Thomas Cromwell 1-3

III

Wreckage (II)

London, Summer 1536

Do you know why they say, ‘There’s no smoke without fire?’ It’s not just to give encouragement to people who like fires. It’s a statement about the danger of chimneys, but also about the courts of kings – or any space where trapped air circulates, choking on itself. A spark catches a particle of falling soot: with a crackle, the matter ignites: with a roar, the flames fly skywards, and within minutes the palace is ablaze.

Early July, the grandi hold a triple wedding, combining their fortunes and ancient names. Margaret Neville weds Henry Manners. Anne Manners weds Henry Neville. Dorothy Neville weds John de Vere.

My lord cardinal had these things at his fingertips: the titles and styles of these families, their tables of ancestry and grants of arms, their links by second and third marriages; who is godparent and godsib, guardian and ward; the particulars of their landed estates, their income, their outgoings, their law suits, ancient grudges and unpaid debts.

The celebrations are graced by Norfolk’s son and heir, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey. The young earl intends to pass the summer in hunting, with the king and Fitzroy. Since childhood he has been a companion to the king’s son, and Richmond looks up to him. Surrey is conspicuous in all he does: laying down the cards and throwing dice, playing at tennis and betting on it, cantering in the tilt yard, dancing, singing his own verses and inscribing them in the manuscript books kept by the ladies, where they decorate them with drawings of ribbons, hearts, flowers and Cupid’s darts. His marriage to the Earl of Oxford’s daughter is no bar to gallantry. We give poets latitude – we need not think Surrey performs all he promises. He is a long youth: long thighs, long shins, long parti-coloured hose; he picks his way on stilts among common men. His disdain for Lord Cromwell is complete: ‘I note your title, my lord. It does not change what you are.’

The triple wedding makes the king project other weddings. His niece the Scottish princess is a great prize, as she is now very near the throne. If Jane the queen should fail and if Fitzroy cannot command the support of Parliament, Margaret Douglas will some day rule England. No one wants a woman; but at least Meg is bonny and has shown herself governable. She has been under the king’s guardianship since she was twelve or so, and he is as fond of her as if she were his own daughter. Cromwell, he says, make a note: we will find her a prince.

But the king hesitates, the king delays. The difficulty is repeating, it is intractable, it is the same he faced when his daughter Mary was his heir, when (briefly) the child Eliza was his heir. Choose a husband for a future queen, and you are also choosing a king for England. As a wife she must obey him: women must obey, even queens. But what foreigner can we trust? England may become a mere province in some empire, and be governed from Lisbon, from Paris, from the east. Better she should marry an Englishman. But once he is named, think of the pretension it will breed in his family. Then think of the envy and malice of those great houses whose sons are passed over.

You watch at Jane the queen and you say if, and when she. The women prick off, on papers they keep, the days when they expect their monthly courses. Probably they keep papers for each other, casting a practised eye, ready to spread good or evil tidings. It is not yet two months since the king’s wedding, and already you sense he is impatient for news.

With Fitzwilliam and young Wriothesley, he melts away from the wedding party to shuffle papers in a side room. Fitzwilliam has regained his chain of office as Master Treasurer. The king has pardoned him for his outburst in the council chamber; it was done, Henry has said, out of love for us. The treasurer fingers his chain now; he speculates on what maggots of ambition might be burrowing into the mind of the Duke of Norfolk. ‘I tell you, Crumb, if young Surrey were not married already, his father would be coveting the Scottish princess for him – or the Lady Mary at the least, in case ever she is restored in blood. Because when his niece Anne was alive, Norfolk could boast that a Howard sat on the throne – and that is not a boast he likes to give up.’

Not that she ever took any notice of Uncle Norfolk, he says. The late queen chose her own path, she heeded to no one. Not me, not you, and not the king, in the end. Anyway, he says, the long youth is fast married, so Uncle Norfolk is out of hope there. ‘And even if Surrey were free,’ Mr Wriothesley says, ‘I doubt Lady Mary will favour that family again. Not after Norfolk threatened to beat her head to mash.’

The king himself goes to Shoreditch for the marriage celebrations. He and his suite are dressed as Turks, in velvet turbans, breeches of striped silk and scarlet boots with tassels. At the end of the evening the king unmasks, to general astonishment and applause.

The young Duke of Richmond leaves early, heated and flushed from dancing and wine. So does Mr Wriothesley, though his exit is more sudden. ‘Sir, I am going to Whitehall, and as soon as I …’

Fitz looks after him. ‘Do you trust him? Gardiner’s pupil?’ He rubs his chin. ‘You don’t trust anybody, do you?’

‘We all need second chances, Fitz.’ He flips the treasurer’s chain of office. This last week or so, whenever Cromwell comes near, Lord Audley clutches his own chain in mock-panic.

Just Audley’s little joke. He knows well enough by now that he, Lord Cromwell, has no ambition to be chancellor. Master Secretary’s post gives him warrant for anything he needs to do, and keeps him close to Henry day by day, privy to his every sign.

By mid-July, arrangements are under way to set up the Lady Mary in a household of her own. Following her visit to Hackney – to the house that will now be known as King’s Place – she has returned to Hertfordshire. After the tears, the promises, after her father’s vows that he will never let his daughter out of his sight, a period of reflection has set in: he should, the king feels, keep her at arm’s length to quash any rumour he means to make her his heir again. Lady Hussey, the wife of her former chamberlain, remains in the Tower after her rash mistake at Whitsuntide. The king will not have his daughter disrespected, but he doesn’t want people calling her ‘princess’ either. And he wants the situation to be clear to Europe: his daughter needs him, he doesn’t need her.

At Hackney she had said, in a low voice meant only for him: ‘Lord Cromwell, I am bound to you: I am bound to pray for you during my life.’ But it may be that fortune turns and he needs more than prayers. He has called in Hans, to design a present for her. She is a young woman who needs presents, he feels. He wants to give her something that will outlast the pretty saddle horse, something to remind her of these last perilous weeks: the brink, and who pulled her back from it. He is thinking of a ring, engraved with proverbs in praise of obedience. Obedience binds us together; all practise it, under God. It is the condition of our living as humans, in cities and dwelling houses, not in hides and holes in the fields. Even beasts defer to the lion: beasts show wisdom and policy thereby.

The engravers are cunning. They can write a prayer or verse very small. But, Hans warns, such a ring must be of a certain weight, and perhaps more than a woman with small hands can conveniently wear. But she can hang it on a chain at her girdle, just as she can hang an image of her father, in miniature – where formerly she carried two or three pious tokens, emblems of those saints to whom maidens pray: St Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, or Felicity and Perpetua, eaten alive in the arena.

Hans has a round face, practical and innocent. He would not say things against you, with a covert meaning: surely not.

‘Or why should you not,’ Hans says, ‘have it made into a pendant? A medal? You could get more good advice on it, that way.’

‘But a ring is more –’

‘More of a promise,’ Hans says. ‘Thomas, I wonder that you can be so –’

But then a message comes in, to tell him to attend the Duke of Richmond. He never manages to finish a conversation these days, in his own household or in the king’s, in stable yard or chapel or council chamber. ‘Yes, I’m on my way,’ he says. And to Hans, ‘Give it some thought.’

He leaves the table strewn with sketches – his offers, Holbein’s emendations. There is something he needs to repeat to Mary, because he hasn’t said it strongly enough. These last few years you have carried a great burden, and carried it alone – and look at the result. You are stooped, you are worn, you are bowed under the weight of your past, and you are only twenty years old. Now let go. Let others bear the burden, who are stronger, and appointed by God to carry the cares of state. Look up at the world, instead of down at your prayer book. Try smiling. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel.

Not that you can put it like that to a woman. Stooped, worn – she might take it badly. Sometimes Mary looks twice her age. Sometimes she looks like an unformed child.

At St James’s, Richmond’s people usher him to the sickroom, shuttered against the midsummer heat. ‘Dr Butts,’ he says, nodding, and makes his bow to a miserable heap under the bedclothes.

At the sound of his voice the young duke stirs. He pushes the covers back. ‘Cromwell! You did not do what I said. I told you Parliament must name me heir.’ He punches a pillow away, as if it were interfering with his rights. ‘Why is my name not in the bill?’

‘Your lord father is still advising on the matter,’ he says easily. ‘The bill permits him liberty to decide who follows him. And you know you stand high in his favour.’

Attendants cluster around the bed, and under the doctor’s eye they ease the boy back against the bolsters, shake the quilts, swaddle him. A great bowl of water stands atop a brazier, bubbling away to moisten the air. Richmond leans forward, coughing. His face is burning, his nightshirt patched with sweat. When he masters the fit he subsides, white as the linen. He touches his breast. ‘Sore,’ he tells Butts.

Dr Butts says, ‘Turn on your afflicted side, my lord.’

The boy slaps out at his attendants. He wants to view Cromwell and he means to do it. He begins to talk, but there is little sense in what he says, and presently his eyelids flutter and close; at a signal from the doctor they ease away the cushions and settle him.

Butts makes a gesture: creep over here, my lord. ‘Usually I would keep him upright to ease his breathing, but he needs to sleep – I have prescribed a tincture. Otherwise I fear he would be up and fomenting trouble. He was fretting about poison. He mentioned you.’ The doctor pauses. ‘I do not mean to say he accused you.’

‘Some men always think they’re poisoned. In Italy one hears it.’

‘Well,’ Butts says, ‘in Italy they are probably right. But I said to him, my lord, poison most usually shows in gripes and chills, vomiting and confusion, a burning in the throat and entrails. But then he talked about Wolsey, the pain in his chest before he died –’

He takes Butts by his coat, unobtrusively. He doesn’t want this conversation public. The outer chamber is seething with people – retainers, well-wishers, probably creditors, too. Safe in a window embrasure, he murmurs: ‘About Wolsey – I do not know how young Fitzroy heard it, but what is your opinion? Could he be right?’

‘That he was poisoned?’ Butts looks him over. ‘I really have no idea. More likely his heart gave out. Consult your memory, if you will. I admired your old master. I did all I could to reconcile him with the king.’ Butts seems anxious: as if he fears he, Cromwell, is nourishing a grudge. ‘Dr Agostino was with him at the end, not I. But they say he starved and purged himself, which is never advisable while travelling in winter … and think what he was travelling towards. A trial or an act of attainder, and the Tower. The fear would act upon a man.’

He says, ‘The cardinal was not afraid of the living or the dead.’

‘And he told you so, I am sure.’ It’s clear the doctor thinks, why fret about it now? ‘Do not think I heed young Richmond’s talk. When the king is ill he believes the whole world is against him. The boy is the same, a bad patient. When the fever was high he said, “I blame the Howards for this – Norfolk has no father’s heart towards me, he only loves me because I am the king’s son – and if I am not to be king, I am no use to him. Besides,” he said, “Norfolk does not need me now – he has thought of another way towards the throne, he will get it by fair means or foul.”’

‘They could not be fair means,’ he says. ‘If you think about it.’

‘I would rather not,’ Dr Butts says.

‘Any witnesses to my lord’s words?’

‘Dr Cromer was standing by. But with God’s help and with our science, we have suppressed the fever and with it all talk of treason.’

‘So if not poison, what does ail him?’ Apart from pique, he thinks.

The doctor shrugs. ‘It is July. We should be elsewhere. You are bringing in too many laws, my lord. Let Parliament rise, and we can all quit London. They say that Cain invented cities. And if it was not he, it was someone else fond of murder.’ The doctor is turning away, but then he hesitates. ‘My lord, about the king’s daughter … Dr Cromer would wish me to speak for both of us. We consider you have done a blessed work. You have done better than we healers could. Her spirit was so taxed by papish practices that her health and judgement failed. But they say your lordship’s presence at Hackney worked on her like a potion from Asclepius.’

Asclepius, the doctors’ god, learned his art from a snake. He could bring his patients back from the edge, or beyond it; Hades grew jealous, fearing lack of custom. ‘I take no credit,’ he says. ‘It was more that she warmed to the company, and ate her dinner. She is given to fasting. As if she is not meagre already in her person.’

‘If the king should ask our opinion,’ Butts says, ‘we are inclined to give it heartily in favour of her marriage. My fellow physicians have shown me where, in the writings of the ancients, such cases are described – young girls who are fervent, studious, given to fantasies, and prone to starving themselves if forced into any course that does not suit. They are virgins, and there lies their disease – if their single state is prolonged, they will see ghosts, and attempt to hang and drown themselves.’

‘Oh, I should say we are clear from that.’ He wonders, can you help seeing ghosts? Don’t they just turn up and make you see them? When people raise the cardinal’s name, he asks himself: if I had been with him in the north, would he have succumbed – to poison, to fear, to whatever? Some said it was self-slaughter. He thinks of the cold dark weather, the back end of 1529: Thomas Howard and Charles Brandon kicking their way into York Place as only dukes can kick, tossing Wolsey’s treasures into packing cases; clerks humming under their breath as they listed plate and gems; the chilly scramble to the water gate, the dripping canopy of the barge, the phantom jeering on the riverbank from voices in wet mist. At Putney horses met them, and they rode over the heath: there came Harry Norris in a lather, flinging himself from the saddle with an incomprehensible message from the king. He saw the spark in Wolsey’s eyes, his face light up; he thought the horror was over, that Norris was coming to lead him home, and he knelt to him – the cardinal, kneeling in the mud.

But Norris shook his head, and spoke in the cardinal’s ear, and pretended to be sorry. When hope drained away the cardinal’s strength went with it – as if by operation of a spell he was changed, suddenly elderly, fumbling, heavy. They dusted off their hands and hoisted him into his saddle, put the reins in his hand as if he were a child. No dignity, no time for it – and that knave Sexton, his jester, giggling and capering till he stopped him with a threat. They rode to the cardinal’s house at Esher: to the fireless grate, the unprovisioned kitchen: to truckle beds, lighting their way with tallow candles on pewter prickets. The cellar was full, at least: he sat up, drinking through the night with George Cavendish, one of the cardinal’s men – too scared, if he was honest, to sleep.

If I had known how it would end, he thinks, what would I have done different? Ahead was a harsh winter: half-drowned in puddles, unfed, unkempt, daily and desperate he forged across the Surrey bridleways in half-light, bringing his master news from Parliament – what was said against him and what was done, Thomas More’s twisted sneers and Norfolk’s common slanders: never in time for meat or sleep or prayer, always leaving and arriving in the dark, heaving himself onto a steaming horse: a winter of fog and wet wool and rain cascading from slick leather. And Rafe Sadler at his side, drenched, frozen, and shivering like a greyhound whelp, nothing but ribs and eyes: bewildered, bereft, never complaining once.

Yet here he is at St James’s: six years on, Baron Cromwell, the sun shining. Over the heads of Richmond’s retainers, Mr Wriothesley calls his name. Shouldering through, he swats the air with his feathered cap, his face glowing, his shirt neck unlaced.

‘Don’t go in there,’ he says, barring the way to the sickroom. ‘Fitzroy will accuse you of poisoning him.’

Dr Butts chuckles. ‘I see you are agog with news, young man. Well, I leave you to tell it. But whatever the urgency, do not hurry in the heat. Let your hat be on your head and not in your hand – the rays are too burning for one of your fair complexion. Be advised, tepid liquids are more refreshing than cold, which may cause colics. And do not be tempted to jump into rivers.’

‘No.’ Wriothesley stares at him. ‘I wouldn’t.’

The doctor touches his cap in farewell. Wriothesley asks his retreating back, ‘Will Fitzroy mend?’

Butts is tranquil. ‘I have seen off worse trouble.’

Wriothesley talks at him; they walk into a blaze of sunshine, feel the heat on their backs. ‘Sir, I have made pressing enquiries, among the Scottish princess’s folk.’

‘To what end? Put your cap on, by the way. Butts talks sense.’

The young man places his cap carefully, though he lacks a mirror to admire its angle; he looks closely at his master, as if trying to see a little Call-Me reflected in his eyes. ‘I have been sure this long while that something is amiss with her – I had been turning it over in my mind for weeks – her furtive manner whenever you were by, as if she was afraid some mischief would be found out – and also –’

‘You thought the ladies were making secret signs to each other.’

‘You laughed at me,’ Wriothesley says.

‘I did. So what have you found? Not a lover?’

‘You will excuse me, sir, for running ahead of you – it came to me at the wedding, but I could not speak till I had proof. I questioned her chaplain, and her men Harvey and Peter, and the boys who see to her horses, in case she had ridden out to some tryst. And they were not shy to speak – all except the chaplain, who was afraid.’

He begins to get the drift. ‘I wonder that I could be so simple. So who is he? And who knew? Which of the women, I mean?’

Mr Wriothesley says, ‘Sir, I leave the women to you.’

The scuffling and haste, the sudden vanishing of papers, the shushing, the whisk of skirts and the slammed doors; the indrawn breath, the glance, the sigh, the sideways look, and the pit-pat of slippered feet; the rapid scribble with the ink still wet; a trail of sealing wax, of scent. All spring, we scrutinised Anne the queen, her person, her practices; her guards and gates, her doors, her secret chambers. We glimpsed the privy chamber gentlemen, sleek in black velvet, invisible except where moonlight plays on a beaded cuff. We picked out, with the inner eye, the shape of someone where no one should be – a man creeping along the quays to a skiff where a patient oarsman with bowed head is paid for silence, and nothing to tell the tale but the small wash and ripple of the Thames; the river has seen so much, with its grey blink. A rocking boat, a splash, a stride, and the boots of Incognito gain the slithery quay: he is at Whitehall or Hampton Court, wherever the queen goes, with her women following after. The same trick suffices on land: a small coin to the stables, an unbarred door or gate, a swift progress up staircases and through flickering candlelit rooms to – to what? To kisses and illicit embraces, to promises and sighs, and so to feather bed, where Meg Douglas, the king’s niece, disposes herself against the pillows and waits for her pleasure.

Call-Me says, ‘It is Thomas Howard. The younger, I mean. Norfolk’s half-brother.’

‘Thomas the Lesser,’ he says.

‘Your man, Tom Truth. Wooed her with his verses, sir. Undressed her with his wit.’

Wreckage, he thinks. Winter and spring we watched Anne, but should we have watched another lady? Truth was on the river, Truth was in the dark; Truth stripped to his shirt and his member jutted beneath the linen, while the Princess of Scotland lay back and parted her plump white thighs. For a Howard.

