Thomas Cromwell 1-3

II

The Image of the King

Spring–Summer 1537

Hans does not like the pavonazzo. You cannot have a king who is purple from one angle, blue from another, green from a third, who shines and shimmers wetly as if evading the artist. Stick to crimson, sir, Hans says: it is my earnest loyal advice.

The king has not decided yet what kind of portrait he wants. He might ask for anything, from a picture that covers a wall to a miniature you can hold in your palm. But he agrees to be crimson. Each ruby is a tiny kindling fire.

In the kitchen at the Rolls House, the Lord Privy Seal holds a white basin, within it a pool of green oil, in which he is dipping pieces of bread, and giving them to passing boys to taste. Mathew, bustling in for his portion, sneezes loud enough to crack an egg. ‘That will be the plague,’ Thurston says.

‘Too early for plague.’

‘Then I blame our diet. Englishmen were never made to eat fish. Salt water gets in your brain. A German can live on vegetables, he eats what he calls crowte. A Frenchman eats roots and herbs – if he’s famished you just turn him out to grass. But an Englishman is bred on bacon and beef.’

‘An Englishman may ask,’ Mathew says, ‘why we still have Lent. Now we’ve kicked the Pope out, you would think we could enjoy a dish of tripe every day.’

‘The season will be easier this year,’ he says. ‘We can have eggs. Cheese. The king allows it.’

‘Naught but yellow and white,’ Thurston says.

The French and the Emperor are fighting by land and sea. Their war makes fish scarce, and that’s the only reason the king makes a concession. Cranmer complains that at the royal court even the minor feasts of the church are held with all the old superstitious ceremonies. How then can he convince the simple people to labour on saints’ days, instead of drinking ale under a hedge: to till and sow, instead of playing skittles?

‘There are willing butchers enough,’ Thurston says. ‘A man can purchase flesh even on Good Friday, if he has a shilling and a good wit.’

He holds up a palm. ‘If I knew the names of willing butchers, I’d have to close them down.’

‘Our master is second to God,’ Mathew says, chewing. ‘First comes the king, God’s deputy, and then comes our master, deputy to the king.’ He licks his fingers. ‘Sir, they are saying the French have given you a big present. I mean, not a lion or a fighting horse. A present of money.’

He relishes the last fragment of bread, sacramentally: pepper, grass: Chapuys sent the oil. ‘The king’s not averse to us getting our living,’ he tells Mathew. ‘It’s how it’s always been. We frighten the French, and they give us money. The king himself has a pension from them, from old King Edward’s time. Not that they’re good payers.’

Mathew’s brow clears. ‘As long as it’s true. If it were a slander, we’d have to wallop them.’ He sniffs and goes out, with a speculative slap of fist into palm.

‘I’ve no strength to beat anybody,’ Thurston says. ‘An egg won’t do it for me. I want a rib of beef. I could kill Christ for a taste of bacon. I reckon that was Eve’s sin – she never erred for an apple, she went wrong for a fat rasher.’

‘Oh, stop it,’ he says. ‘You’ll make me weep.’

And yet, you wonder who thought of this arrangement: the blind haul from Christ’s birthday, through freeze and sleet to Candlemas, and then weeks of penance, raw meatless days till Easter. Mid-March the trees will leaf and the birds sing, but you can’t eat beauty. Thurston says, ‘It’s all right for His Holy Majesty, I avow he stuffs himself with sugar. He calls for mead and malmsey, and drinks the cellars dry.’

In the blink of an eye, in the space of an Ave, he is somewhere else: he is at Launde Abbey, on the cardinal’s business: on a day of buzzing heat, a young fellow laughing with the monks in a garden. This abbey, where he ate honey scented with thyme, stands in the heart of England, far from the dangers of salt water. It basks in woods and fields, and summer or winter the air is sweet. When he visited for the cardinal he looked at figures as he was bidden, but he found it so blessed a spot that he could not see it through the grid or lattice of an account book. Now he thinks: I’ll have Launde for myself, when its surrender comes. I’ll build a house, and live there when I’m old, far from the court and council. It’s time I had something I want.

He thinks, I need to go back to the Charterhouse, the London Charterhouse, to lock myself once more in argument with those monks: men unused to speech, hermit-like, but eloquent in their dislike of what they call the king’s pretensions to rule their spiritual lives. Henry is only a man, they say: but he says, what else is the Bishop of Rome but a man, and not a fine example either?

