgot. So now we will never be sure.’

That is a large admission, he thinks: that the truth may be other than what Katherine told us all these years. ‘But do you know,’ Chapuys says, ‘before I left her, she said a troubling thing to me. She said, “It might be all my fault. That I stood out against the king, when I could have made an honourable withdrawal and let him marry again.” I said to her, madam – because I was amazed – madam, what are you thinking, you have right on your side, the great weight of opinion, both lay and clerical – “Ah but,” she said to me, “to the lawyers there was doubt in the case. And if I erred, then I drove the king, who does not brook opposition, to act according to his worse nature, and therefore I partly share in the guilt of his sin.” I said to her, good madam, only the harshest authority would say so; let the king bear his own sins, let him answer for them. But she shook her head.’ Chapuys shakes his, distressed, perplexed. ‘All those deaths, the good Bishop Fisher, Thomas More, the sainted monks of the Charterhouse…“I am going out of life,” she said, “dragging their corpses.”’

He is silent. Chapuys crosses the room to his desk and opens a little inlaid box. ‘Do you know what this is?’

He picks up the silk flower, carefully in case it falls to dust in his fingers. ‘Yes. Her present from Henry. Her present when the New Year’s prince was born.’

‘It shows the king in a good light. I would not have believed him so tender. I am sure I would not have thought to do it.’

‘You are a sad old bachelor, Eustache.’

‘And you a sad old widower. What did you give your wife, when your lovely Gregory was born?’

‘Oh, I suppose…a gold dish. A gold chalice. Something to set up on her shelf.’ He hands back the silk flower. ‘A city wife wants a present she can weigh.’

‘Katherine gave me this rose as we parted,’ Chapuys says. ‘She said, it is all I have to bequeath. She told me, choose a flower from the coffer and go. I kissed her hand and took to the road.’ He sighs. He drops the flower on his desk and slides his hands into his sleeves. ‘They tell me the concubine is consulting diviners to tell the sex of her child, although she did that before and they all told her it was a boy. Well, the queen’s death has altered the position of the concubine. But not perhaps in the way she would like.’

He lets that pass. He waits. Chapuys says, ‘I am informed that Henry paraded his little bastard about the court when he heard the news.’

Elizabeth is a forward child, he tells the ambassador. But then you must remember that, when he was hardly a year older than his daughter is now, the young Henry rode through London, perched on the saddle of a warhorse, six feet from the ground and gripping the pommel with fat infant fists. You should not discount her, he tells Chapuys, just because she is young. The Tudors are warriors from their cradle.

‘Ah, well, yes,’ Chapuys flicks a speck of ash from his sleeve. ‘Assuming she is a Tudor. Which some people do doubt. And the hair proves nothing, Cremuel. Considering I could go out on the street and catch half a dozen redheads without a net.’

‘So,’ he says, laughing, ‘you consider Anne’s child could have been fathered by any passer-by?’

The ambassador hesitates. He does not like to admit he has been listening to French rumours. ‘Anyway,’ he sniffs, ‘even if she is Henry’s child, she is still a bastard.’

‘I must leave you.’ He stands up. ‘Oh. I should have brought back your Christmas hat.’

‘You may have custody of it.’ Chapuys huddles into himself. ‘I shall be in mourning for some time. But do not wear it, Thomas. You will stretch it out of shape.’

Call-Me-Risley comes straight from the king, with news of the funeral arrangements.

‘I said to him, Majesty, you will bring the body to St Paul’s? He said, she can be laid to rest in Peterborough, Peterborough is an ancient and honourable place and it will cost less. I was astonished. I persisted, I said to him, these things are done by precedent. Your Majesty’s sister Mary, the Duke of Suffolk’s wife, was taken to Paul’s to lie in state. And do you not call Katherine your sister? And he said, ah but, my sister Mary was a royal lady, once married to the King of France.’ Wriothesley frowns. ‘And Katherine is not royal, he claims, though both her parents were sovereigns. The king said, she will have all she is entitled to as Dowager Princess of Wales. He said, where is the cloth of estate that was put over the hearse when Arthur died? It must be somewhere in the Wardrobe. It can be reused.’

‘That makes sense,’ he says. ‘The Prince of Wales’s feathers. There wouldn’t be time to weave a new one. Unless we keep her lingering above ground for it.’

‘It appears that she asked for five hundred masses for her soul,’ Wriothesley says. ‘But I was not about to tell Henry that, because from day to day one never knows what he believes. Anyway, the trumpets blew. And he marched off to Mass. And the queen with him. And she was smiling. And he had a new gold chain.’