He says to Call-Me, how did Meg contrive to be alone with him? There are some sharp old dames at court. My lady Salisbury for one, Margaret Pole – still in post about the new queen because, though the king is enraged with her son, he would rather have the countess where he can see her. And of course, to save face, we are still pretending to the world that Reynold’s poisoned letter has never been received: that the wretched document is still in Italy, where Pole plays with his phrasing.

Many things have occurred, that we pretend have not occurred. This must be another. ‘We’ll talk to Meg first,’ he says. He pictures her running towards him, hair loose and streaking behind her, like Atalanta in the footrace: her mouth open, emitting a steady wail.

First comes her shock, indignation, denial: how dare he enquire into her life? I am informed … he says, and she says, ‘How? How are you informed?’

‘By your own people,’ he says. He sees how hard she takes that, bursting into hot angry tears the size of apple pips.

Her friend Mary Fitzroy, Norfolk’s daughter, stands behind her chair. ‘And what have the servants told your lordship?’ She makes their words contaminated, even before they are aired.

‘I am informed that Lady Margaret has resorted to the company of a gentleman.’

Mary Fitzroy presses a hand on Meg’s shoulder: say nothing. But Meg flashes out: ‘Whatever you think, you are wrong. So don’t look at me like that!’

‘Like how, my lady?’

‘As if I were a harlot.’

‘God strike me if I ever thought so.’

‘Because I tell you, Thomas Howard and I are married. We have given our promise and it holds good. You cannot part us now. We are every way married. So you are too late, it is all done.’

‘It may not be too late, at that,’ he says. ‘Let us hope not. But when you say “every way married”, I cannot guess at what you mean. Look at Mr Wriothesley here – he cannot guess either.’

On the table before them are the sketches for the Lady Mary’s ring. Mr Wriothesley fingertips the sheets together, solemn, like an altarboy. His glance rests on the papers, where lines lace and intersect: ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he murmurs, and plants a book on the sheets to secure them.

Good. We don’t want Meg picking one up and blowing her nose on it. He asks Mary Fitzroy, ‘Will you not sit?’

‘I do well on my feet, Lord Cromwell.’

‘Let’s set the facts down.’ Mr Wriothesley pulls up a stool, expectant eyes on Meg. When her handkerchief is sodden she balls it up and drops it on the floor, and Mary Fitzroy passes her another: it is sewn over with Howard devices, so Meg dabs her cheeks with the blue-tongued lion of the Fitzalans. ‘Cromwell, you have no right to cast doubt on my word. Take me to see my uncle the king.’

‘Better off with me, my lady, in the first instance. Certainly I can broach it with the king, but first we must think how to present your case. Naturally you wish to keep your good name. We understand that. But it is of no help to you or to me to insist you are married, since you and Lord Thomas have pledged yourself without the king’s permission or knowledge.’

‘And,’ Wriothesley says, ‘we will not lie for you.’ He picks up a pen. ‘The date of your pledge was …?’

A fresh flood of tears, another handkerchief. He thinks, what is Mary Fitzroy to do? She cannot own many more. She will have to pick up her skirts and start ripping up her underlinen. Meg says, ‘What does the date matter? I have loved Lord Thomas a year and more. So you cannot say, and my uncle cannot say, that we do not know our minds. You cannot part us, when we are joined by God. My lady Richmond here beside me will bear out what I say. She knows all, and if it were not for her help, we should never have enjoyed our bliss.’

He raises his eyes. ‘You kept watch for them, my lady?’

Mary Fitzroy shrinks into herself. She is very young, and to be dragged into this debacle … ‘You gave the signal,’ Wriothesley suggests to her, ‘when your seniors were gone? You encouraged them to meet? And you witnessed their pledge?’

‘No,’ she says.

He turns to Meg: ‘So no one was present when these words were spoken – I say “words”, I will not dignify them as “pledge” or “promise” –’

Deny it, he tells Meg under his breath: deny the whole and deny every part, then persist in denial. No words. No witnesses. No marriage.

Meg flushes. ‘But I have a witness. Mary Shelton stood outside the door.’

‘Outside?’ He shakes his head. ‘You can’t call that a witness, can you, Mr Wriothesley?’

Wriothesley looks at him fiercely. It is he who has found out the plot, and he doesn’t want it talked away. ‘Lady Margaret, have you and your lover exchanged gifts?’

‘I have given Lord Thomas my portrait, set with a diamond.’ Proudly, she adds, ‘And he has given me a ring.’

‘A ring is not a pledge,’ he says reassuringly. His eye falls on the drawings. ‘For example, look at these – I am having a ring made for the Lady Mary. A pleasant token that indicates friendship, nothing more.’

Mary Fitzroy interrupts. ‘It was only a cramp ring, such as acquaintances exchange. It was of little worth.’

Wriothesley says, ‘And next you will tell me it was a very small diamond.’

‘So small,’ Mary Fitzroy says, ‘that I for one never noticed it.’

He wants to applaud. She is not afraid of Call-Me; though sometimes, he thinks, I am.

‘There’s nothing on paper, is there?’ he says to Meg. ‘I mean, other than …?’

The rhymes, he thinks.

The girl says, ‘I will not give you my letters. I will not part with them.’

He looks at Mary Fitzroy. ‘Did the late queen know of these dealings?’

‘Of course.’ She sounds contemptuous; but whether of him, or the question, or of Anne Boleyn, he cannot say.

‘And your father Norfolk? Did he know?’

But Meg cuts in: ‘My husband –’ she relishes the word – ‘my husband said, let us be secret. He said, if my brother Norfolk hears of this, he will shake me till my teeth fall out, so let us not tell him till we must. But then –’ Meg closes her eyes. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps he did tell him.’

He remembers the day at Whitehall – he in conversation with Norfolk, Tom Truth trotting up with a message – when he had said, ‘The ladies show your verses around,’ the poet had panicked. He grabbed his kinsman’s arm and as he, Cromwell, walked away, the two Thomas Howards fell into furious whispering. When he thinks back, he reads an irate, confused expression on the duke’s face: what, you’ve done what, boy? It all fits. It would not be like Norfolk to make a plot ab origine, with so many fissile elements, but he can believe Tom Truth has appealed to him for protection and that the duke, after blasting and damning him, has worked out how he can turn this folly to his family’s advantage.

He leans across the table towards Meg. If she were not a royal lady – and she is at pains to point out she is – he might pat her hand. ‘Dry your tears. Let us think afresh. You say that Lord Thomas has visited you in the queen’s chambers. All come there, I do suppose, for purposes of pastime. They come to sing and make merry. There need be no sinister intent. So over the months – in that very busy place – you have been drawn into some conversation, and Lord Thomas admires you, as is natural, and he has said, “My lady, if you were not far above me –”’

‘He is a Howard,’ Wriothesley says. ‘He does not think anybody above him.’

He holds up a hand. His scene is too gorgeous to be interrupted. ‘“If you were not far above me, and intended by the king for some great prince, I swear I would beg your hand in marriage.”’

‘Yes,’ Mary Fitzroy says, ‘that is exactly how it was, Lord Cromwell.’

‘And you of course said, “Lord Thomas, I am forbidden to you. I see your pain, but I cannot assuage it.”’

‘No,’ Meg says. She begins to shake. ‘No. You are wrong. We are pledged. You will not part us.’

‘And being a man and ardent, and you so lovely and a great prize, he did not desist – he presented you with verses – he – well, and so on. But you stood firm and permitted him not so much as a nibble of your nether lip.’

He thinks, I shouldn’t have said that. I should have made do with ‘kiss’.

Meg stands up. Her handkerchief is bunched in her fist – this one is scattered with the Howards’ silver crosslets, light as summer snow. ‘I will unfold this matter to the king alone. Even despite this dignity to which you are raised, he will not permit you to hold me and question me and make such imputations, that I am not married when I say I am.’

Mr Wriothesley says, ‘My lady, can you not grasp the point? It would be better for you to be seduced and slandered, and to have ballads sung in the streets, than to promise yourself in marriage without the king’s knowledge.’

Mary Fitzroy says, ‘For the love of Christ, sit down, Meg, and try to comprehend what my lord is telling you. He is trying his best.’

‘He cannot part what God has joined!’

Mary Fitzroy raises her eyes to his. ‘I am sure Lord Cromwell has been told that before.’

He smiles. ‘We must ask ourselves, Lady Margaret, what marriage is. It is not just vows, it is bedwork. If there were promises, and witnesses, and then bed, you are fast married, your contract is good. You would be Mistress Truth, and you would have to live with the king’s extreme displeasure. And I cannot say what form that would take.’

‘My uncle will not punish me. He loves me as he loves his own daughter.’

She falters there. From her own mouth, she hears it, and now she understands: how does the king love his daughter? Two weeks past, Mary stood on thin ice. It was cracking under her feet. Only Thomas Cromwell would walk on it to retrieve her.

Call-Me rises, as if Meg might faint. But the princess sits down neatly enough. ‘The king will say I have been foolish.’

‘Or treacherous.’ Mr Wriothesley stands over her: he looks almost tender now.

Meg says, ‘My marriage is not a crime, is it?’

‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘But I am sure it will be. We can get a bill through before Parliament rises.’

Mary Fitzroy says, ‘You are making a law against Meg Douglas?’

‘You can see the sense of it, my lady Richmond. Ladies do not always know their own interests. Sometimes they do not know how to protect themselves. So the law must do it. Otherwise, any poet can try to carry them off as a prize, and if he succeeds he makes his fortune, and if he fails he suffers nothing but a blow to his pride. That cannot be right.’

‘You do not write verse yourself?’ Mary Fitzroy asks.

‘Why enter a crowded field?’ he says. ‘Mr Wriothesley, would you take a note for me?’

Call-Me resumes his seat and dips a quill. He dictates: ‘An Act against those who, without the king’s permission, marry, or attempt to marry, the king’s niece, sister, daughter –’

‘Better throw in aunt,’ Call-Me says.

He laughs. ‘Throw in aunt. The offence will be treason.’

Mary Fitzroy is incredulous. ‘Marrying will be treason, even though the woman consents?’

‘Especially if she consents.’

‘Tra-la,’ Call-Me says, scribbling. ‘Trolley lolly … hey ho … hey derry down, penalties the usual. I’ll get Riche on the wording.’

‘Luckily,’ he says, ‘in this case there is no issue of consent. It is doubtful Lady Meg really made a marriage, because it lacks consummation, as Master Wriothesley says.’

‘I do?’ Call-Me raises his sandy eyebrows, and blots the paper.

Mary Fitzroy says, ‘Meg, nothing of an unchaste nature occurred between you and Lord Thomas. You will say that and you will stick to it.’

‘Lady Margaret, you have a good counsellor in your friend.’ He turns to Mary Fitzroy. ‘You should be with your husband. I will give you an escort to St James’s.’

Mary says, ‘Fitzroy doesn’t need me. He doesn’t even like me. He doesn’t count me as his wife. My brother Surrey takes him whoring.’

Blunt as her father. ‘My lady,’ he says, ‘you bear much blame for this intrigue. As we have not yet defined the scope of the new law, we do not know what penalties you might face. But I doubt the king will pursue you, if you are watching at his son’s sickbed. Do not fret over Lady Margaret, she will be well-attended at the Tower. But unless you want to go with her, I advise you to get to St James’s and stay there.’

Meg is on her feet, bursting into tears again; she clings to the back of her chair. Mr Wriothesley rises and takes charge. He is firm and cool. ‘Lady Margaret, you will not be put in a dungeon. No doubt Lord Cromwell will arrange for you to have the late queen’s apartments.’

He gathers his papers. ‘Come, my lady,’ Mary Fitzroy pleads, ‘do this as befits your royal dignity. Do not make these men have to carry you. And thank Lord Cromwell – my trust is in him, he will divert the king’s anger if any man can.’

He thinks, it will be diverted to Tom Truth: Henry will hate his proceedings. He stands by the wall till the women are gone, sweeping by him without a word. But the Princess of Scotland is still protesting: ‘What harm can I take by telling the truth?’

Her voice rings in the stairwell, then she is gone. Call-Me says, ‘I thought she would never grasp your saving hand.’

‘She’s not by nature stupid. She’s in love.’

‘It’s lucky it doesn’t make men stupid. I mean, look at Sadler.’

Yes, look at Sadler. Besotted with his wife, and no blunting of his wits at all.

Mr Wriothesley’s mood has softened. With Meg in the Tower, he knows he will have another chance to bring her down. ‘Were you ever in love, sir?’

‘It’s eluded me.’ He remembers asking Rafe, what is it like? Although Wyatt has alerted him to the signs. The burning sighs, the frozen heart. Or is it the other way around?

He thinks, I must make shift to help Bess Darrell. I am caught up in this fresh Howard knavery, while Wyatt’s child is growing inside her. ‘I want Francis Bryan. Is he at home or abroad?’

‘Favours to call in?’ But Call-Me is restless, excited; he does not pursue it. ‘Who’s going to break it to the king that Meg is married?’

He sighs. ‘I am.’

‘I would not like to be in Norfolk’s shoes. His niece disgraces him in spring, and his half-brother in summer. You can easy pull him down now.’ Call-Me flits a glance at him. ‘If you want to.’

He thinks, I don’t know that I do. Whether the duke planned this misalliance, or just concealed it, it is a grave matter. But no graver than crimes in the past, for which I appear to have forgiven him. ‘Suppose the Scots come over the border? If not Norfolk, who would go up against them?’

‘Suffolk,’ Wriothesley says.

‘And if the French come in by the other door?’

‘You were a soldier, sir.’

‘A long time ago.’ I carried a pike. Or I was the boy to the man who did; one fights as a unit. I was a child. Now I am fifty. I could perhaps win a brawl in the street, though I would rather stop one. ‘I have aged into accommodation, Call-Me. As you have noticed, this hour past. It would be a meagre triumph to have saved the king’s daughter, if he now turns and executes his niece.’

‘But why,’ Call-Me says, ‘would they let a year pass – in love, as she says – and only then take a vow? I think he was not so passionate, till the date Eliza was declared a bastard, and Meg stepped nearer the throne.’

‘Unless he was weary of making rhymes without result. Surely they took the vow so he could bed her?’

‘Surely. And what if inconvenience should ensue?’

He shrugs. Meg must trust to luck. And sometimes a woman gets a child, but loses it before anyone knows it but herself. It’s only afterwards they tell you about such things: twenty years on, sometimes. Call-Me says, ‘The king will want her pressed on the date and the witnesses.’

‘Then we’ll press Tom Truth. He already thinks I know more than I do.’

‘Most people think that,’ Mr Wriothesley says.

‘He fears everybody knows where his cock has been just by reading his rhymes. But Norfolk’s daughter has a stout heart. She should be on the king’s council. You recall how she tried to bar the door to me, on the day Anne was crowned?’

Wriothesley doesn’t know, why would he? What Call-Me witnessed was the public show, the seething crowds, trumpet blasts, banners, snorting horses, trampling hooves. Anne, fragile, heavy with child in the humid heat, must sustain three days of ceremony under the hostile eyes of the people. The flower of England’s nobility, under protest, carried her train. At the altar, the weight of the crown bent her neck. If her face shone, that was not sweat – it was a sense of destiny. Her hand, itching for so long, took a sure grip on the sceptre. Archbishop Cranmer smudged her forehead with holy oil.

Then after the ceremony she withdrew, away from the gaze of the city and its gods, to a chamber where she could lay aside her robes. He followed. He had seen the look of glazed fatigue on her face. But now he must get her up and out, to the feast in Westminster Hall; if he could not, short of carrying her, then he must speak urgently to the king, because rumour spreads like a blaze in thatch; if Anne was too exhausted to be propped up in public view, they would say she was taken ill, they would say she was losing the child.

At the chamber door he met Norfolk’s daughter, an obdurate fourteen-year-old shocked to her marrow: ‘The queen is undressed!’ Anne’s voice, fractious, called out to him, and setting the little girl aside, he stepped in. On a high bed the queen lay on her back like a corpse, her thin shift draping the mound of her belly. Her narrow hand rested on her person, as if she were calming the prince within; her hair was loose and fell around her like black feathers. He had looked at her in pity and in wonder and a kind of appetite, imagining that he himself had a woman heavy with child. She turned her head. A ripple of hair slid away, spilled over the side of the bed. In an impulse of – what, of tidiness? – he had lifted the strand, held it for a moment between finger and thumb, then smoothed it with the rest.

Mary Norfolk had yelped, ‘No! Don’t touch the queen.’

The dead woman spoke: ‘Let him. He has earned it.’

Her eyes snapped open. They moved over him. She gave him her strange, slow smile. I knew then (he would say later) that Anne would not stop at the king, but consume many men, young or old, rich or poor, noble or common. But at the last, she did not consume me.

He remembers her swollen feet, blue-veined, bare. How helpless they seemed, as if on that hot June day they might be cold.

At the king’s command, a lodging is prepared for Tom Truth. Constable Kingston comes in person, and suggests the upper floor of the Bell Tower, which has a good fireplace. Let’s put a hopeful face on it, Kingston says, and assume the king will show mercy, and the young man will still be alive this winter.

He says to Kingston, ‘You know the turnkey Martin?’

‘I know him. One of your gospellers.’

‘Martin ought to attend Lord Thomas,’ he says. ‘He respects those who write verse.’

Kingston stares at him as if he were ignorant. ‘They all did it. All those late gentlemen.’

‘George Boleyn, certainly,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘And Mark, I concede. But can you see Will Brereton juggling with terza rima? As for Norris, he was more interested in listing his emoluments and tabulating his assets.’

Kingston says, ‘They tried their hand. I am no judge. But the queen said there was only Wyatt who could do it.’

‘Sir William,’ he says, ‘ask your wife to sit with Lady Margaret, as she sat with the late queen. Let me know what she says.’ He adds, ‘I do not say it will end the same way. Let Lady Kingston encourage her to think she can live and thrive, if she sees her duty.’

‘I hear you will bring in a law,’ Kingston says. ‘It seems harsh, to make them commit a crime in retrospect.’

They try to explain it to the constable. A prince cannot be impeded by temporal distinctions: past, present, future. Nor can he excuse the past, just for being over and done. He can’t say, ‘all water under the bridges’; the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace. Often, meaning is only revealed retrospectively. The will of God, for instance, is brought to light these days by more skilful translators. As for the future, the king’s desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up. ‘Bear in mind his Majesty’s remarkable foresight, at the trial of the late queen. He knew the sentence before the verdict was in.’

‘True,’ Kingston says. ‘The executioner was already on the sea.’

Kingston has been a councillor long enough. He should know how the king’s mind works. Once Henry says, ‘This is my wish,’ it becomes so dear and familiar a wish that he thinks he has always had it. He names his need, and he wants it supplied.