He has pleaded with the king to keep the Charterhouse open. There is no abuse and no slackness there, and they never eat meat, not once in the year, but subsist on the fruit and herbs they grow for themselves. I will turn them to us, he has said, a little and a little. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. When he thinks of the blindness of these earnest men, he wants to weep. When he thinks of Farnese, the present Pope – Cardinal Cunt, as the Romans used to call him – he wants to cross the seas and mountains and grab him by the throat.

The third week in February, the court attends the christening of Edward Seymour’s daughter. She is his first child with his present wife, and she is to be called Jane, after the ornament of the family; the queen stands her godmother. Tradition keeps the king from such an occasion, though he looks forlorn. ‘Bring my jewel back safe, my lord.’

You wonder about these traditions, that shut out a king from occasions of common rejoicing. What law puts him, at a queen’s coronation, at a dizzying height above the action in a prayer closet? As his subjects roar gloria in excelsis, he watches through a squint.

Henry kisses the queen heartily before she descends the water stair, a pale doll wrapped in sables. Lady Mary is the other godmother; the godfather, the Lord Privy Seal. Under the canopy of the queen’s barge, he makes small talk with the ladies. Audley makes efforts at an impromptu council meeting, but he ignores him; he can talk to the Lord Chancellor any time.

They are no sooner on the queen’s barge than they disembark at the pier of Chester Place. No notice of the event has been given to the Londoners. All the same a crowd gathers, and cheers for Lady Mary as she is handed to dry land. As for Jane, they look on with indifference, giving their voices neither for nor against. They know she’s not Anne Boleyn. Nor is she the dead woman they still call Queen Katherine. But he has given money to women in the crowd, and when they shout ‘God bless Queen Jane,’ there is a chorus in support. People will shout anything, he thinks, once you start it up. That’s how it must have been in Lincolnshire, when the tumult began. Some rustic bleats ‘Follow the crosses!’ and the whole county is up.

The crowd recognise him. They call out: ‘Cold enough for you, Tom?’ He is a stout godfather, wrapped in black lamb and lynx fur. You cannot say the Londoners like him, but they know he has done good work in defending the city, and that he has vowed to buy and store arms himself for their defence. No doubt they prefer him to a Yorkshire looter. A stray voice pipes, ‘Cromwell, king of London!’

His stomach lurches. His head turns. ‘Friend, if you love me, sing some other tune.’

A consort of musicians meets them, piping them indoors. Garlands of painted roses lead them into the gallery. The christening party inspect the Seymour ancestors, painted on the wall. Today’s bundle of linen must be added into the picture – perhaps down at her parents’ feet, her red crinkled face like a flower on the forest floor.

Mary has been silent on the short journey. Her face looks wan under her gable hood. When she sheds her cloak, he sees she has fixed to her gown the pendant Hans cast: a ring, after all, was not practicable. At the font she touches it, as they stand side by side: ‘You see I am wearing your verses, in praise of obedience. Though my father gave them me, I know their origin.’

He inclines his head. ‘Madam.’

‘And thank you for my Valentine’s gift. You use me beyond my deserts.’

‘You look very well today,’ he lies. ‘Crimson is your favourite colour, I think?’

She murmurs, ‘Do not make light of what you did for me.’

Why would I, he thinks, when it nearly killed me?

‘You saved me, my lord, when I was drowning in folly. When I was almost past recovery.’ Her voice runs on, rehearsing her gratitude. But she won’t look at him, he notices. Her eyes are everywhere, but never on him.

Chester Place belongs to the ancient bishopric, and Seymour is even now wrangling over the lease. A shame if he has to move now he has had the ancestors painted, and the chapel reglazed at his own expense. Winter light filters through the plumage of the Seymour phoenix; the slumbering fire beneath the feathers is so deep a red you want to warm your hands at the glow. Glass angels coo and flutter: they hold tabors and shawms, scourges and crowns of thorns. Some hold hammer and nails, to nail God to the cross: Easter will arrive, and the Man of Sorrows must bleed.

Little Mistress Jane cries heartily at the font. It is a sign, the ladies claim, that the devil is departing. ‘Women are fanciful,’ Edward Seymour says, his tone fond. His wife Nan holds court from her great bed, where they go to kiss her and give her presents. They give money to the wet nurse, and to the midwife for seeing Nan safe, and then they take wine and wafers.