Wriothesley’s tone suggests he is curious: just that. It passes no judgement on Henry.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘if you’re dead, Peterborough is as good a place as any.’

Richard Riche is up in Kimbolton taking an inventory, and has started a spat with Henry about Katherine’s effects; not that Riche loved the old queen, but he loves the law. Henry wants her plate and her furs, but Riche says, Majesty, if you were never married to her, she was a feme sole not a feme covert, if you were not her husband you have no right to lay hands on her property.

He has been laughing over it. ‘Henry will get the furs,’ he says. ‘Riche will find the king a way around it, believe me. You know what she should have done? Bundled them up and given them to Chapuys. There’s a man who feels the chill.’

A message comes, for Anne the queen from the Lady Mary, in reply to her kind offer to be a mother to her. Mary says she has lost the best mother in the world and has no need for a substitute. As for fellowship with her father’s concubine, she would not degrade herself. She would not hold hands with someone who has shaken paws with the devil.

He says, ‘Perhaps the timing was awry. Perhaps she had heard of the dancing. And the yellow dress.’

Mary says she will obey her father, so far as her honour and her conscience allow. But that is all she will do. She will not make any statement or take any oath that requires her to recognise that her mother was not married to her father, or to accept a child of Anne Boleyn as heir of England.

Anne says, ‘How does she dare? Why does she even think she can negotiate? If my child is a boy, I know what will happen to her. She had better make her peace with her father now, not come crying to him for mercy when it is too late.’

‘It’s good advice,’ he says. ‘I doubt she will take it.’

‘Then I can do no more.’

‘I honestly think you cannot.’

And he does not see what more he can do for Anne Boleyn. She is crowned, she is proclaimed, her name is written in the statutes, in the rolls: but if the people do not accept her as queen…

Katherine’s funeral is planned for 29 January. The early bills are coming in, for the mourning attire and candles. The king continues elated. He is ordering up court entertainments. There is to be a tournament in the third week of the month and Gregory is down as a contestant. Already the boy is in a sweat of preparation. He keeps calling in his armourer, sending him off and calling him back again; changing his mind about his horse. ‘Father, I hope I am not drawn against the king,’ he says. ‘Not that I fear him. But it will be hard work, trying to remember it is him, and also trying to forget it is him, trying your best to get a touch but please God no more than a touch. Suppose I should have the bad luck to unhorse him? Can you imagine if he came down, and to a novice like me?’

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he says. ‘Henry was jousting before you could walk.’

‘That’s the whole difficulty, sir. He is not as quick as he was. So the gentlemen say. Norris says, he’s lost his apprehension. Norris says you can’t do it if you’re not scared, and Henry is convinced he is the best, so he fears no opponent. And you should fear, Norris says. It keeps you sharp.’

‘Next time,’ he says, ‘get drawn on the king’s team at the start. That avoids the problem.’

‘How would one do that?’

Oh, dear God. How would one do anything, Gregory? ‘I’ll have a word,’ he says patiently.

‘No, don’t.’ Gregory is upset. ‘How would that stand with my honour? If you were there arranging matters? This is something I must do for myself. I know you know everything, father. But you were never in the lists.’

He nods. As you please. His son clanks away. His tender son.

As the New Year begins, Jane Seymour continues her duties about the queen, unreadable expressions drifting across her face as if she were moving within a cloud. Mary Shelton tells him: ‘The queen says that if Jane gives way to Henry he will be tired of her after a day, and if she does not give way he will be tired of her anyway. Then Jane will be sent back to Wolf Hall, and her family will lock her in a convent because she is no further use to them. And Jane says nothing.’ Shelton laughs, but kindly enough. ‘Jane does not feel it would be very different. As she is now in a portable convent, and bound by her own vows. She says, “Master Secretary thinks I would be very sinful to let the king hold my hand, though he begs me, ‘Jane, give me your little paw.’ And as Master Secretary is second only to the king in church affairs, and a very godly man, I take notice of what he says.”’

One day Henry seizes Jane as she is passing and sits her on his knee. It is a sportive gesture, boyish, impetuous, no harm in it; so he says later, excusing himself sheepishly. Jane does not smile or speak. She sits calmly till she is released, as if the king were any joint-stool.

Christophe comes to him, whispering: ‘Sir, they are saying on the streets that Katherine was murdered. They are saying that the king locked her in a room and starved her to death. They are saying that he sent her almonds, and she ate, and was poisoned. They are saying that you sent two murderers with knives, and that they cut out her heart, and that when it was inspected, your name was branded there in big black letters.’

‘What? On her heart? “Thomas Cromwell”?’

Christophe hesitates. ‘Alors…Perhaps just your initials.’