‘But surely he won’t kill her?’ Kingston says. ‘The Princess of Scotland! What would her countrymen say?’

‘I don’t think the Scots have a use for Meg. They think she is an Englishwoman now. Still,’ he says, ‘I always pray for a good outcome. As for Lord Thomas – I’m sure the Duke of Norfolk will make his plea.’

‘Norfolk?’ the constable says. ‘Henry will throw him downstairs.’

No doubt, he thinks. I hope I am there to witness. ‘Be ready, Sir William. That’s all I advise. I wouldn’t like you to be caught out.’

After all, it’s nearly two months since the death of the queen. Quite possible that Kingston’s inner machinery will have rusted. The constable says, ‘Whatever occurs, I suppose we wouldn’t be having that fellow back?’

‘The Frenchman? No. Good God. I can’t afford him.’ Back to old-fashioned hacking. Of course, the Howards are stout for tradition. They wouldn’t want to die with any refinements.

‘He did a fine job,’ Kingston says. ‘I admit that. Beautiful weapon. He let me see it.’

He thinks, we all killed Anne Boleyn. We all imagined it, anyway. Soon I’ll hear that the king himself came down and said, ‘Master Executioner, can I try the swing of your blade?’ It’s as Francis Bryan said: Henry would have killed her one day, but in the event some other man saved him the trouble.

He remembers the weight of the weapon, when the Frenchman put it in his hand. He saw the light flash on the steel and he saw that there were words written on the blade; he drew his finger over them. Mirror of Justice. Speculum justitiae. Pray for us.

At Austin Friars, they admire Mr Wriothesley: his tenacity, his willingness to back his belief that there’s no smoke without fire. And lucky for Meg Douglas that he did not hesitate, once he grasped the facts. ‘Because imagine,’ Richard says, ‘if someone had walked in and found her naked in the arms of Truth.’

Richard Riche says, ‘I would not offend the king in such a way and expect long continuance in my life.’

Riche is busy drafting. The new clauses won’t necessarily stop royal persons doing stupid things. But they will create a formal process for dealing with them, when they do. The question is, who is complicit in Meg’s crime? He had asked for the rotas, to see which ladies were attending the queen – the dead one – during March, April and what she saw of the month of May. But the haughty dames who arrange such matters – Lady Rutland, Lady Sussex – had simply raised their eyebrows at him, and hinted that the whole thing was a mystery. Whereas with the king’s privy chamber, as Rafe Sadler says, you have a list, you know who should be where, and when.

Not that it necessarily works. Vagrant habits took hold this spring.

Approaching the king with the bad news, he had found him in a huddle with his architects, plotting to spend some money. ‘My lord Cromwell? Which of these?’ He had flourished a baton patterned with egg-and-dart moulding, which he was narrowly preferring to laurel wreaths.

‘Wreaths,’ he had said. ‘I have something to tell you.’ The draughtsmen rolled up their plans. His eyes followed them to the door.

Once the king had grasped what he was being told, he had shouted at the top of his voice that the business should be kept quiet. The baton was still in his royal hand: if Meg Douglas had been standing there, he would have broken the eggs over her head and stuck her with the darts. ‘I want no repeat of what happened in May, a royal lady before a public court. Europe will be scandalised.’

‘Then what shall I do?’

Henry dropped his voice. ‘Choose some neater way.’ As for Truth: ‘Draw up a charge of treason – I want it recorded in the indictment that the devil inspired him. Unless it was my lord of Norfolk?’

He had offered no comment. Meanwhile – as one of Truth’s own rhymes states, ‘False report as grass doth groweth.’ Word has got around that Lord Thomas is arrested, and so it is assumed that he has been revealed as one more lover of the late Anne.

At the Bell Tower he and Wriothesley approach Truth by the turret stair, passing the lower chamber where Thomas More’s shadow squats in the dark with the shutters closed. He puts his palm against the wall, as if feeling for a minute tremor in the stonework that would tell him More was talking in there: chattering to himself, jokes and stories and proverbs, scripture verses, mottoes, tags.

Christophe comes behind with the evidence. It is not stained bed sheets, but something nastier. The poems – Tom Truth’s and Meg’s mixed with others – have come to him in sheaves – some found, some left, some handed over by third parties. The papers are curled at the edges, and some are folded many times; they are written in divers hands, annotated in others; scribbled, blotted and smudged, they vary in skill of construction, but not in content. I love her, she loves not me. O she is cruel! Ah me, I shall die! He wonders if any of Henry’s poems have got mixed in. It was alleged, against the recently dead gentlemen, that they had laughed at the royal verses. But the king’s handwriting, fortunately, is unlike any other hand. He would know it in the dark.

In his upper room, Tom Truth is staring at the wall. ‘I wondered when you would get here.’

He – Lord Cromwell – takes off his coat. ‘Christophe?’

The boy produces papers. They look more crumpled than he remembers. ‘Have you been chewing them?’

Christophe grins. ‘I eat anything,’ he tells Tom Truth. As he, Lord Cromwell shuffles through the papers and prepares to read aloud, Truth becomes irate and tense, like any author whose work is under scrutiny.

‘She knoweth my love of long time meant,

She knoweth my truth, nothing is hid,

She knoweth I love in good intent,

As ever man and woman did.’

He looks at Tom Truth over the paper. ‘Nothing is hid?’

‘Have you tupped her?’ Mr Wriothesley asks.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Tom Truth says. ‘What opportunity? With your eyes on us?’

Many-eyed Argus. He holds the paper at arm’s length. ‘Can you go on, Mr Wriothesley? I cannot. It’s not the handwriting,’ he assures Truth. ‘It’s that my tongue refuses to do it.’

Mr Wriothesley takes the paper by one corner.

‘What helpeth hope of happy hap

When hap will hap unhappily?’

‘Perhaps it sounds better if you sing it,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘Shall we have Martin fetch a lute?

‘And thus my hap my hope has turned

Clear out of hope into despair.’

‘Pause there,’ he tells Wriothesley. He accepts the paper back, between finger and thumb. ‘It seems you declared yourself, even at the risk of a rebuff. She knoweth my truth, nothing is hid. At this date she does not seem amenable. Though it is usual, is it not, to say that you love the lady more than she loves you?’

‘It is considered polite,’ Wriothesley assures him.

‘And yet she loved you well enough to give you a diamond.’

Tom Truth says, ‘I do not know if I wrote this verse.’

‘You have forgot it,’ he says. ‘As would any man of sense. Yet in the fifth stanza you write, Pardon me, your man, Tom Truth. Which you rhyme, unfortunately, with growth.’

Christophe sniggers. ‘Even I know better, and I am French.’

‘There is many a Thomas at court,’ the accused man says, ‘and not all of them tell the truth, though I am sure they all claim to.’

‘He’s looking at us,’ he says to Thomas Wriothesley. ‘I hope you aren’t saying one of us wrote it?’

Call-Me says, ‘All the world knows you go by that name, so you may as well stand to it. You have married her, her servants say.’

Tom Truth opens his mouth, but leafing through the pages he cuts in: ‘You ask her to ease you of your pain.’

‘Would that be the pain in your bollocks?’ Christophe says.

He quells him with a look; but he cannot help laughing. ‘You have been in love for a certain space – Although I burn and long have burned – and then you make some pledge – why would you do that, unless to make her think it is lawful to go to bed?’

Wriothesley says, ‘The lady tells us there are witnesses to the pledge.’

When the pause prolongs, he says, ‘You need not reply in verse.’

Tom Truth says, ‘I know what you do, Cromwell.’

He raises an eyebrow. ‘I do nothing, unless with the king’s permission. Without that, I don’t swat a fly.’

‘The king will not permit you to ill-use a gentleman.’

‘Agreed,’ Wriothesley advises, ‘but don’t try Lord Cromwell’s patience. He once broke a man’s jaw with a single blow.’

Did I? He is astonished. He says, ‘We are tenacious. In time you will confess you meant to do ill, even if you did not achieve your purpose. You will acknowledge your error to the king, and beg his pardon.’ Though I doubt it will forthcome, he thinks. ‘We understand your situation. You come of a great family, but all you younger Howards are poor. And being of such exalted blood, you cannot soil your hands with any occupation. If you want to make your fortune you must wait for a war, or you must marry well. And you say to yourself, here I am, a man of great qualities – yet I have no money, and no one regards me, except to confuse me with my elder brother. So I know what I’ll do – I’ll marry the king’s niece. Odds-on I’ll be King of England one day.’

‘And till then I can borrow against my expectations,’ Wriothesley adds.

A line of Wyatt’s comes to him: For I am weak, and clean without defence. In Wyatt’s verse there is a tussle in every line. In the verse of Lord Thomas, there is no contest at all, just a smooth surrender to idiocy. Though he is staunch under questioning – you must concede that. He does not weep or beseech. He just says, ‘What have you done with Lady Margaret?’

‘She is here in the queen’s rooms,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘Though probably not for long.’

They leave him with that ambiguous thought. The harmless truth is that Meg may have to be lodged elsewhere if the king decides to go ahead with a coronation, because by tradition Jane will spend the night there before her procession to Westminster. The king had talked of a ceremony at midsummer. But now there are rumours of plague and sweating sickness. It is not wise to allow crowds in the street, or pack bodies into indoor spaces. The Seymours, of course, urge the king to take the risk.

He and Call-Me go downstairs. One fights as a unit, he thinks. He misses Rafe, always at his right hand. But if the king wants Rafe’s presence he must have it. He says, ‘Did I? Broke a jaw? Whose?’

‘The cardinal used to tell about it,’ Wriothesley says happily. He passes into the sunshine. ‘Sometimes it was an abbot, sometimes a petty lord. In the north somewhere.’

When this is over – however it ends – he will try to return the poems to their owners, though they don’t put their names to them. He pictures himself on a windy day, throwing them into the air so that they flap down Whitehall, sailing across the river and landing in Southwark: where they will be giggled at by whores, and used to wipe their arses. When he gets home he says to Gregory, ‘Never write verse.’

Bess Darrell had sent him a message: come to me at L’Erber. It is not surprising the Pole family should offer her shelter; she is a legacy from the late Katherine. But she must have kept it from them that she is carrying a child. The old countess would not want Wyatt’s bastard under her roof.

He finds Bess and Lady Salisbury sitting together, peaceful as St Ann and the Virgin in a book of hours. A strip of fine linen lies across their laps, and on it a needlework paradise, a garden of summer flowers. He greets the countess with elaborate courtesy – as perhaps he did not at their last meeting. He notes that Bess has not unlaced her bodices yet. She is a delicate woman; how long can she keep her secret?

The countess indicates her sewing: ‘I know that of your gentleness you interest yourself in the work we women do. You see I have found young eyes to help mine.’

‘I compliment you. I wish my flowers would bloom as fast.’

‘Your gardens are all new-planted,’ Lady Salisbury says sweetly. ‘God takes His time.’

‘And yet,’ Bess says, ‘He made the whole world in a week.’

He nods to her gravely; says to the countess, ‘I hear your son Reynold has been summoned by the Pope.’

‘Has he? It is more than I know.’

He has only just heard himself, and it may not be true. ‘I wonder what Farnese intends. He would not whistle him to Rome for a hand of Laugh and Lie Down.’

The countess looks enquiring. ‘It is a card game,’ Bess says. ‘For children.’

The countess says, ‘We do not know my son’s plans, any more than you do.’

‘Less.’ Bess merely breathes it, stirring the petals beneath her fingers.

‘You know the king wants him to come home?’

‘That is a matter that lies between Reynold and his Majesty. As I have explained – and his Majesty well accepts it, if you do not – neither I, nor my son Montague, knew in advance of his writings against the king. And we do not know where he is now.’

‘But he has written to you?’

‘He has. It is a letter that goes straight to a mother’s heart. He says that whoever observes the laws of this realm and this king is shut out of Heaven – even if they are tricked or coerced into obedience.’

‘But you are not tricked or coerced, are you? Your loyalty comes from gratitude.’

‘There is more,’ Margaret Pole says. ‘My son bids me cease dabbling in his affairs. He says I cast him off as a boy – that I had no use for him. It is true I sent him away from home to his studies. But my understanding was, I gave him to God.’ She lifts her chin. ‘Reynold severs his ties to us. He says we are damned by our obedience to Henry Tudor.’

He thinks, it is very sad he should write you such a letter. It is also convenient. The countess takes a neat loop of her thread and slips her needle into the cloth. ‘But you want to speak with Mistress Darrell.’ Rising, she slides the work into Bess’s lap, and murmurs a question not meant for his ears.

Bess says, ‘No, I trust my lord Privy Seal.’

‘Then so do I,’ the countess says.

He smiles. ‘Encouraging for me.’

Lady Salisbury draws together her skirts. Ah, she is cold to my charms, he thinks. Bess Darrell sits with bent head, and does not look up even when they are left alone, the door ajar. Her hood hides what Wyatt has seen, her hair of crisped gold. He had imagined Wyatt would only chase what flies; that the pursuit would interest him, but not the capture. Yet Bess looks not simply captured but tamed, a woman trapped by her own ill-luck. He looks after Lady Salisbury: ‘You may judge how far she trusts me. Not enough to close the door on us.’

Bess says, ‘She does not think you will throw me to the floor and ravish me. Perhaps she fears you will sit and whisper bad verses, and coax me into marriage.’

So she has heard about the Douglas affair. No doubt the gossip is everywhere. He says, ‘I have found a refuge for you. As I promised Wyatt. The Courtenay family will ask you to be companion to my lady marquise.’

‘Gertrude?’ She folds the linen on her lap; folds and folds it again, so it becomes a square, the needle inside. ‘But she doesn’t like you.’

‘She is in my debt.’

‘True. You could have brought her family down two years ago. What a forbearing man you are. I suppose you hold back, in the hope of a greater destruction. Queen Katherine always said, “Cromwell keeps his promises, for good or ill.”’ She looks away. ‘I know you kept your promise about Mary. I was in the room at Kimbolton when you made it. All I will say, my lord – beware of gratitude.’

I do not wonder, he thinks, that Wyatt cleaves to you. A jaundiced riddle sits as well on your lips as on his. ‘As for your condition, I leave to you what explanation you make. The Courtenays know what is owed to you. You helped Katherine in her last hour. It was you who wiped her death sweat. Now they boast of what they did for her, but they did nothing really. They will not press you for the man’s name. And if they do, and they don’t like it – they are still bound to you.’

‘They ought to like it,’ she says. ‘They are indebted to Wyatt and his testimony. Because it wrought this.’ She gestures around. ‘This land we live in now. England without Boleyn.’

‘Wyatt wrought nothing. His evidence was not needed.’

‘So you say. But then, you like to offer comfort, my lord. You pick your way over the battlefield with prayers for the wounded and water for the dying.’

‘It is true,’ he says simply. ‘I gave him the papers back so he could tear them up. He told me of the understanding between you, and I said I would find you a place of safety … I would offer you my own poor house, or any of my houses, but my counsellors – I mean those in my household who advise me, and have my interests at heart – have suggested to me –’

She laughs. ‘No, Lord Cromwell, I cannot lodge with you. An unmarried female, estranged from her family – your enemies would suggest such knavery – and you being the king’s Vicegerent, you would look no better than any lustful bishop, or Roman cardinal.’

He says, ‘The Courtenays do not know my part in this. Let us keep it so. Francis Bryan spoke to them for you. He has worked your salvation. He loves Tom Wyatt and admires him.’

‘I expect Francis is used to ridding himself of women,’ she says. ‘No, do not doubt me – I will take the chance, since you offer it. You have my gratitude during my life. You saved Tom Wyatt when he would not save himself.’

‘I unlocked the door,’ he says, ‘but it was you who made him walk out of his prison. If it were not for the child you carry, he did not care to live. Man or maid, this is a child of great power. It has already preserved its father from the axe.’

‘The child?’ she says. ‘It seems I was wrong about that.’

‘There is no child?’

‘No.’

‘Never was?’

‘I cannot be sure.’

‘Does Wyatt know you have deceived him?’

Fiercely she says, ‘He knows he’s still breathing.’

A silence. She unfolds her sewing, its whiteness flowering out across her skirts. She finds the needle, and examines it between finger and thumb, as if daring it to draw blood. She says, ‘Considering the result, you will understand my deceit.’

‘I like your deceit,’ he says. ‘It makes me think highly of you.’

‘You are right I need a refuge. No one wants me except Wyatt and he cannot have me. I have made him promises in my heart’s blood, and I count myself as well married as any woman in England, except he has a wife living.’

Amor mi mosse, he thinks: love moves me, love makes me speak.

‘Perhaps you want to stay here with Lady Salisbury.’

‘She can get another pair of eyes. And I think you are already provided with spies here. When I go to the Courtenays, what shall I do?’

‘You will live.’

‘But for you, Lord Cromwell – what shall I do for you?’

‘Write to me. Someone within the household will approach you. A servant. I will even send you the paper.’

‘And what shall I say?’

‘You will tell me who visits. If any of them plan to travel. Whether any of their ladies are breeding.’

She says, ‘I have no money.’

He has settled her gambling debts a time or two. The pious Katherine, even in her days of exile, played for high stakes, and she expected her household to pay out. ‘I will take care of that, if Wyatt cannot.’

She says, ‘I will be the judge of what passes among the Courtenays, and I will protect what is private. I shall tell you what touches the public weal. I shall tell you whatever it is in your interest to know.’

‘Thank you.’ He gets to his feet. ‘Bear in mind my field of interest is very wide.’

‘Before you go, let me show you my sewing.’

‘That would be pleasant,’ he says.

She holds up the work; she shows him how the Pole emblem, the pansy or viola, is worked in a border with the marigold. ‘They do it to encourage each other, and they give such work as tokens to their supporters. They are sewn into altar cloths, or made into cap badges. They gave one this last week to Ambassador Chapuys. The marigold stands for – well, I see you have arrived already – it stands for the Lady Mary, that exemplar of shining virtue. Look here,’ she indicates with the needle tip, ‘at how the flowers entwine. So may Reynold entwine himself about her body and heart.’

‘So was Lady Salisbury lying to me in toto this last hour or only in part?’

She glances at the door. ‘It is true Reynold has written her a letter.’

‘But surely the family have concocted it between them. It is a device, to shift blame away from them.’

‘It appears she is struck to the heart.’