All the talk is of heirs and new-borns. Sir Richard Riche has been augmented, after the birth of many daughters, by a son at last. With stout independence, in a year when all the boys are Henry, he has called his baby Robert, and talks of him excitedly, as a sturdy child and likely to live. Any increase in Riche’s benevolence is of public interest. The treason of certain northern abbots makes it sure that their houses will be pulled down, and Sir Richard will be pleasantly placed to hand out the assets. Meanwhile the news from Calais is that Lady Lisle is pregnant, her child expected late spring, early summer. It seems like a miracle, the couple have been without offspring so long. Lisle is an ageing man, of course, but Honor had seven children with her first husband, though she married him when he was fifty-three already.

The Seymours show no pleasure at the news. They have old law suits with the Lisles, so they don’t care for additions to the family. But noble dames write doting letters to Honor, looking forward to welcoming a little Plantagenet into the world. Arthur Lisle may be a bastard, but he is still old King Edward’s blood.

He spies Lord Lisle’s man of business, bobbing on the edge of the gathering: ‘Spying, Husee?’

‘I bring a christening gift, sir. From my lord and my lady over the sea.’

He has some fellow-feeling for John Husee. Lady Lisle runs him ragged with her shopping lists, and she never wants to pay for anything, so he is constantly begging for credit: and he remembers his own early days, when the Marchioness of Dorset used to send him out for orient pearls, with only the price of oysters in his purse.

The Lord Chancellor heaves in view: ‘Ho, Husee! I hear in Calais there is nothing but singing all the day. And Lisle dancing as if he never knew what gout was.’

Husee makes a reverence. ‘I am explaining to my lord Privy Seal, sir – I have to list everything my lady Beauchamp has, for her lying-in, so my lady can get the same.’

‘Oh, I see that,’ Audley says. ‘She would not want any less for herself, in terms of her hangings, her gold plate, and so forth.’

‘My lady wondered,’ Husee says, ‘if she should come over for her confinement, so the child can be born on English soil.’

He, Lord Cromwell, rolls his eyes. ‘Calais is English soil. As the Lord Deputy’s wife, I hope she grasps that.’

Husee turns to him. ‘But if she’s to be confined there, she wants the silver font sent from Canterbury. Can you put in a word, sir?’

‘I’d send the archbishop to carry it, if Lisle would bestir himself. I hear of two priests preaching treason through the streets, and the governor turns his head and does naught. Tell him to truss them up and put them on a boat, addressed to me at the Tower.’

He thinks, if Cranmer turned up, font or no, Honor would bar the door. She would sprinkle holy water on the threshold, and throw blessed salt in his eyes.

‘I hear Lady Beauchamp has ermine caps,’ Husee says. ‘And if I could get the embroidery pattern for her nightgowns, my lady would be well pleased with me.’

Clearly we can expect no business to be done in Calais this year. Arthur Lisle defers to his wife, and he will never cross her while she is in pup. He says, ‘I mean it, Husee, you tell your master – either he catches me those priests, or he must come himself to answer for them. I am not patient for ever. Perhaps your lady mistress encourages him to slack his duty, but tell him I am watching him. I will have him out of his post and at the gallows’ foot, if he tries to play me for a fool.’

Husee sucks his lip. ‘I’ll tell him.’

‘Look out,’ Audley says. ‘The queen.’ He steps back, clutching his bonnet to his chest, as if Jane were a runaway horse. ‘Madam – we are speaking of Lady Lisle. Her great hopes of an heir.’

‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ Jane sounds bored.

‘May God in His own good time make your Highness a happy mother too. Your sister-in-law sets a glad example.’

‘Does she?’ Jane is puzzled. ‘I shall hardly be a happy mother, if I have a girl. I should think I will be sent back to Wolf Hall in a basket, like a fowl unsold on market day. What do you think, Lord Audley?’

She turns away. Audley’s jaw drops.

He looks around. ‘My lady Rochford, spare me a moment?’

Nothing urgent in his tone. Can he have mistaken Jane’s meaning? A pregnant woman will not usually stand godmother to another woman’s child, as she deems her future too precarious. He steers Lady Rochford aside. ‘It is true her courses have not come,’ she murmurs. Like Mary, Jane Rochford won’t look at him – her eyes are on the guests. ‘Her titties are swollen. She won’t speak till she’s sure. Let’s hope it’s stuck fast, eh?’

He stares at the queen. ‘Let me know when she decides to tell Henry.’

‘Yes,’ Jane Rochford says, ‘make sure you are at hand. He will be in a humour to hand out favours. He might give you … whatever it is you lack. Though that’s not much, is it, my lord Privy Seal?’

Five minutes, and the whisper has spread. Edward Seymour has his sister by the elbow: ‘I believe you have hope. Your Highness.’