‘That is how the king feels. Stung, dismayed, betrayed. They are prodigious efforts, these letters of Reynold’s. I marvel he does not write to me.’ He touches her hand. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

He can’t see Richard Riche framing a law against embroidery, but then he doesn’t need to. The laws are already capable of stretching to cover anything the Pole family have in mind – especially when you add in the new penalties against plotting to marry the king’s daughter. Nothing he has learned about the hopes of Lady Salisbury surprises him, but it’s useful to have the evidence stitched together. ‘I hope when that cloth is finished,’ he says, ‘the family will protect it from the light.’

Like the treasures of Heaven, he thinks, where no moth nor rust consumes.

She says, ‘I wonder where Anne Boleyn is now?’

It is not a question for which he came prepared. He imagines her whipping down some draughty hall of the hereafter, where the walls are made of splintered glass.

When he goes to see Jane the queen, he takes Mr Wriothesley with him. ‘Just in case there is another plot among the women. I shall trust only you from now on. If you see that anyone is married who should not be, point out the offender. Don’t try to be subtle. We’ve had enough of that.’

It is mid-morning, a broad summer light. The ladies have come from their devotions. Bess Oughtred, the queen’s widowed sister, is at her side. On her other hand sits Edward Seymour’s wife, Nan: Nan Stanhope, as she was before her marriage. She is not, of course, the wife who sinned with Old Sir John. That one is dead, and never mentioned at Wolf Hall. No gap is visible, where the Scottish princess should be. The ladies are settling to the task which has absorbed them for weeks – erasing the initial ‘A’ from satins and damasks, and replacing it with Jane’s initial, so she can wear the clothes of the late queen. A sympathetic murmur from Mr Wriothesley: ‘Will that false lady never be gone?’

‘She had a lot of clothes,’ Bess Oughtred says. ‘I remember sewing this one in.’ Her tone is low and absorbed; seed pearls shower from her scissors, and Nan is catching them in a silk box.

‘Praise God for generous seams,’ Nan murmurs. ‘Her present Majesty is broader than the other one.’ She flips Jane’s sleeve. ‘And broader still soon – God willing.’ Jane dips her head. Nan glances up, scissors poised: ‘We are glad to see handsome Mr Wriothesley.’

Call-Me blushes. Jane says to her sister, ‘Mr Wriothesley is the … thing of the Signet. Clerk of the Signet, I should say. And of course you know Master Secretary. Though he is now Lord Privy Seal.’

‘Instead?’ Bess Oughtred says.

He bows. ‘As well, my lady.’

Jane explains, ‘It is he who does everything in England. I did not understand that, till one of the ambassadors told me. He marvelled that one man could have so many posts and titles. It is a thing never seen before. Lord Cromwell is the government, and the church as well. The ambassador said the king will flog him on to work till one day his legs go from under him, and he rolls in a ditch and dies.’

Call-Me tries a change of tack. ‘My lady Oughtred, may we hope you will live at court now?’

Bess shakes her head. ‘My husband’s family want me back in the north. They want to keep hold of little Henry, and bring him up a Yorkshireman. And much as I wish to see my sister in her pomp, I don’t want the little ones to forget me.’

Jane is working on a private piece of sewing. The women have rules about these matters that men do not understand; perhaps it is unbecoming in a queen, to snip away her predecessor. She holds it up – a border of honeysuckles and acorns. ‘Nice for a country girl,’ she says.

He thinks, it is as Norfolk says, I will soon be so expert I will be able to ply the needle myself. ‘Majesty, I have a request, and perhaps you will not like it. I must meet with those ladies who served the late queen. We must invite them back to court.’ He feels, suddenly, very tired. ‘I need to ask them questions. It may be that misunderstandings have occurred. We must revisit certain matters that I wish were forgot.’

‘I pity Meg Douglas,’ Bess Oughtred says. ‘The king should have found a husband for her long ago. Leave any sweet thing unattended, and the Howards settle on it like flies.’

‘Who do you need?’ Nan asks him.

‘Who do you suggest?’

‘Mistress Mary Shelton.’

Shelton was clerk of the poetry book; it was she who decided which rhymes were saved and which suppressed, and knew how they were encoded.

‘And,’ Nan says, ‘George Boleyn’s wife.’

‘Lady Rochford is a very busy active lady,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘She remembers everything she sees.’

An image swims into his mind, clouded, as if from distance: Jane Seymour, padding softly through the apartments of the late Anne, her arms laden with folded sheets. Anne was not queen then; but she lived in expectation, and she was served like a queen. He remembers the white folds. He remembers the soft perfume of lavender. He remembers Jane, whose name he hardly knew, her dipped glance casting a lavender shade against the white.

Nan says, ‘I think it was Rochford who was witness to Meg’s marriage. She is not averse to seeing another woman ruined.’

Bess Oughtred is puzzled. ‘But she did not ruin her. She did not speak out.’

That is true. But as the other Bess – Bess Darrell – has recently pointed out, a proper, comprehensive wreckage takes work and deliberation. Meg’s disgrace, if it had come out earlier, would have been a mere coda to that of the late queen: wasted.

Nan says, ‘Meg and Shelton and Mary Fitzroy, they were always scurrying and hushing and spying. Of course we thought it was all …’ She bites her lip.

Bess says, ‘We thought it was Boleyn’s secrets they were keeping.’ She looks sobered. ‘De mortuis nil nisi bonum.’

He is astonished. ‘You know Latin, my lady?’

‘My sister didn’t listen in the schoolroom, but I did. Much good it brought me. Jane is raised high, and I am a poor widow.’

The queen only smiles. She says, ‘I don’t mind if Mary Shelton comes back to court. She is not envious or mean.’

And, he thinks, the king’s already had her, so that’s one less thing for you to worry about.

‘But Jane,’ Bess says, ‘you do not want Lady Rochford near you, surely? She joined with the Boleyns in mocking you. And she is a traitor’s wife.’

‘She cannot help that,’ Mr Wriothesley says.

‘But still.’ Bess is indignant. ‘I wonder the king asks such a thing of Jane.’

‘He doesn’t,’ the queen says. ‘The king never does an unpleasant thing. Lord Cromwell does it for him.’ Jane turns her head: her pale gaze, like a splash of cold water. ‘I am sure Rochford would like to have her place back. Lord Cromwell is in debt to her for certain advice, which she gave freely when he needed it.’

Nan says, ‘If Rochford comes back to court, she will never go again. We will never be rid.’

‘But never mind,’ Jane says. ‘You will be a match for her.’

Is it a compliment? Nan does not know. Bess says sharply, ‘Sister, do not be so humble. You forget you are Queen of England.’

‘I assure you, no,’ Jane murmurs. ‘But I am not crowned yet, so no one notices.’

‘All the realm notices,’ he says. ‘All the world.’

‘They know you even in Constantinople, madam,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘The Venetians have sent their envoys with the news.’

‘Why would they care?’ Jane says.

‘Princes like to hear of the household affairs of other princes.’

‘But Turkish princes have a dozen of wives each,’ Jane says. ‘If the king had been of their sect, he could have been married to the late queen, God rest her, and Katherine, God rest her, and at the same time to me, if he liked. For that matter, he could have been married to Mary Boleyn, and to Mary Shelton, and to Fitzroy’s mother. And the Pope could not have troubled him about it.’

Mr Wriothesley says feebly, ‘I do not think the king will turn Turk.’

‘That’s all you know,’ Jane says. ‘If you are going to him now, you will see he is wearing his special costume. He does not feel he wore it enough at the wedding. Try to be surprised.’

Nan says, ‘Surely Lord Cromwell cannot be surprised.’

Jane turns to her. ‘One time or other, before he had so much to do, Lord Cromwell used to bring us cakes. Orange tarts in baskets. When she was displeased with him, the queen threw them on the floor.’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And there were worse things she did. But nil nisi …’ He meets Bess Oughtred’s eye, and smiles.

As they leave the queen’s rooms he says, ‘Nan is wrong. I am not beyond astonishment. At Oughtred’s widow and her Latin, for one thing.’

He calls her ‘Oughtred’s widow’, in a distant way, as if he never thought of her. He pictures Sir Anthony, that veteran of the wars; he pictures his own dead wife. He thinks, the dead are crowding us out. Rather than not speak ill of them, how if we don’t speak of them at all? We don’t speak of them, we don’t think of them, we give their clothes to beggars and we burn their letters and their books? After they had left Tom Truth and descended the stair at the Bell Tower, Christophe had slapped the wall, thwack, thwack with his palm, as if to roust out any shades who were attempting to rest in peace. It’s two years since Bishop Fisher tottered down that stair, led to his execution. He was old, spent, frail; his body lay on the scaffold like a piece of dried seaweed.

A crush of petitioners, waiting outside the queen’s rooms, surges after him. ‘Lord Cromwell, a word!’ ‘Over here, sir!’ ‘My lord Privy Seal, something you should see.’ Papers are thrust at him, and the Thing of the Signet gathers them into his arms. He sees a man in young Richmond’s livery, and hails him. ‘How is my lord today?’

‘He is worse. We do not want to tell the king.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘The king should go,’ the man says. ‘He should go and see his son.’

The king is very tall in his turban. Since the triple wedding he has embellished it with a jewel and extra plumes. At his side is a curved dagger, its sheath inlaid not with the crescent moon, but with the Tudor rose.

He, Lord Cromwell, kneels before the king, with Call-Me beside him. They do not remark on his costume. There is a limit to how much awe a man can feign. ‘I was hoping to astonish you,’ Henry says, petulant. ‘But I hear the queen has prepared you.’

How fast a word travels, in a palace. ‘She did not mean to spoil it,’ he says.

Irritated, the king motions them to their feet. ‘You don’t think I have married a fool? She seems not to comprehend even ordinary things.’

He hesitates. ‘She is of that chastened spirit, sir, that never presumes to understand her betters. Your Majesty has ruled for many years, for which we thank God daily: whereas the queen lacks experience in worldly affairs.’

The king eases his silver belt. ‘I believe the ambassadors think she is plain.’

‘But why are they looking?’ He is impatient. ‘Chapuys is no judge of women.’

‘And the French envoys,’ Wriothesley says, ‘they are mostly in holy orders – they should be ashamed to state an opinion.’

Henry seems mollified. A mirror is half-hidden by a curtain; he takes a sidelong glance at himself and likes what he sees. ‘So,’ he says, ‘why have I sent for you?’

He takes a silk bag out of his pocket. ‘I wanted to ask your Majesty’s permission to give this to the Lady Mary.’

Henry empties the present from the bag. He turns it over and over and squints at the workmanship. In case the engraving is too delicate to decipher, Mr Wriothesley quotes the inscription.

‘In praise of obedience,’ Henry says. ‘Very apt. And you think my daughter will take the point?’ Without waiting for an answer, he says, ‘Am I working you too hard, Thomas? You should hunt with me this summer. And I shall keep my son by my side. I hope by the time I am ready to leave London he will be strong enough to ride.’

The king likes saying that: my son. He says, ‘Majesty, the duke’s household suggest you might go to St James’s.’

‘Is that what you advise?’

He feels enquiry ripple through the body of the Thing of the Signet; every fibre of Mr Wriothesley is alert. Such advice could breed consequences. For as Henry now says, ‘The nature of his illness may not have shown itself. If it should prove contagious –’

‘God forbid,’ Mr Wriothesley says.

Henry is looking down at the gift, cupped in his palm. ‘I like this so well, I think I shall give it to my daughter myself. You can find something else, can’t you?’

He bows. What choice has he? The king nods as they leave, his blue eyes mild. The emerald in his turban gleams, the eye of a false god, and his big pink feet in their velvet slippers look like pigs walking to market.

The ladies exiled from court must have been waiting with their clothes packed, because they are back in no time, and he is calling on them to welcome them. Mary Shelton reminds him of one of those virgins of Nikolaus Gerhaert’s carving: pink and white and dimpled, but with shrewd eyes. Though she is not a virgin, of course.

When Shelton had charge of the manuscripts that circulated among the dead queen’s slaves and admirers, she collated the riddles, jests and profane prayers, copying them and sometimes annotating them and deciding who could respond, with a verse or another riddle. Her editor’s hand was light, or she would have crossed out Tom Truth and all his work. He agrees with the dead queen: only Wyatt can do it.

He tells her, ‘I am sure your cousin the queen knew all about Meg and Tom Truth. So was she pleased, when she knew another of her Howard kin was rising in the world?’

‘No. But she was entertained.’

‘She didn’t think to give Lady Meg a warning?’

‘Why would she?’

He concedes that. Why would one woman help another? Mary Shelton says, ‘It is all my cousin Anne’s fault, I agree. It was she who taught us to be selfish, and to reach for our desires. Amor omnia vincit, she said.’

‘Perhaps for a season it did.’

‘Love conquers all?’ Poor gentle creature, she bends her head. ‘With respect, my lord, love couldn’t conquer a gosling. It couldn’t knock a cripple down. It couldn’t beat an egg.’

Shelton was going to be married to Harry Norris; at least, she thought so, until Anne told her, ‘If the king dies, Norris will marry me.’ She had built a little house for love, and it was flattened by one remark: now she lives in the wreckage. He asks, ‘What about Norfolk’s daughter? I know she was the lookout for Meg. She does not live with Richmond as his wife, does she? She has never been permitted. So does she not have a lover of her own?’

Shelton shakes her head. ‘Too frightened of her father. Wouldn’t you be?’

‘Insofar as I can think myself into her place,’ he says, laughing, ‘yes, I would. Where was Jane Rochford in all this?’

‘She’s on her way, isn’t she? Ask her yourself.’

‘I’m asking you.’

‘I will not say she was in the room on Meg’s wedding night. But I will say that she brought fresh linen.’

He holds up a hand. ‘No talk of linen. Meg Douglas is a maid. Intact, like Norfolk’s daughter. Clean as from her mother’s womb.’

‘I see,’ Mary Shelton says. ‘Be sure to apprise Jane Rochford. Tell her to rinse her memory clean.’

He thinks, why must you bed on white linen? God gives you a whole realm for your pleasures: you would be safer in the park against a tree.

Ahead of her return to court, the relict of George Boleyn has stated her demands. She specifies which rooms she would like, asks for stabling for two horses, and bed and board for herself, two maids, and a manservant. He sends a message to the royal household: give Lady Rochford what she wants. But as soon as she arrives, send her to me.

‘What do you hear from Beth Worcester?’ she says, settling herself to conversation as if the last weeks had never been. There is a gleam in her eye. ‘Beth must be in her seventh month now. I wonder if the earl has decided whose child it is?’

‘The king wants to know about Meg Douglas,’ he says.

‘No, he doesn’t. Why would he want to know his niece is ruined? What he wants is to show that all her friends have been questioned, so he can claim he has pursued every road to the truth. One must pity him. He will think he is held of little account these days – his friends cuckolding him, his daughter defying him, his niece contracting herself in marriage. And you yourself, using him so roughly.’

‘How, roughly?’

‘“Set me free,” Henry said. And so you did. He meant, free like a prince – not free like a beggar. You knocked down his palace of dreams and left him stark in the ruins. You showed him his wife was false, that his friendships were feigned. Of course, the treachery of a wife, it is only what you men expect; it is the sin of Eve, you say, betrayal is her nature. But the treachery of Norris – of Weston, whom he nursed in his bosom –’

‘I gave the king what he asked for.’ He thinks, she agrees with Chapuys: she believes Henry will never forgive me for it.

‘But did he know how he would be laughed at?’ Lady Rochford asks. ‘His clothes, his verses, his manhood? He must live with his shame now, and you must live with him. You will have to build him up again, as you can. You and the Seymours.’

‘Build him up? He is King of England.’

‘But is he a man?’ She laughs. ‘I suppose he can do the deed with pasty Jane. She will not expect too much of him. I do not envy her, these nights. Anne said it was like being slobbered over by a mastiff pup.’

He closes his eyes.

‘I hear the coronation is postponed,’ she says.

‘Get the hot weather over. Michaelmas, perhaps.’

He thinks, I hope for notice: time to paint out the dark-eyed goddesses I ordered for Anne, and replace them with Englishwomen dancing in a bower, with rounded bellies and rosy uplifted arms. Lady Rochford says, ‘I think he will not crown Jane till she can satisfy him she has an heir inside her.’

‘Satisfy him? You think she might lie about it?’

‘It has been known.’

We’ll let that pass, he thinks; she wants to draw him where he will not go, into the thickets of the past.

‘Seymour will know how to play her hand,’ she says. ‘Because Seymour has watched and waited. And God knows she has no conscience. I have been in the country and had to endure the prating of my neighbours – “Our lord king will be happy now, England is happy, this is a blessed marriage.” But how can it be blessed? A wedding dress made from a shroud?’

‘Who sewed it, my lady?’

‘Well, there is a question. You, or me, or Master Wyatt – who took the greater share in the work? I think it was you. We pricked out our little pattern, but you cut the cloth.’

‘In May, I counselled you, think before you speak. I warned you, if you give evidence against your husband, you will be shunned. You will be held in odium. You will be alone.’

‘How little you know of our lives,’ she says. ‘The lives of women, I mean. I have been alone for years.’

‘You must forget those days. No one speaks of Anne Boleyn. No one thinks of her. You must be jocund and pleasant and adapt yourself to the new queen, or you will be sent away again, and I shall not speak for you.’

‘Jane Seymour will not send me away. I know what she is. I know a thing about her.’

Inside his chest, a horrible slither and flip of the heart: Chapuys had asked, how could she be at your court so long, and still a virgin? He thinks, some wretch has dishonoured her. A wash of rage, like a current in the sea, almost knocks him off his feet.

Jane Rochford smirks. ‘It is not what you think. No one wanted Jane in their bed, she was too cold a fish. It is another thing, that I know – I know her method. I witnessed everything that she worked against Anne, maid against mistress. You will remember a day when Anne took fright because she found a paper in her bed? A drawing of a man crowned, and beside him a woman without a head?’

Dr Cranmer was there, and had reached across him to snatch it from Anne’s hand and tear it up. But Anne pulled away and read aloud: Anne Sans Tête. Anne had said, it is Katherine’s people, they did this, they watch me. Cremuel, she had clutched his arm, I am not safe. How can they come at me, in my own chamber?

He says, ‘Jane did not do it, she does not speak the French tongue.’

‘Everybody speaks that much.’ She laughs at him. ‘Do you know, I believe all these years you have been thinking it was me?’

‘It would have been a natural thought. There was no love lost between you and Anne.’

She says, ‘I have suffered since I was a girl from these people – the Howards, the Boleyns. George Boleyn talked to me as if I were a girl who carries coals for a living, or scrubs shirts. My family was as good as his. Why should Anne Boleyn be uplifted, and not me?’

She is like a starved child, he thinks. Offer her a morsel of attention and she feeds till she is sickened. He had seen Anne Boleyn in fear that day, but he had also heard her scorn. Let them do their worst. I will be queen, though hereafter I burn.

‘At least that was spared,’ he says. ‘Burning.’

Jane raises an eyebrow. ‘In this world, perhaps. I am sure the devil knows his business.’

He picks up his papers: though they have not completed their own business, indeed they have not begun it.

‘So, I am dismissed?’ Lady Rochford stands. ‘I thank you for my return to court. With what I have from my settlement from the Boleyns, and with my allowance for waiting on Jane, I shall be able to keep myself as a gentlewoman, if I am careful. And I dare say you will help me out if I am not.’

‘My obligations are not unlimited.’

‘At least you do not say, “My coffers are not bottomless.” Now that would make me laugh.’ She turns at the door. ‘About Meg Douglas,’ she says. ‘You will be asking yourself, could I have mistaken the meaning of what I saw last spring – the coming and going by night, the hasty flitting, those swift glances, those burning sighs …’

‘My lady, if you knew of this intrigue, why did you not come to me? It would have prevented much mischief. It would have helped me –’

‘How would it have helped you? You never supposed for one moment those men to be guilty of all you charged them with. You said, let us throw mud, and see what will stick. But for all that, you may be easy in your mind. Do not think a mistake has been made, nor an injustice done. You were not wrong about Anne Boleyn.’

‘I trust your word,’ he says, lying.

‘She was false to the core. False in her heart. Whatever our deeds, it is the heart that God sees. Is that not so, Master Secretary?’

He says, ‘You must learn to use my new title, madam.’

As he walks into Austin Friars he meets Richard Cromwell. ‘My doorkeeper,’ he says. ‘Never let a woman in here. I never want to see or speak to one.’

‘What, never?’ Gregory says. ‘Will you join a monastery? But then I hear they are full of women, and women of the worst sort too. What if the queen sends for you – what excuse shall we make?’

‘Tell her she can write me a letter. I’ll write her one back. But I will never read another verse in praise of love. I will read stanzas in praise of military victories. Metrical translations of the psalms. But women’s matters – no.’

Gregory says, ‘It is only the other week you were speaking warmly of the Lady Mary, and saying she ought to have presents.’

His nephew says, ‘Richard Riche is here. And Call-Me.’

‘And Rafe,’ Gregory says. ‘They look grave. We sent them into the garden.’

‘Rafe is here? Why did you not say so?’

He hurries out. It has rained within the hour, and the air is warm and grass-scented. Even the stocks that support his young trees seem to quiver with their own green life. The young men stand on a path of damp beaten earth, their sleeves brushing tangled roses, their hems stuck with briars. They are speaking in low voices, and as he approaches they break off and look at him, shifty, almost guilty.

Rafe says, ‘I cannot think how this has happened. It seems someone has taken letters of yours, or memoranda. It would not have occurred when I oversaw your desk.’

‘I assure you, Sadler,’ Richard Cromwell says, ‘there is nothing leaves this house that should not. Nor word, nor paper.’

‘Every household has traitors,’ Call-Me says.

Richard Riche says, ‘We would not for the world any baseless rumour traduce your reputation. Or set up a misunderstanding between you and our royal master.’

Mr Wriothesley says, ‘Your friends have often begged you to remarry.’

‘For God’s sake!’ he says. ‘What has happened?’

‘Chapuys seems to have some information, or has drawn some inference. He says that the king has promised the Lady Mary in marriage. To you.’

He is silent. ‘By the bones,’ he says. ‘I gave that lady a jewel to wear. Or at least, I attempted it.’

‘The rumour is everywhere by now,’ Call-Me says. ‘It swam to Flanders, rolled through France, scaled the mountains and flew back to us from Portugal.’

‘And does the king know?’

‘If he does not, he is the strange exception,’ Riche says.

Wriothesley says, ‘Sundry letters between you and his daughter were warm in tone. Someone has stolen them.’

‘Not necessarily,’ he says. Freely he had shown the ambassador letters from Mary; she in turn had shown the ambassador letters from him. ‘We cannot say they were stolen. We may say that they have been misread, on purpose to make a ruffle in the world.’

‘Your friends warned you,’ Call-Me says. ‘We warned you in the garden at Sadler’s house. You gave her mother a promise, you said. Now it comes home to you.’

He sees Henry’s face, as it broods over the gift in the palm of his hand. I’ll give it her, he said, you find her something else. Has the king saved him from himself? He says, ‘The king has not, he could not make any such proposition, as to marry his daughter to his councillor. And if he did, then I would refuse. He cannot believe I would seek such a match.’

‘Not for now,’ Gregory looks shocked. ‘But if he chose to believe it …’

Riche says, ‘It is a potent weapon, sir, for your enemies to turn against you. For many believe that the husband of the Lady Mary, whoever he be, will be king one day. And any man who offers himself to wed her, stands in treasonable light.’

‘Yes,’ Richard Cromwell says. ‘You need not go on spelling it out and spelling it out, Riche. This is my uncle’s reward for his goodness. He saved her, and now they say he did it to serve himself.’

He thinks, when fire breaks out you run to the rescue with a bucket. But it’s not the smoke and flames that kill you, it’s the bricks and timbers that fly out when the chimney blows up.

Gregory says, ‘Here is what to do, sir. Nothing will counter the rumour unless you can say, “I am married already.” Go out into the street and offer yourself to the first woman you see.’

‘I concur,’ his nephew says. ‘Old or young. Whatever her condition or degree.’

‘If she is already wed?’

‘Leave that to us,’ Richard says. ‘I am sure we can see off a husband. What do you think, Riche?’

The ghost of a smile: ‘We will dispose of him. Most of us do wrong, if we know it or not. Enquire into any man’s conduct, and I am sure some charge will lie.’

‘Or we can just knife the fellow and toss him on a dungheap,’ Richard says. ‘It’s what they think we do, anyway.’

‘I’ll knife the ambassador,’ he says, ‘when I see him.’

He finds Chapuys in his garden, sitting beneath a tree, a book on his knees. He proffers it: A Dialogue between Law and Conscience.

He takes the book and turns it over in his hands. John Rastell’s printing. ‘I can lend you the second part. But it’s in English.’

‘It continues?’ The ambassador is surprised. ‘I thought all was said. Matters of conscience do not fall outside the law. Therefore, what need of special laws made by churchmen?’ He takes the book back. ‘Soon, some Englishman will ask, what need of churchmen? Why not every man his own minister? The Germans are saying it already.’

He says, ‘I believe I am to be married.’

At least Chapuys has the grace not to lie. He does not deny knowledge of the rumour; he simply waves a hand and denies he is its source. ‘My dear Thomas, do you believe I would say such a thing of you? It would lead to your murder by the noble lords of England, and then I should have to deal with the Duke of Norferk as chief minister. And – I swear by the Mass – the mere thought of it and I am withered by ennui.’

‘I think you are trying to ruin me,’ he says.

‘Please,’ the ambassador signals to his people, ‘a glass of this excellent Rhenish?’

‘Put it on a sponge,’ he says. ‘I’ll have it when I’m nailed above London.’

‘You blaspheme,’ Chapuys says pleasantly. He hands a goblet. ‘I have only reported what I have heard from honourable and good men – that the king means to bestow his daughter on an Englishman, and has chosen you. But I have said to the Emperor, I believe Cromwell will decline the honour. He admits he is a blacksmith’s son, and is not lost to all sense.’

‘I could hardly deny my father.’ He thinks of Walter plunging his head in a water butt at the end of the day: coming up spitting, and spluttering for air. Why did he do it? He was no less filthy afterwards.

‘Of course, if the king did make the offer, face to face,’ Chapuys says, ‘how could you refuse him?’

‘He has not. He will not. He could not. He would rather see Mary dead. His pride would not allow such a match.’

‘Ah yes,’ the ambassador says, ‘his pride. I know from my own observation that the Lady Mary blushes when your name is mentioned.’

‘She blushes with rage,’ he says. ‘She is thinking how she will kill me when she has the power. Crucifixion would be a mercy.’ He downs the Rhenish. ‘She will hate me worse now. By the way, I like your cap badge. That is ingenious work.’

He could swear Chapuys pales. His hand goes to it: a marigold, a petal tipped with a pearl. But he is not a seasoned diplomat for nothing. He removes his cap, and begins to unpin the jewel. ‘Mon cher, it’s yours.’

He almost laughs. ‘You are gracious.’ The traitorous emblem rolls into his palm. He puts it in his pocket. ‘I shall fix it on later,’ he says. ‘Before a mirror.’

At home Rafe is waiting for him. ‘It is a sorry tale against Chapuys. After our amity in my garden.’

‘Oh, Chapuys is not our friend.’ He thinks, should I show him the cap badge? But does not.

‘And now?’ Rafe says.

‘Now let us visit the French ambassador and see what he knows.’

‘Monseigneur is from home,’ says the usher. Then, as if he might not understand, he says in English, ‘He is out.’

‘Really?’ He removes his hat. ‘Not just playing at being out? He didn’t spy me from the window? If I were to lift the lid of that chest, I would not find him crouching there with his knees under his chin?’

The ambassador in residence is Antoine de Castelnau, Bishop of Tarbes; and at the thought of a bishop crammed into this ridiculous posture, the usher cannot help but smile. Or perhaps it is because Cremuel rewards well, that he is so affable? ‘But milord, another friend of yours is within. Come …’

Jean de Dinteville is sitting by a good fire. Outside the birds hang listless on the bough, and lawns are baking to straw. ‘You!’ he says.

‘Alas, Thomas: your manners. “Welcome back, ambassador,” is the usual greeting.’

‘We shall have the pleasure of a long visit?’

‘Not if I can help it.’

‘But what brings you?’ You are on the scent of disaster, he thinks. Nothing else would fetch you. ‘Have you heard of my forthcoming nuptials?’

The ambassador does not smile. ‘My king said, get over there, Jeannot, bring Cremuel our felicitations in person. It will mean all the more, he said, coming from an old friend.’

He snorts. ‘He wants me dead, not wed.’

‘He lives in hope.’

‘If these ludicrous rumours take hold in France, I trust our own ambassador to pour scorn on them.’

‘Well, certainly, Bishop Gardineur does not see you as a fit spouse for a princess. He sees you more as – how does he put it? – fit to shoe horses.’ Dinteville turns his sad dark eyes on him. ‘You seem disconcerted, Thomas? You were not prepared for treachery? What do you expect, of Chapuys?’

He, Cromwell, edges away from the hearth. ‘Are you really cold? You can’t be cold,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I expected. Not this.’

The ambassador stirs crossly inside his furs. ‘You think the Emperor and his people will be grateful to you, because you kept a promise to Catalina. I assure you, Cremuel, they think it is some trick you worked, at the bedside of a dying queen. They hold you a man of no honour nor compunction. But then, they think the same of Henry, so they would not be surprised at anything he did. Nor are we surprised.’

‘I don’t know what else I can do,’ he says. ‘I dealt fairly with the girl. Henry would have killed her. I saved him from a great crime.’

‘I don’t doubt. And now you must save him from another. I mean the Queen of Scotland’s daughter. What will you do there? If they say you preserved Mary for your own usage, they will say the same again. I have seen the Scottish princess. She is a sweeter morsel than the king’s daughter, is she not?’

He sees himself, coughing, labouring through the smoke. I’ve got you, girl! Carrying the maiden from the inferno. Bang! The house has gone up. He sprawls beneath the debris.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘if you walked about, ever? Get some air? Stir your blood? When Parliament rises, come out to the country with me.’

‘I assure you,’ the Frenchman says, ‘diplomacy excites me enough.’ He waves his hand at a blowfly that has taken his furs for some carcass; in the heat of midsummer a smell of must creeps through the room. ‘Take heart. I think my master King François may make you offers. I have told him, you should have regard to Cremuel and put greater sums in his pocket. My king understands that you do nothing except for money. And he sees that although you may be a heretic, you keep Henry from war. If it were not for you, he might be still indulging his belief that he is ruler of France.’

‘What does your king want?’

‘Calais.’

‘Never.’

‘Give it on your terms, or one day soon we will take it on ours. As you will concede, Henry has enough to do, to keep his own little kingdom. His foot should shrink from French soil. If he keeps within his own walls, perhaps we will not molest him. But then again, perhaps we will.’

At the envoy’s door, Christophe is entertaining a crowd of his compatriots. He breaks away from them, shouting, waving a fist in farewell. ‘I have been telling them,’ he says cheerfully, ‘that you have the vigour of a bull, and very fit to get offspring on the Lady Mary. But they say, that is why the king chooses Cremuel – on purpose to dishonour the granddaughter of Spain. They say that if you have children, Henry will make them scrub his floors. They will scour out privies for a living and haul shit in carts by the light of the moon.’

18 July, Parliament rises. Tom Truth is attainted. All he has – not much – is forfeit to the king, and he is entitled to nothing but a traitor’s death. Each dawn he will wake listening for footsteps. First comes Kingston or his deputy, always before nine. After him the priests.

‘Is his date to be deferred?’ he asks the king.

Henry says, ‘Yes. He can wait.’

‘And Lady Margaret? You know, sir, she was much misled. An innocent maid, sick at heart, and hopeful of your Majesty’s forgiveness.’

‘I shall allow her – I shall allow them both – an interval to think on their follies and crimes, before they receive their deserts.’

As the king and queen begin their progress to Dover, French ships are seen haunting the coast. In London, after their months of argument, the bishops make a statement of faith, which comprises ten articles. Rumour comes from Basle that Erasmus is dead. Hans, who has people there, says it is true.

In one of his last acts before departing Whitehall, the king has confirmed and augmented his state as Vicegerent of the church, and knighted him, so he is Sir Thomas as well as Lord Cromwell. If the king believes he has tried to entice, lure or seduce his daughter Mary, he gives no sign: amiably, he lays plans to see him, when business should spare him from the capital. Richmond is still confined to the sickroom, but the king says, if we linger the whole court may fall ill. ‘Be sure and send me Gregory,’ he says, waving a farewell.

His son is in demand. From Somerset to Kent, from the midlands to the northern fells, castles and manors compete to entertain him: a pleasant youth of competent good looks, never over-familiar but at ease with great men, discreet with servants and gentle with the poorer sort; able to play upon the virginals and lute, to sing his part, converse in French, and to take his hand at any game of skill or chance, indoors or out. On the hunting field he is tireless and without fear. He practises daily in the butts, giving example thereby – only modesty prevents his being as sharp as his father with the longbow. He, Lord Cromwell, thanks God daily for his accurate view of the middle distance. For close work now he needs spectacles. They are clumsy things, but Stephen Vaughan sends him good lenses from Antwerp. Sometimes his clerks read out letters to him. They mean to save him strain. He says, ‘Every word, mind. Not the gist of it. Not your version. Every word.’ If they cough or hesitate he makes them start again.

At Austin Friars, he asks Mathew to bring him The Book Called Henry. He hopes, though he lacks time, to record everything he has learned since Anne Boleyn was taken to the Tower. He means to set down the sum of advice he gives to the king’s councillors, especially those recently sworn. Their part is to animate and quicken virtue in their prince. If Henry can think himself good, he will do good. But if you cast a shadow on his soul, comparing him to princes who are morally perfect and lucky as well, do not be surprised if he furnishes you with reason for complaint.

Sometimes he reads a little in the book, to restore his faith in himself. He has hopes for the volume. It need not be long, but it must be very wise.

The day after the king’s departure he is at the Rolls House on Chancery Lane. Richard Cromwell comes in and lays papers before him. ‘Verses come up from Kent.’

He holds the papers to his face, imagining they smell of apples. It is Wyatt’s hand but as he reads he asks, ‘Is this his verse?’

‘It came from his desk, sir.’

‘So we are spying on Wyatt, are we?’ He is amused.

What he sees written are the names of dead men. Rochford. Norris. Weston. In mourning wise since daily I increase … ‘He increases,’ he says. ‘Why does he?’ He reads. Brereton, farewell. ‘Brereton, good riddance,’ he says.

He slaps the paper flat on the desk and runs his finger down the page. ‘Mark is not forgot.’ He pictures the boy’s whey-face. A time thou had’st, above thy poor degree … Addled, desperate, banging on a door in the middle of the night; shut in the dark he believed a phantom had caressed him, with feathers for fingers and holes for eyes.

He thinks, these lines lack form and force. Some of them are more Tom Truth than Tom Wyatt. And yet they present to him those corpses, promiscuous, heaped upon a cart: their pale English limbs intermingled, their heads in sodden bags. And thus farewell each one in heartiwise. The axe is home … He says to Richard, ‘You see that the writer does not plead their case. He says they are dead, he does not say they should be otherwise. He calls George Boleyn to account for pride … and here he says he scarce knows Brereton. So why mourn?’

‘Because grief spreads as a contagion, sir. It grows day by day.’

‘Up to a point.’ He knows about grief. He reads out loud. ‘Ah, Norris, Norris, my tears begin to run, to think what hap did thee so lead or guile, whereby thou hast both thee and thine undone …’ He breaks off. Is that ‘guile’? Or ‘guide’? ‘You note, he does not say anyone else has undone Norris. He does not say someone led him. He says chance led him, or circumstance.’

Richard says, ‘He believes Norris was guilty. It is plain enough.’

‘Well, well,’ he says. ‘And I thought I arranged his fate. But perhaps he did it all himself.’ He holds the paper up to the light. There are no scores or corrections. The watermark is a unicorn.

Richard says, ‘I do not know if these are Wyatt’s own verses, but whoever made them, he knows what passed. You see there is no mention of the lady.’

None is needed, he thinks. Anne is always in the room.

Richard says, ‘Perhaps Wyatt wrote it after all. With his left hand.’

Or his double heart. ‘It changes nothing,’ he says. The axe is home, your heads be in the street. It is only one man’s opinion. But it is one more blow to our faith in our judgement. We did thus, and thus: we might have done less, and let guilty tongues speak for themselves.

He watches as Richard draws the papers together. Pray for the souls of those be dead and gone. ‘I’m going to Mortlake,’ he says. ‘To my new house.’

On his first night he cannot sleep. He walks in the garden till dusk, deciding what needs to be done first: some old rotten stumps to haul out, and fresh planting. He walks the rooms of the house, replanning them, extending them: hall, great chamber and gallery, chapel and library, and the kitchens, sculleries, pantries; the wood store and coal store, wet larder, dry larder, bakehouse. This chamber could be for Call-Me, he thinks, when he stays, and Richard could have this corner room next door – new windows, perhaps? There is still material left over from the king’s rebuilding of Hampton Court, he can order it sent by barge. The principal chambers are served by a privy stair; he will need to set a guard there.

He knew this place in the time of his sister Kat and her husband Morgan Williams. The Williams family had a house on the river, almost under the manor’s wall. They were substantial people, good at laying plans: Thomas, they would say, you’ve not a bad head on your shoulders and if you got away from Walter you could make something of yourself. They imagined he might go as clerk to some cronies of theirs, or be kitchen steward for some dotard, work his way up to book-keeper for a great man. He pictured himself going to Morgan Williams’s tailor and getting a good town coat like his: wearing that coat when, at thirty or thirty-five, he dipped his children in old Bouchier’s font in the parish church. The manor house had always belonged to the archbishops. His uncle had worked in the kitchen one time, and half the lads he knew had picked up pennies for carting wood, for unloading at the wharf, cleaning the fishponds. It did not seem possible he would enter those gates as anything other than a labourer: that he would walk in one day with building plans in his hands, with a new owner’s appraising eye. After all, he never aimed to be an archbishop.

If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you. When you are Lord Privy Seal you must walk abroad with solemn countenance, looking chosen by Jesus, like More did when he was chancellor. Once he had shrugged off his early life – the Williamses and their plans, as well as Walter, his slaps and kicks – he did not think he would ever come back to those streets. But we yearn for our origins; we yearn for an innocent terrain. Ship Lane has always been there, running downhill to the wharves. The town he knew had been a territory of back alleys and rat-runs, robbers’ dens with broken doors, keel-up boats rotting, frayed rope dissolved into vegetable matter, riverine mud and riverine gravel. His birthplace squatted there, around the bend in the river.

On his journey today from London, he felt he brought guests: Norris and George Boleyn, young Weston, Mark, and William Brereton. As he stepped out of his barge they stepped out too; they stood on the banks of the Styx, waiting to cross. They died within minutes of each other, but that does not mean they are together now. The dead wander the lanes of the next life like strangers lost in Venice. Even if they met, what would they have to talk about? When they stood before their judges they edged away from each other, as if fearing contamination. Each man had made a case against the other, hoping he might save his own life.

Get out, he tells them. Don’t think you can move in here. Pay the ferryman, and away you go. His spaniel turns in his arms as they walk in the twilight, her muzzle raised, her tasselled ears pricked; though she is small of her kind, her nose is as sharp as a hunter’s. There is always a current of disturbance, till a house settles about you: till your dog finds its way to the hearth and the sheets to the beds, the beef to the table. There is a scent in the air that reminds him of something from the past – it is yeast, perhaps, hops – though when he was a boy, they had no hops but what came in on the boat; the hometown brewers still used burdock root or marigold. Hops poison dogs, they said, when foreigners boasted about why their ale kept better.

He remembers standing behind the king, at his shoulder, as he signed the death warrants in May: Rafe Sadler, silent, at the king’s other hand: the windows open to admit soft air, and the king an unwilling scholar, truculent as some infant set down for the first time with a slate. It is hard labour for Henry, it is irksome toil, signing lives away. And the king’s hand rests, it seems, for long moments together, to allow him to view the half-made strokes – as if they might form by themselves and relieve him of the task.

Henry Norris, yes. He wills the royal arm to move. William Brereton, yes: he can feel, as if he himself were the king, the concentrated power of Rafe Sadler’s gaze on the nape of his neck. The lutenist Smeaton, yes, that is easily done, ink slips like oil onto the paper, into the vital space: resolving easily, a day or so from now, into the boy’s liquid death. As a man of no birth or breeding, Smeaton should have been strangled in a noose and, before he died, his guts pulled out before the crowd. But he had said to Henry, ‘Be merciful because …’

The king had said, ‘Why would I? Why would I show mercy, to a man who has debauched a queen of England?’

‘Mark is very young and fearful. No creature in terror can make a good death. And he must be sensible of his sins at the last, and able to frame a prayer.’

‘Do you think that a man meeting the headsman is composed?’

‘I have seen examples.’

Henry had closed his eyes. ‘Very well.’

And there Henry had paused. One saw again a child, bowed under the heavy grief of infancy: the schoolmaster’s mauvais sujet twisting in his seat, kicking his stool, watching out of the window as a blithe day draws to its close. I could be out there, the child thinks, in the last of the sun. Wherefore must I engrave these letters, does my tutor hate me that he keeps me to this task? And from the table before him, with a sigh, the king had picked up his little knife (smooth ivory handle) to mend his pen. ‘Weston,’ he said. ‘You know … he’s very young.’

Over the king’s head, his eyes had met Rafe’s. It must be all of them: no doubts, no exceptions. All are guilty.

Rafe reaches out, takes the knife and the quill, sharpens it for the king. Henry receives it with a murmur of thanks: always gracious. He takes a breath and, neck bent, patient as an ox yoked to his future, he reapplies himself to his task: Francis Weston, yes. He, Cromwell, thinks, I have done this before, surely? Some other time, some similar form of coercion?

Henry’s arm, his jewelled and heavy sleeve, trails across the table; an ink blot forms by Weston’s name, and blooms there; it unfolds, a solitary black flower, and forty years glide into ink-dark. His face does not change, he can trust it for that, but he is a child now, and standing, arms folded, feet planted apart in the posture of a man. He stands in a diffuse glow; it is afternoon sun, and it kindles in a curve of burnished copper. He sees the low rippling gleam of pewter plates, the sharp mirror flash from the blades of kitchen tools, from paring knife, boning blade, cleaver. It is Lambeth Palace, the cook’s domain: the echo of raised voices, among them his Uncle John’s.

What has occurred here? Someone is to be whipped. The kitchen steward’s hand slaps the table. The misdeed stated: who and what and why. (Well, not why, no one is interested in why.) The theft, the infraction, the breach – of manners or protocol, piecrust or bowl: the kitchen sin, the pantry crime: whatever it is, Uncle John’s senior means to skin somebody for it, he is bellowing his intentions so loud that his voice bounces around the cold vaulting above and reverberates in the chambers of the skull. And it is the eel boy who sits weeping, neck bent, knuckles pressed into his eyes, while the kitchen steward pummels him for information: the red-headed eel boy who he, Thomas Cromwell, had half-drowned in a water butt only yesterday. ‘It was me!’ The eel boy is streaked with angry tears, nose bubbling with snot, eyes screwed tight. ‘Leave me. Get off me. Enough. It was me.’

He hides his smile: a bad week for the eel boy.

It is only as the boy is hauled away to his punishment, and the knot of gawping menials disperses, that his uncle says to him, his voice low: ‘You demon, it was you, wasn’t it?’

‘What, me? I was nowhere near. You heard him. He confessed.’

‘Yes, but he had no choice. God alone knows.’ John turns away. ‘Could you not rub along with the little wretch, he being a townsman of yours?’

‘People from Putney don’t like each other. You know it.’

‘You’re as twisty as a skewer, Thomas. Where will you end up?’

Whitehall, it seems. The king lays down his quill. He rubs together the tips of his fingers; right, done, deo gratias. Rafe whisks the paperwork away. Each stroke of the pen will translate into a stroke of the axe. Like the eel boy, they will understand that if Thomas Cromwell says, ‘You did it,’ you did it. No use arguing. It only prolongs the pain.

Outside the room he says to Rafe, ‘Get those warrants to the Tower before he changes his mind.’

‘Sir …?’ Rafe’s glance, puzzled, travels to his master’s hand. He is holding – how did it get there? – the king’s penknife, ‘HR’ picked out in letters of jet. Ah, he says, I had better … Rafe says, I will, I’ll take it back to him, and he says, no, you see those papers into Kingston’s hands, then you can get home to Helen before it’s dark.

Rafe goes; one parting glance over his shoulder, flash of pallor above a swirl of black. He, Cromwell, moves back towards his master, the knife in his grip. He stands in the doorway, words on his lips: Majesty, I find I have this knife in my hand, though it belongs to you.

But Henry is at prayer. Beside the table, he is kneeling, uncushioned, on the stone floor: his eyes closed. Lips move: salve, regina. The mild evening is draped around him, the rosy light.

He drops the king’s penknife on the table and walks away. Not backing, as one does, from the presence of the monarch, but assured as a man in his own house, turning from someone in mid-conversation, quitting the room and leaving the door open.

Last night young Dick Purser had said to him, ‘Master, is the queen really guilty? Did she really go to it with all those brave fellows?’

No use to say, she is not on trial for that, but for treason. A month from now, it is only the bawdry and lechery that folk will remember. ‘You want my opinion?’ He had passed his hand over his face. ‘You see, Dick, it is why we have courts of law, and judges, and juries … to protect us from the tyranny of one man’s opinion.’

Outside the king’s chamber, gentlemen servants had tried to converge on him, but he distanced them with an outstretched palm. ‘Go in to the king, he is praying but I dare say he will soon want his supper.’ He was irritated; if Henry has a mind to fall to his knees and beseech the Blessed Virgin, someone should have foreseen it and provided a hassock. ‘Light a fire, the dew is falling. Later he may ask for music …’

Clément Janequin, his psalms. The duets of Francesco Spinacino, the saltarellos of Dalza the Milanese: the pavane alla venetiana, pavane alla ferrarese: a new toccata from Capirola, quickly rehearsed from a manuscript decorated at its edges with the images of apes and leaping hares. The galliard, the basse-dance, Chansons nouvelles en musique à quatre parties: four parties now dead, or dead in effect, and five if you count George Boleyn. On other light evenings, the musicians will ease themselves to the royal threshold: the jellies go out, and the fruits roasted in honey, and as the waiters depart, the consort arrives, one with lute in hand: a single note, shivering, is drawn from a string tightened to a seraph key. With Norris, Brereton, and Weston gone, other gentlemen, chosen by Thomas Cromwell, will take their places in the privy chamber, close to the person of the king. But old servants are the best, the ones who know when you need to sing and when you need to pray. Will death stop them jotting their names on the roster, pricking their names on the list: six weeks off and six weeks on? By the third week in May, their heads are in the street. Autumn will come, the days shortening, and the shade of Harry Norris will slide back to his tasks, bobbing in a corner like a spider on his silk. There is a place, a sequestered place in the imagination, where the eel boy is always waiting to be whipped, where George Boleyn is always in his prison room, always rising in welcome: Master Cromwell, I knew you would come. As George had stood, his hands held out, an image had stirred inside him, and he was elsewhere: in some other enclosed space, the light failing, as if a shutter had half-closed. Above him a shadow, like the outstretched wing of an angel; blood in his mouth, and the curve not of feathers but of stone: and a chill, a deep chill in the marrow. A stone arch, a cellar, a crypt, where someone is waiting in the dark: someone who has apprehended pain for so long that he walks towards it, arms open, relieved that it is here at last.

He remembers himself at eighteen years of age, a shattered creature crawling from the battlefield, creeping through Italy till he came to rest – or a halt, anyway – at the gate of the Frescobaldi banking house. He did not know then whose house it was, only that he needed shelter. He had seen the city’s saint drawn on walls – the city’s patron, one should say: Hercules as an infant, crushing a snake in his fist; Hercules as a hero cleaning out the Augean stables with his bucket and his rake. So when the gate opened to his knock he crawled inside. ‘My name?’ he told the steward. ‘My name is Ercole, I can labour.’

Now when he recalls himself, helpless on the cobbles, he sees himself blackened as he crawls, as if escaping from a burning building. He walks the rooms of the manor at Mortlake, Lord Cromwell on home ground, the wash of the river familiar as the waters of his mother’s womb. He douses his light at last, and sleeps, and dreams he stands, wrapped in his cloak of night, on a wharf where the burning boats have fired the quays.

Towards morning, banging at the gate wakes the household. He rises, prays briefly, and goes down to see what the noise is about. It is Richmond’s people, come from St James’s to say the young duke is dead.

He says, ‘Is someone on the road to tell the king?’ (For once, this is not his role: Mortlake to the Dover road, one has not wings.) ‘Alert my lord archbishop. He should be ready to go to the king’s side.’

He thinks, Henry will say this is God’s punishment on him, for allowing the bishops to make new articles of faith. For stripping the number of the sacraments away.

‘Ensure word goes up-country to my lady Clinton. Remember the feelings of a mother, tell her gently – not banging on the gate and shouting it to the skies.’

Seventeen years back, when the king’s son was born, he himself had not been at court or anywhere near it, and so he had to rely on others to tell him about those days. Francis Bryan saw Bessie Blount when she first came into the queen’s household, fair as a goddess and not yet fourteen. The king would not touch her at that age; the most lenient confessor would have shaken his jowls at it. Henry danced with her, and waited a year or two, always mindful of Charles Brandon bustling behind him, ready to snap her up. Then Queen Katherine had to watch her as her little maid of honour filled out, plump and smiling and sick every morning. Katherine said nothing, only praising her glowing skin. Why, she had said, I think our little Bessie is in love.

Bessie was whisked away before her belly showed. Her family were sensible of the honour and hopeful of a son for the king. It was the cardinal who arranged everything. The king never saw her afterwards – perhaps once, after the child was born. He received the compliments, insincere, of the ambassadors: this shows your Highness well capable of siring a boy, and surely God will not long deny your Highness the consolation of one born in wedlock? But everybody knew Katherine’s courses had stopped, and she would not bear another child.

It was Wolsey who set up a household for the infant, who found the new mother an honourable marriage, who filtered the funds through – the land grants and honours. Perhaps he looked after Bessie too well. Ten years on, with his power slipping away, his enemies unlocked their chest brimming with slights and derelictions, and out crawled a musty slander. They alleged that – taking their pattern from Bessie Blount – all the maids in England wished to become concubines. Harlots had flocked to the king’s vicinity, they said, hoping for rich rewards.

It appears, the cardinal had said dryly, I must add to my crimes the degradation of the married state, the corruption of virgins and the valorisation of pimps everywhere.

It is not, and never has been, the custom of the kings of England to attend the burials of their sons or their wives. At the death of Prince Arthur, the chief mourner was the Duke of Norfolk’s forebear, so word comes from the king that it would be fitting to follow custom, and for the rites to be arranged by the Howard that is now. And since Fitzroy was under the guardianship of the present duke, and married to his daughter, it seems proper that he should lie at Thetford, among the duke’s own ancestors. Instructions are that the removal is to be in a closed cart, the whole matter handled in silence.

‘What is Henry doing?’ Chapuys says. ‘He cannot hope to conceal that his son has died, can he?’

He says, ‘Eustache, I cannot tell you about the king’s state of mind. I am employed to make laws and mind the treasury. For the rest he has the archbishop.’

‘That dubious fellow.’

He looks at him sharply to see what he knows. ‘Heretic,’ Chapuys says. Oh, only that, he thinks. He is relieved. The ambassador turns back for a parting shot. ‘Richmond’s death is not a bad thing for the interests of the Princess Mary.’ He smirks. ‘Your bride-to-be.’

His familars gather at the Rolls House. Call-Me says, ‘My lord Privy Seal … you recall that day you went over to St James’s with Richard Riche? When Fitzroy was first taken ill? You sent Riche out of the sickroom, he told me. What happened? May I ask?’

He thinks, the son spoke treason against the father. But it doesn’t matter now.

Wriothesley says, ‘Richmond feared he had been poisoned. I heard him say so.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t start that up,’ Rafe Sadler says. ‘Or I’ll give you a slap.’

‘And so you could, little man, if you stood on a box.’ Call-Me decides to take it in good part; he is too interested in plots to be diverted. ‘If Richmond had been named in the succession bill, there would have been grounds for suspicion against Mary’s people. And even as it is, knowing Mary’s nature …’

Rafe says, ‘Never mind her nature. The king is reconciled with her. It cost our master no little trouble.’

‘Reconciled?’ Wriothesley snorts. ‘She has been forced to bow her knee. Do you think she will forgive? I do not.’

Gregory begs, ‘Boys, don’t fight. No one is poisoned. Surely.’

He says to Wriothesley, ‘Think what you like, but don’t go dragging this rumour around the Inns of Court. Or wherever it is you go.’

‘Or the brothels of Southwark,’ Rafe says under his breath.

‘Do you?’ Gregory is interested.

Rafe asks, ‘What are we going to say to Henry?’

It is the only question left. He must get down to Kent, and say something. Forty-five years on this earth, twenty-seven of them as King of England – and all he has to show for it are three bastard children, one of them now a corpse.

He goes to the Tower to see Meg Douglas, in his pocket a recent example of her verse. ‘Shall I read to you?’

Recognising her handwriting, she is startled. ‘How did you get that?’

‘Now may I mourn as one of late

Driven by force from my delight

And cannot see my lonely mate

To whom forever my heart is plight.’

‘I think you still don’t understand,’ he says. ‘There was no plighting. You can’t afford plighting. Your state was grave last week, my lady, but this week it is worse.’

‘Because Richmond is dead.’ She looks up. ‘That takes me nearer the throne. He is no longer in my way.’

God help her, she supposes that gives her some greater leverage. He says, ‘Can you imagine the king’s doleful state? They say he cannot speak for sorrow. He has been struck dumb for two days.’

She says nothing. He throws the paper down in front of her. She has written her name under the verse, what she thinks is her name now: Margaret Howard. ‘I have told the king how you were beguiled and misled. But now your eyes are opened and you are heartily sorry for what you have done. You repudiate Lord Thomas Howard, and you wish never to see him or speak to him again.’

‘But that is not true.’

‘It will be true, in time.’

‘I cannot live without Lord Thomas.’

‘You will find you can.’

‘You don’t know,’ she says.

He wants to ask her, what did you think would come out of this? That you would sit in a turret, and Tom Truth come riding over the hills, his lyre slung behind his saddle? And you at the high window, letting down your strawberry tresses? When Mary Fitzroy stood guard outside the door, did you know how your beau would secure you, with a brutal thrust that made you bleed? Did you know how he would use and spoil you?

She says, ‘My lady mother has written to me from Scotland. She says I must obey my uncle the king in all things. If I do not she will disown me.’

‘She is the king’s own sister, she understands him. After the summer we have passed, do you not think he is sensitive to his honour? You have chosen an evil hour to fall in love.’

He thinks, you have no notion how hard I am working for you. Neither had the Lady Mary. She ought to marry me, really, out of gratitude. So should you.

Constable Kingston is waiting for him outside. ‘Sir William,’ he tells him, ‘I still have hopes Jane will be crowned this summer. So move Lady Meg to the Garden Tower. She must live in apprehension till I can frame the king’s mind to mercy, and that will not be a while yet.’

‘Myself,’ Kingston says, ‘I would stop these letters going between. But I am told it is your pleasure your man Martin should act Cupid. Why encourage it, if you are trying to stop the king proceeding against her?’

‘I want their verses for the book.’

Perhaps Kingston thinks he means the statute book. Or a prayer book. ‘The book of poems,’ he says. The burning sighs. The frozen heart. Better the frozen heart than the perils of the thaw.

Kingston says, ‘Lord Thomas is a harmless young man in himself.’ There is something almost timid in Kingston’s bearing: this man of singular experience, fishing for some inkling of what comes next. ‘Pray God the archbishop can console the king in this last blow of fate. They fall so fast, I do not know how he endures it.’

It is dusk when he arrives at the Palace of St James, and at the news of his arrival, servants gather in whispering assemblies, hushing each other. The officers already wear mourning. The menials, in their livery of yellow and blue, have tied black bands about their sleeves. But all colours are fading to subfusc, the yellow bruised, the blue deepening to indigo. A man begs him, ‘Sir, my lord of Surrey is in the stableyard. He is picking the best horses for himself, and we are afraid we will be blamed.’

He quickens his step. The servant speeds along with him. ‘What will happen to us? To the household?’

‘I will take as many as I can. The king will be good to you.’

He feels no confidence in the latter. The king’s response to his son’s death, so far as one can understand it, is not sorrow but a jealous rage, as if he had been cheated of something. Norfolk has applied to him for better instructions: ‘Cromwell, what am I to do here? Closed cart? What does that imply? Shall I have to build a monument at my own expense? Or does Henry want me to shovel the boy into some common pit, like a churl who wears homespun and dines on a boiled onion?’

In the stableyard, he finds young Surrey, standing by as the groom Colins leads out Richmond’s black jennet. She is a gleaming and well-muscled creature of Spanish breed, nimble-footed in trappings of black velvet.

Surrey’s eyes flicker over him. No greeting. ‘He would have wanted me to have the beast.’

‘You must account to the king for what you take to your use. But no one will demur, if you clear it with my lord’s master of the horse.’

‘Giles will give me no trouble,’ Surrey says. ‘Besides, where is he?’

‘At his prayers, I hazard.’

‘I thought you did not believe in prayers for the dead?’

‘Perhaps Giles Foster does.’

Black elongates the young man’s spider limbs. As he turns, a red-gloved hand on the horse’s mane, a low shaft of sunlight catches him and he glitters, head to toe, as a web glints with dew. On closer inspection, it proves he is sewn over with diamonds. He should have thrown a cloak around himself, even at the risk of dimming his lustre; high-bred though the jennet is, she still smells of horse. Surrey reaches for the bridle. ‘Will you step out of my way, Cromwell? I want to walk her.’

He does not move. ‘It would be charity in you, as you and my lord were so brotherly, to give employment to some in his household.’

‘I suppose you have taken your pick already? I should have thought your retinue was bloated enough. I see your livery everywhere about the town. You employ some stout ruffians, Cromwell. I have never seen such evil countenances, and such readiness to fight, as I see in your people.’

It is true that he employs men who by reason of their dubious histories cannot find another master. He does not feel equal to explaining this to Surrey. He says, ‘I grant you, appearances are often against my boys. But I do not believe they will fight unless for good cause.’

‘Not even if provoked?’

‘Ah – in that case I could not say.’

He thinks, I could snap you in two, boy. He runs a hand along the jennet’s gleaming hide; the beast stirs, and he finds the tender place between the ears, rubs it. Surrey is crying: he buries his face in the bright saddle-cloth emblazoned with the dead boy’s arms. ‘He was my friend,’ he says. ‘But you, Cromwell, you would not understand it – the friendship that is amongst men of ancient lineage and noble blood.’

I understand, he thinks, your nose is running like any stable-lad’s. ‘Your father would not like to see you weep. Take this like a Christian man, sir. Richmond is gone where no harm can touch him, nor spoil the flower of his youth. He was a king’s son, but he will find a father in Heaven.’

Surrey’s face is mottled: tears, rage. ‘Cromwell, I wish I were dead,’ he says. ‘No, I take it back. I wish you were dead.’

He remembers the breakup of York Place: the rattle of treasure into the chests of other men, the scramble onto the river. He has many of Wolsey’s people among his own. The dukes took others. I wonder, he thinks, if Charles Brandon retains that clown who used to keep the hearth and chimneys at Esher? It gives him satisfaction, to think of Suffolk being smoked like a herring, from the year 1529 and every winter till now: and from now, unto the ending of the world.

He answers a summons from Jane the queen: finds her with a book in her lap, a Book of Hours. He thinks, I know that volume. It belonged to the other one.

Jane holds out the book. ‘This is hers, Anne Boleyn’s. She and the king passed it between them. The king has written an inscription, under the Man of Sorrows.’

He takes the book from her. Christ is kneeling, his flesh gory from head to heels, each bleeding cut fine as a wire. The picture is set within a border of peapods and ripe strawberries: the king has written some lines in French. ‘Lady Rochford has kindly translated it for me,’ Jane says. ‘I am yours, Henry R, forever. And then she replied to him.’

He cannot see the reply.

‘Look under the Annunciation,’ Jane says. ‘She had hope, of course, in those days. She thought she could bear a son.’

He finds the picture. A coy virgin with lowered eyes is getting good news: the angel of the lord is right behind her.

Jane recites, ‘By daily proof you shall me find/To be to you both loving and kind. Do you think she was kind to him?’

‘Not often.’

Jane’s hand moves over the book’s binding, as if it were a living creature she is soothing. ‘Sometimes, when the king has, so to speak, visited me, then he falls asleep in my bed. But he soon wakes because he has bad dreams. Then he kneels by the bed. He cries out, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. To that he appends Latin I do not follow. Then the gentlemen of the privy chamber come, and walk him back to his own chamber.’

‘And you, madam, I trust you then take your rest?’

Jane nods to Mary Shelton, who stands at her elbow. Mary curtseys and goes out, giving him a weary smile.

‘You all like Shelton,’ Jane says. ‘The king likes her.’ She waits till the door is closed. ‘My ladies say that if a wife does not take pleasure in the act, she will not get a child. Is that true?’

Jane waits. It seems that, humbly, she would wait all day: she knows she asks questions to which answers are not likely.

He says, ‘Perhaps consult with your lady mother? Or one of the elder dames here at court might advise you – the Countess of Salisbury?’

‘They will have forgotten. They are old.’

‘Your lady sister, then. Because she has two fine infants, I hear.’

‘Bess puts heart into me. She tells me, say an Ave, Jane, and the king will soon spend. She tells me she did not have much joy in her own marriage bed. With Oughtred it was like a military manoeuvre. Brisk.’

He bursts out laughing. Sometimes you forget she is a queen. ‘He did not beat a drum, I hope?’

‘No, but she always knew when he was on his way. Bess says, she wouldn’t mind a bouncing new husband. A willing young one whom she could teach. But the infants come when they will, she says, pleasure or not, and never mind what the physicians say.’ She holds out her hands for the book. ‘Forget this. I should not have asked you. You can go to the king now. Today he is not dressed as a Turk.’

In the king’s privy chamber he is surprised to meet Rafe. ‘You are on the rota, Master Sadler?’

An esquire says, waspish, ‘Master Sadler has his own rota. He is always here.’

‘He talks about my lord of Norfolk,’ Rafe says. ‘He is angry with him. And he has sent for Richmond’s inventories.’

‘Meg Douglas, does he say …?’

‘Not inclined to mercy.’

‘Right,’ he says.

A Genoese tailor is draping the king in black velvet. He greets the man, motioning him out. Henry says, ‘You practise still that Italian tongue.’

And its variants. The king knows enough Italian to sing an amorous ballad, but not enough to talk about money.

The tailor retreats, bowing, folds of night draped across his arms. ‘I am amazed,’ the king says, ‘that the Duke of Norfolk should so far forget himself as to ignore my wishes. I said a closed cart. I said, discretion. Now I hear that black riders went before.’

‘He did not want to dishonour a king’s son.’

‘He defied my intentions.’

‘He did not perfectly understand what they were.’

Henry stares at him: that’s no excuse. ‘Tell him I shall send him to the Tower.’

‘I durst not take that message.’ He surprises himself – because, as he delivers this useful lie, he smiles.

Henry is disarmed – like someone who discovers a child’s fear, and sees an easy means to dispel it. ‘If you fear Thomas Howard, then of course I shall relieve you of your task. I did not think you feared anyone. You should not, my lord. You have my authority.’

‘The Tower is filling up,’ he says. ‘Your lady sister has written from Scotland, begging that her daughter’s life be spared.’

‘I own Scotland,’ Henry says. ‘After Flodden I should have taken it back.’

He thinks, you did not have the men or the money. You did not have me. ‘The cardinal used to say, marriages work better than wars. If you want a kingdom, write a poem, pick some flowers, put on your bonnet and go wooing.’

‘Good advice,’ Henry says, ‘for any prince whose heart is his own. Or one who has the disposal of other hearts. But if princesses dispose of themselves to men of no fortune, only because they like their verses, then I do not know what world we live in any more.’

‘I move you to mercy,’ he says.

‘My niece is a shame and a disgrace. She gave herself to the first man who asked her. She gave what was mine to give.’

He thinks, I wish Cranmer were here. It is the bishop’s task to show how sins can be forgiven or redefined: to prove how adultery is not adultery, and killing no murder. It is he who holds the key to the walled garden of the king’s mind; he knows its shady walks, its allées, its rank corners where sunbeams never creep. ‘It seems to me,’ he says, ‘if a word is given lightly, in haste, by a young person, without the advice of sober friends, under the intoxication of love, without knowledge of where it will lead … I ask myself, sir, does God in His wisdom not wink at such a promise?’

‘God is not mocked,’ Henry says. ‘As St Paul is pleased to tell us, men reap what they sow, and women too. To take an oath and not to mean it, that is blasphemy. And if words are no more than breath, if words are air … if they are not bonds, if they are not honour …’

‘I speak of lovers. Not princes.’

The king turns his face away. ‘True, there is a difference.’ A pause. ‘There are great lords and rash young women who have cause to be grateful to you, my lord Cromwell.’

He inclines his head. He thinks, Wriothesley will be amazed, that once again I have let Norfolk wriggle away, when I have him on the hook. He imagines himself shouting through to Thomas Avery, who does his accounts: invoice him for my fee, mercy is not gratis.

The king indicates a bundle of papers – inventories, as Rafe had said. He leafs through. ‘See Lady Mary gets the silver plate from Richmond’s household. The gold plate to me, of course.’ He turns the pages. ‘These sables and the lambskins, they should be sent to my officers of the Wardrobe. The tapestries … Moses found in the bulrushes … the plagues of Egypt … Moses leading his people through the deserts of Sinai … Make sure my son’s household stuff does not leak away to his mother’s people. I have done a great deal for Bessie – Lady Clinton, I should say – and am not inclined to do more. And beware of Norfolk’s daughter too – I want her goods listed, so we are sure they are not suddenly augmented by what should come to me.’

‘She will be due a settlement, sir. She is my lord of Richmond’s widow, even if she is still a maid.’

Henry snorts. ‘You wonder if she could be a maid, when she has embroiled herself in this affair of my niece, and filthied her own name. What should a virgin know of assignations, of back stairs and greased locks?’

So this is how it will be. He will use Mary Fitzroy’s misjudgement to cheat her of her dues and enrich the treasury. There could be worse punishments.

‘Let her father take her back to his own country,’ Henry says, ‘and see she lives chaste. A convent would be best.’ He glances down at the lists. Satin coats fringed with silver; habits of green velvet, to ride in spring through the woodlands when blossom smothers the bough. An image of St Dorothea with a basket and garland; Margaret of Antioch stamping on a dragon; George stamping on a dragon also, with his sword, spear and shield, an ostrich feather on his head. Spoons, chalices, bowls, censers, pyxes, holy water stoups; gold chains with enamelled white roses, red roses with ruby hearts. It is the king’s pleasure to read out the inventories, as if he is reading them to his dead son: I gave you life, and I gave you all this.

‘A small salt carved of beryl.’ Henry frowns. ‘The cover set with a ruby, its foot garnished with pearls and stones. They do not say what stones. And I do not recall it.’

‘A new year’s gift from my lord cardinal. The year escapes me.’

The king looks up. ‘How unlike you. I understand Surrey took the black jennet.’

‘And its tack.’

‘Tell Giles Foster I want the bay and the sorrel.’

‘Sir.’ He bows his head.

‘Mary Fitzroy may have geldings, to take her wherever she is going.’ A sour smile. ‘You think me heartless? Giving and receiving, when my son is bundled off to lie among strangers? But as the psalmist bids me, placebo Domino in regione vivorum. I will please our Lord in the land of the living, since it is only in the land of the living that we can do anything at all.’ Henry looks into the distance. ‘I hear my cousin Reginald Pole has been called to Rome. The Pope has charged him to lead a crusade against me. He is to visit the French court and stir them into action.’

‘I wonder how?’ The French armies have just marched into the land of Savoy. Their king has broken two treaties, so the Emperor is after his blood. François has more to do than attend on Reynold when he rolls up, lugging his volumes of canon law and bleating about his ancient lineage.

He says, ‘The French will do nothing for him. And the Pope has not given him ships, nor money, nor men.’

‘But he has fortified him with spiritual power.’ Henry’s mouth twists. ‘He is to take to the road.’

Henry fed this ingrate, Pole. But now he feels the poisoned lash of the Plantagenet tail, he feels the bite of the back-fanged snake. Henry leans forward. He seems to choke. You can almost feel his heart galloping – his face is as pink as Easter veal. With one flat hand he slaps the arm of his chair. ‘Traitor,’ he says. ‘Traitor. I want him dead.’

He waits for the fit to pass. Says, ‘The wars your father fought are not over yet. But I assure you, sir – means may be found in Italy, to rid a traitorous subject. Wherever Pole moves, my people will follow.’

Henry looks away. ‘Do what you must. I have told you before this, how Pole’s family laid a curse, after young Warwick was beheaded. My brother Arthur died at fifteen. My son Richmond, at seventeen.’

The king used to explain his lack of heirs by saying he had married his wife unlawfully. Now it seems the Poles are to blame. It is the more useful explanation, as things stand; there is no juice left in the other one.

‘You saw Margaret Pole at L’Erber,’ Henry says. ‘Or so I am informed. Keep going there. I should not doubt the whole family, I suppose. Yet I do.’

The king makes a signal. He bows himself out. Henry calls after him, ‘Dieu vous garde.’

He is glad Henry did not tax him on his visit to Margaret Pole. He does not want to say he went there to see Bess Darrell. He does not want to raise Wyatt’s name. The king says a man is forgiven, but that does not mean a man’s offence is forgot: and a woman can be pulled down, and stifle in his wreckage. The countess had left him alone with Bess, and her sewing. But then, as he was leaving, a servant intercepted him: My lady countess will see you.

The servant had led him to a panelled closet, the countess’s private oratory. Here, you were shut away from the noises of the city – hooves on the cobbles, shouts of draymen, clattering and hammering from the workshops beside the walls. A table was set up for Mass, draped with rich brocade; the altarpiece was of silver, shining indistinct figures going about pious lives. It reminded him of one Anselma had, in Antwerp years ago. Though as Lady Salisbury is one of the richest dames in England, it is likely hers is of greater value.

Margaret Pole had turned to him. ‘I hope you have not left Mistress Darrell in tears?’

‘Why would I?’

She had unlocked her writing box. ‘Here.’

‘Is this your son’s own hand?’

‘He has those about him who do the office of secretary. Italians, perhaps. I do not know their names.’

No, he thinks, but I do.

‘Believe me, Master Cromwell, I am no traitor. Why would I be? Henry has done everything for me. It has been a slow and painful path, from that low place I occupied when my father Clarence was attainted, to the honour I now enjoy.’

‘Surely you cannot remember your father. You cannot have been five years old.’

‘Even a child knows when one goes to prison and never comes out. My father did not die by the axe, he – God knows how he died, but I trust he was shrived, he did not lack a priest or die in his sin. I learned early, what treason was, and what follows it. I have seen four reigns – my uncle King Edward, my uncle the usurper, then the first Henry Tudor, and now his present Majesty, whose name I have reason to bless.’

He is reading Pole’s letter. It is bitter, as she says.

‘I scarcely knew my poor brother Warwick. He was a child when Henry Tudor shut him away.’

‘To keep the peace,’ he says.

‘To secure the throne. Our blood being so near it, and so much nearer, in truth, than his.’

‘But the Tudor won the battle. God favoured his army. He won England in the field.’

‘And none of us,’ she said sharply, ‘ever contested his victory. When my brother was led to the scaffold, I was quick with child, but I would have come to court to petition for him. I would have begged to wear mourning for him, and observe the proper rites, in which I would have found some solace, I dare say – but one does not pray for a traitor’s soul, nor wear black for him. At a traitor’s demise, one must smile.’

‘I do not think the old king would have required that.’

‘You did not know him. In those days no one was safe. When the Henry that is now came to the throne – well, then we thought we had come to the promised land. To right all wrongs, was his express desire: to make restitution, to see justice done. I had been widowed then for years. When my husband died I had to borrow money to bury him. But Henry restored me – in fortune, in title. He and Katherine bestowed on me the inestimable favour of making me governor to their daughter, their only child, trusting in me to fit her either for the office of consort to some great prince, or to rule as a prince in her own right. Henry favoured and promoted my sons –’

‘And they all married rich heiresses,’ he said. ‘Except Reynold, who as we know has his eye on a greater prize.’

She had positioned herself with her back to him, staring down into the courtyard. Whatever was going on there, she found it of interest. ‘I do not understand my son. I concede he has behaved with foolish ingratitude. But he is innocent of any greater design. He is drawn to chastity, to a celibate life. He would not wish to marry.’

‘Not even a king’s daughter?’

‘You must not judge others by yourself, Cromwell.’

She turned her head, to see that blow hit home.

‘All these years,’ he said, ‘you have learned to dissimulate. You say it yourself – you smile when you wish to weep. It must work the other way – weep when you would like to smile? So though you appear abashed by what Reynold has done, how can the king know you are sincere?’

She spread out her hands. ‘I can only appeal to the history that lies between us. I am a feeble woman, who never wore plate armour, nor links of mail. I have no breastplate, but faith in God. I have mounted no defence against my detractors – but trusted in the king, and in his skill to recognise those who are fit for his company and service.’

‘But now you see me,’ he said, ‘in his company and service. And you wonder if Henry knows anything at all.’

‘You are useful to him. How could I doubt it? And I did not mean to deprive you of your title just now. I am elderly and it takes one a while to become accustomed to new usages. We think of you as plain Master Cromwell.’

‘Well,’ he had said cheerfully, ‘if you could learn to think the Tudors rightful kings of England – and you say you could – I am sure you can come to think of me as Lord Privy Seal. And should I ever forget that I was born one of the lower sort, I will presume upon our friendship, madam, and beg you to remind me.’

That jolts you, he thought: ‘our friendship’: that sickens your stomach. That a Putney boy should presume! He says, ‘You claim that your son is not ambitious to rule. But others may be ambitious for him. Others may plan and intrigue for him, at home and abroad.’

Her eyes dart like birds in their nest of violet shadow. ‘I? You mean, I would do it? You accuse me?’

‘Great families are subject to reversals. For a decade, they climb; then their enemies hurl them down; then they overthrow their enemies, and lead them in a Roman triumph, in chains. It used to be that, if you and your kind stuck doggedly to the wheel of fortune, you would rise as far as you had fallen. But then comes a fellow like me, and knocks you clean off the wheel. Be advised, I can do it.’

‘There is a proverb,’ she said, ‘the truth of which is hallowed by time. “He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.”’

‘A feeble saying, and feebly expressed. It leans on that same conceit, the wheel. What I say is, these are new times. New engines drive them. Still,’ he smiled, ‘I congratulate you. You have said what my lord of Norfolk would say, but he dare not.’

‘The duke is a time-server,’ she said coldly. ‘He forgets, there were lords of Norfolk, before Howards held that title.’

‘But there were no lords Cromwell. Not before this. You hope there may be none after. But it is the present you must reckon with. You cannot pray nor curse me away – your women’s weapons are no use against me, nor the weapons used by priests, I am proof against them too. If the men of your family would relish an open fight, I am ready – I will fight any day for Henry against papists and traitors.’

Stock-still against the window’s light, she had stood with hands clasped, her voice frigid. ‘I am glad we have spoken plain. What Reynold has done against the king – God knows, I have never felt so sharp a sorrow; not when his father died, not when some other of my children have died. I shall write to him and advertise him of this. And I am sure you will read my letter by some means, either before it leaves these shores or after – so I shall not detain you now, while I write it. But I shall counsel you, my lord, and I beg you to hear me out. You speak of new times and new engines. These engines may rust before you have wheeled them to the fight. Do not join battle with the noble families of England. You have lost before you ride out. Who are you? You are one man. Who follows you? Only carrion crows, bone-pickers. Do not stop moving, or they will eat you alive.’

The low civil tone in which the countess said this had left him without a rejoinder. She had inclined her head, and walked out of the room.

He possessed the ground. The writing box gaped open; but she was right, he had no interest in its contents.

Outside his escort waited, marshalled by Richard Cromwell. His people carry clubs and daggers, and are ready to move on anyone who casts them a second glance. From Dowgate it’s but a step to Austin Friars, but death threats come in daily, some of them in verse. The Londoners who jostle them, the Londoners whose indifferent eyes skim over them, see no more than a sober merchant with his household about him, hurrying to a ward meeting or guild dinner. But there are those who have his features engraved in memory: so they claim, when they threaten to strike him down as he walks. Thank God I am not memorable, he thinks. One coarse-featured sway-belly, like my father in his prime: better clothes, though.

He says to Richard, ‘I have no illusions about the countess. Her sons have been feeding our secrets to the Emperor for years. Young Geoffrey Pole, the brother – he was so often at Chapuys’s house that Eustache had to beg him to stay away.’

The bell at All Hallows gives tongue, then St Mary’s after it. Richard says, ‘But you can see why the king fights to think well of them. It was he who restored their fortunes, and he does not want to take himself for a fool.’

St John Baptist rings out; then Swithun strikes up; further off, the bells at Paul’s. Across the street Richard shouts: ‘Humphrey Monmouth, or do my eyes deceive?’

The merchant, his old friend, halloos in reply. With his companion, he threads between two carts, steps over a stream of horse piss. He, Cromwell, claps their shoulders: ‘Will you come up to Canonbury to hunt?’

‘I will hunt with you,’ Robert Packington says. ‘Old man Monmouth can come and watch.’

Monmouth elbows him. ‘Old man! You’ll not see forty again, sir! I shall ride out with my falcon in your company, Thomas.’

It is a usual conversation. They raise the name of Tyndale, as he knew they would. He says courteously that he has done all he can through official channels, and now awaits the outcome. He turns the subject – the family, are they all well? But Packington turns it back: ‘Any visitors from Antwerp?’

‘The usual,’ Richard says, cautious.

‘No one new?’

He says, ‘No one who can tell us anything we don’t know.’

They part with hearty farewells. The merchants go chattering away. He and Richard walk on, silent. He says to Richard, ‘What?’

‘They sound as if they are planning a surprise. Perhaps it’s a present?’

He doesn’t need to say, I don’t like surprises.

Richard looks at him sideways. ‘So will you? Kill Reynold?’

‘Not in the street,’ he says.

It is a conversation for Austin Friars: for his private rooms. He says, ‘Francis Bryan would do it. He would rise to a challenge. Make a name for himself. He must sometimes wonder, what is the point of my life?’

‘Bryan?’ Richard makes a tippling motion.

‘True.’ He thinks, what other desperate men do I know?

‘I’ll go.’

Fear touches him. ‘No.’

‘I would need a company of rogues, but from what you say I could find them easy, in any Italian town. There are some gentlemen who might try to manage the business from afar. Now, I am not saying I would put the knife in myself. But I am saying I would see it done.’

‘I need you here, Richard,’ he says. God knows how much. ‘Tom Wyatt would do it. The king would forgive him everything. He would make him an earl.’

Richard hesitates. ‘The people about Pole … they might turn him. There are some subtle wits at Rome. I love Tom Wyatt, no man more, but he is not proof against sudden persuasion.’

He says, ‘When we ride to Kent to join with the king’s party, we will visit Allington, you and me, whether the king goes there or no. Sir Henry writes that he is failing. I am his executor, and should consult with him. And Tom Wyatt would be glad to see you.’

Richard slides a paper out of his pocket. ‘This came.’ He has been carrying it near his person. ‘Another verse. Not stolen. Offered freely.’

This time he knows it: Wyatt and none other. It is not strange if, once again, he laments those lost. Call it two and a half months – late May to Lammas-tide. The dead are no longer fresh, but copper-green flesh is still adherent to their bones. The verse is about slippage, fall, reversal of fortune, the casting down of the great by the great: around the throne thunder rolls, circa regna tonat; even as he sits under his canopy of estate, the king hears it, he feels it shudder in the stone flags, he feels its reverberation in the bone. He pictures the bolts, hurled by the gods, falling through the crystal spheres where angels sit and pick the fleas from their wings: hurtling, spinning and plunging till, with a roar of white flame, they crash down on Whitehall and fire the roofs; till they rattle the skeleton teeth of the abbey’s dead, melt the glass in the workshops of Southwark, and fry the fish in the Thames.

The Bell Tower showed me such sight

That in my head sticks day and night.

There did I learn out of a grate …

He cannot tell if Wyatt writes lean or learn. From the Bell Tower, no use to lean: you cannot see the scaffold on Tower Hill. But then, what had he to learn? He could not be ignorant of what was to pass. He did not think the men would come back with their heads on their shoulders.

He thinks, I didn’t have to go to the Bell Tower. This sorry procession to extinction – it was always in my sight. Chapuys had said, ‘You went to your house and dreamed it, then it came to pass.’

On the day of Anne’s death, Gregory saw Wyatt standing at a window; Wyatt looked down at him and made no signal. Did he watch the deer on her last run, her heart labouring, her gait failing? One supposed his eyes were inward, his gaze trained on nothing: where nothing soon would be. He has an image in his mind – and either it is a distant memory, or it is inserted there by a verse – of Wyatt’s hands scratched and bleeding, a tangle of roses in his grasp.

But surely, he thinks, it is Wriothesley I remember, at Canonbury: standing at the foot of the tower in the garden, the light fading, a sheaf of peonies in his hands.

They are in Kent, and the king calls him at dawn: he comes in, the locks rattling open, to free his prince from the oppressions of the night. Henry sits in his nightgown on a gilded and fringed stool, while a pale, perfect morning dawns outside the panes, and his features emerge from shadow, as if God were making him for the occasion.

The king begins, as he often does, as if they had just been speaking, and for some slight cause had broken off: a door opening, or a spark flying from the fire. He says, ‘In the days when I wanted her, and could not have her, when we were apart, Anne Boleyn and I, let us say I was at Greenwich, she was here in Kent – in those days I used to see her standing before me, smiling, just as if she were real, as real,’ the king stretches his hand out, ‘as real as you, Cromwell. But now I know she was never truly there. Not in the way I thought she was.’

The room smells sweetly, of lavender and pooled beeswax. Below the window, across the gardens, a boy is singing.

‘The knight knocked at the castle gate

The lady marvelled who was thereat.’

Henry lifts his head, listening. He sings:

‘She asked him what was his name

He said, Desire, your man, madame.’

When he steps forward into the full light, he sees Henry is crying silently, tears running down his cheeks. ‘The archbishop has given me a saying to guide me. It comes from the book of Samuel. “When the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept … But now he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.”’

Some fool comes in with a ewer of hot water. He waves the man back again. ‘A child’s loss is grievous, sir; it is as if we drag their corpses with us, all our days. But it is best to lay down your sorrow in some safe and consecrated place, and then walk on, looking to better times.’

‘I thought I had been punished enough,’ Henry says. ‘But it seems I will never be done being punished.’

‘Sir –’

‘You cannot know. You have only lost daughters, not sons. When my own day comes …’

He waits. He cannot guess how the king will conclude.

‘… you understand my wishes, and should you survive me I charge you to honour them. I wish to be buried in the tomb that the cardinal prepared for himself.’

He inclines his head. There is a sarcophagus of black touchstone, in which the cardinal never lay. All the parts are preserved, laid up in store. They await use, by someone who values himself in the sight of God and man, and wishes his name continued. Wolsey brought the artist over. Benedetto worked on it year after year, but as soon as he put in his account, the cardinal thought of something else. There are twelve bronze saints, and putti bearing shields emblazoned with the Wolsey arms. There are sober angels who bear in their hands pillars and crosses, and dancing angels with curly hair, their garments floating about them as they caper and skip.

‘You should be glad, Crumb,’ Henry says. ‘You always want to save money.’

‘Only if it sits with your Majesty’s honour.’

‘The angel who bears the cardinal’s hat,’ Henry says, ‘he will bear a crown instead. The griffins at the feet – I thought they might be wreathed in roses. Golden roses.’

‘I’ll talk to Benedetto.’

The artist has never gone home. Perhaps he has been expecting the cardinal to rise from the dead, with fresh suggestions? By now one of the skipping angels has developed a crack, between the fingers of his left hand. Benedetto says, no one will know, Tommaso. Not when he’s gilded and dancing up there on his pillar. But I’ll know, he says.

The king tells him, ‘Erasmus is dead.’

‘So I hear.’

‘I saw him first when he came to Eltham when I was a child. You would have seen him at Thomas More’s house, no doubt.’

The great man’s eyes passed over him, over Thomas Cromwell: saw him and forgot him. He says, ‘He civilised us.’

The king says, ‘Then he died with work to do.’

Henry seems frightened of himself, frightened of what he might say or do next. He seems weary, as if he might leave off being king, and just walk out into the street and take his chances.

The knowledge of this collapse of morale must be kept from the court. William Fitzwilliam catches him, outside the king’s door. ‘Before we left London,’ Fitz says, ‘he told me he thought he would have no more children.’

‘Hush,’ he says. ‘He is ashamed of himself. He thinks he is done for, only because he cannot follow the chase as he did when he was young.’

This summer, the king will not hunt on horseback. The game will be driven to him as he stands in the butts, crossbow loaded, poised to shoot. He can ride well enough, keeping an ambling pace, but not across rough country, because of the jolting to his leg.

‘It seems to me,’ Fitzwilliam says, ‘that he has some principle of rotation in his head, by which he humiliates his councillors in turn.’

‘True. At the moment it is Norfolk’s turn.’

‘At the council board he walks about behind us. He hovers like a cutpurse. If I met such a man in Southwark, I would turn and knock the felon down.’

He laughs. ‘But what would you be doing in Southwark, Fitz?’

‘When he gets himself behind us, we must rise and kick our stools away and turn and face him, which throws us off, makes us forget what we were saying – and then, if we address him, is it kneeling or standing?’

‘Kneeling is safest.’

‘You don’t.’ Fitz sounds accusing. ‘Or not so much as you did.’

‘I have too much business with him. He knows not to cripple me.’

‘Even the cardinal knelt.’

‘A churchman. He was trained to it.’

The cardinal, in his days as master of the realm, had spoken of God as if He were a distant policy adviser from whom he heard quarterly: gnomic in his pronouncements, sometimes forgetful, but worth a retainer on account of his experience. At times he sent Him special requests, which the less well-connected call prayers; and always, until the last months of his life, God fell over Himself to make sure Tom Wolsey had what he wanted. But then he prayed, Make me humble; God said, Sir, your request comes too late.

His servant John Gostwick has been checking the inventories of the Duke of Richmond. Among Fitzroy’s effects he finds a doll: no wooden mammet for a common child to play with, but the lively image of a prince.

‘Item: a great baby lying in a box of wood, having a gown of white cloth of silver and a kirtle of green velvet, the gown tied with small aglets of gold, and a small pair of beads of gold and a small chain and a collar about the neck of gold.’

Gostwick had called him to see it: he stood looking down at the likeness of the dead boy. ‘Wolsey gave him this. Keep it carefully, in case the king wishes to have his son in remembrance.’ The infant, he recalled, did not know his own father; the king gave me titles, Richmond had said, but the cardinal gave me a striped silk ball.

The summer passes. The king’s entourage winds through the leafy shires. In the deep woodlands, where the king may not venture, you meet the wily shades of boars and wolves, extinct forms: the stag who, between his antlers, bears the cross of Christ. He says to Fitzwilliam, ‘If he cannot hunt, we must teach him to pray.’

On the last day of July they are at Allington Castle. The king has wondered aloud if it might be time for Thomas Wyatt to receive the honour of knighthood. His father would like to see it, he says, as he enters into his old age, and whatever has lain between us, Wyatt and I, it is forgot; I know his faithful mind to me.

What he disliked was the short silence, among the gentlemen of the privy chamber, when the king mentioned Wyatt’s name.

Henry Wyatt says to him, ‘Thomas, I doubt I shall see another winter.’ One by one, those gentlemen depart, who served the king’s father, whose memories stretch back to King Edward and the days of the scorpion; men bruised in the wars, hacked in the field, impoverished, starved out, driven into exile; men who stood on foreign quays and swore great oaths to God, their worldly goods in sacks at their feet. Men who sequestered themselves in musty libraries for twenty years and emerged possessed of inconvenient truths about England. Men who learned to walk again, after they had been stretched on the rack.

When the men that were then look at the men that are now, they see companies of pretty painted knights, ambling through the meadows of plenty, through the pastures of a forty-year peace. Not, of course, if you live on the Scots border, where the raiding and feuding never stops, or on the Kent coast within sight of France, where you hear the war drums across the Narrow Sea. But in the realm’s heart there is a quiet our forefathers never knew. Just see how England is breeding: go out into the town, and the faces you see are those of children, apprentices, shining young maids.

Don’t look back, he had told the king: yet he too is guilty of retrospection as the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer before they bring in the candles, when earth and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the night-walking animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darkening air; when the page grows dim and letter forms elide and slip into other conformations, so that as the page is turned the old story slides from sight and a strange and slippery confluence of ink begins to flow. You look back into your past and say, is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing itself through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself – slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself, undone myself, have I forgotten too well; must I apply to Bishop Stephen, who will tell me how transgression follows me, assures me that my sins seek me out; even as I slide into sleep, my past pads after me, paws on the flagstones, pit-pat: water in a basin of alabaster, cool in the heat of the Florentine afternoon.

Time was when the cardinal knelt in the dirt, and he saw he was mortal, flawed and old. On Putney Heath, Harry Norris stared down at him, bemused, and his people had to hoist him on his mule; his heart and will had failed him, and with his heart, his joints. The jester Patch stood by cracking jokes, and he almost struck him, he should have struck him – but then how would that have helped the cardinal, his goods confiscated, his chain of office torn from his neck, and now his fool rolled in the Surrey mud with his skull cracked?

When they came to Esher, to the empty house, he had climbed to the top of the gatehouse, wanting to know if they were pursued. New-built when Wayneflete held the see of Winchester, improved by my lord cardinal, no place was more pleasant, when it was staffed and scrubbed; when the fires were blazing and the beds made and the arras hung, when the buffet was stacked with gold and silver plate; when meat was slapped and seared, fruit chopped and skewered and basted in butter, and all the air perfumed with scorching and sweetness. No one had known, even yesterday, how brutally they would set his master on the road, on the river, propel him to these gaunt rooms, the ovens cold, the fires ash, the thick walls not so much repelling the cold as encasing it, like a reliquary.

From the top of Wayneflete’s tower, the countryside beneath him was more imagined than real, stretching away in the darkness. It will soon be All Hallows, he thought. It seemed to him time had shuddered and slowed, as if the transit of heavenly bodies was retarded by the catastrophe that had overtaken his master and all England. It was drizzling. There were lights in the river. As he climbed down, the voices of those below curled up to him – rounded, as if in song. But when someone spoke his name – ‘Thomas Cromwell’ – it was very close, as if in his ear.

Some trick the building has, he thought. The staircase was a spiral of brick, and he had seen it by day, flesh-coloured, flowing from floor to floor. In the dimness where the torch-light failed, the brick was the hue of stale blood, but each twist held a slit of light, like a promise. Delivered to the foot, he emerged and blinked, a child born into a harsh world.

They had found candles to light the lower chamber. ‘Who will cook my supper, Tom?’ the cardinal enquired.

‘I will, I can cook.’

‘Come here, you’re cobwebbed.’ It was George Cavendish, one of the cardinal’s gentlemen. ‘Allow me, Thomas.’

He let George brush him down, passive as an animal: his eyes on his master, a bereft old man in borrowed clothes. He stood with his back to the brick, feeling the beating of his own heart: waiting to see what he would do next.