‘We all have hope,’ Jane says sweetly.

Edward looks as if he would slap her: playing games, at a time like this! ‘We have waited long enough, sister.’

‘Oh, Edward.’ She sighs. ‘You are so eager for promotion.’

‘When are you safe to speak?’

He, Cromwell, says, ‘Highness, why delay?’

‘Because …’ The queen contemplates her reasons. ‘Because once the king has hope of a son, what will there be, to make him say his prayers?’

He and Edward exchange glances. She’s right. Whenever one of his queens has been with child, Henry has always been sure it is a male. Once he has an heir in the womb, once he can say again, ‘God is pleased with me,’ what will there be to refrain Henry from every desire? He might free all the prisoners in the Tower. Or he might go to war on a whim. King François is in the field himself, reports say: laying sieges, ordering up the big guns. Henry grunts and colours when he speaks of it. His leg is sore, and Thurston is right: the more miserable he is, the more sugar he requires.

He puts his hand on Edward’s arm. ‘Listen to your lady sister. Say nothing yet.’

In idle moments he has been planning a cake he could give the king for Easter: a huge marzipan one, gilded balls on top. Perhaps he will keep it for when the news comes out.

Jane’s eyes are like deep ponds on a still day.

As the short afternoon darkens, he is back at the Rolls House, writing letters to Flanders. They say Pole has spent all his money, and the Pope has given him none: but still Reginald struts, with his title of papal legate, trying to sell the idea of an invasion of England. Lord Darcy, and no doubt some other of the rebel lords, have sent him letters; we do not need to read them, to know the rebels take Pole for their king in exile.

Now he has learned through back channels that Pole is asking to talk to him: Reginald wants him to cross over to Calais, then meet on Imperial territory, both parties with safe-conduct. He, Lord Cromwell, has thought it wise to bring the matter into daylight: so he loses his temper in the council chamber, shouting that if he should find himself in a room with the traitor Pole, only one can emerge alive.

The king had watched him, head tilted, as if sceptical about his sudden passion. To reinforce it the Lord Privy Seal had shaken his fist in the direction of Dover. Richard Riche had gaped at him, and the Lord Chancellor dropped his penknife in shock.

He sands his papers. The prospect of an heir, he thinks, will strike Pole a blow to the heart. Though if Jane is in a happy condition, it changes our plans. The king will want to stay by her side this summer. He will never go north. There will be no coronation in York.

Christophe comes in. ‘That Mathew, sneezing,’ he says. ‘If he has a disease, you will not be able to go to court.’

At any time, the king is always afraid of contagion. And now, of course, every precaution will be necessary.

Christophe says, ‘Call-Me is here for his supper.’

He thinks, Mary looks at me as if she doesn’t know who I am.

Supper is pike, with rosemary and fried onions. Call-Me says, ‘I hear when Rafe is done in Scotland he will go to France.’

‘I shall try to get him home first. Helen says she is sick for the sight of him. She is expecting a child in the autumn.’

‘I suppose by now she knows the signs,’ Call-Me says. ‘It seems they took a liking to Rafe, the Scots?’

‘Who would not like Rafe? He goes to France now with messages to King James. James lingers there, does he not?’

‘Rafe will meet Bishop Gardiner while he is in Paris. He cannot avoid it. Gardiner is asking for his recall.’

He pokes his fish around the plate. ‘God forgive me, but I wonder why He ever made pike?’

Mr Wriothesley extracts a bone. ‘I imagine the bishop’s return would be as welcome to your lordship as hemlock in a salad.’

He sighs. ‘It will be a while before we taste salad. I hear from France there will be no cherries till July.’

Christophe brings almonds and dried fruit. Mr Wriothesley says, ‘I perceive how the Lady Mary is continually applying to you for money and favours. Lady Rochford says,’ he smiles, ‘that Mary avoids looking at you, only for the great love she bears you. You are too dazzling a sight for her maiden eyes.’

‘We have to be gracious to Lady Rochford,’ he says. ‘Without her, the king and queen might not be married. Anne Boleyn would still be queen.’

And our heir unconceived. It appears that despite his sharp ears, Call-Me has not caught on to the day’s most important news, because he only wants to talk about Calais. ‘Lisle is careless. You do well to warn him, sir. It is not only papists he is harbouring. It is sectaries, they say. Sacramentaries.’

‘So Chapuys tells me.’ He eats a fig, meditatively. ‘I’d rather be in bed with a scorpion than with Honor Lisle.’

‘I too,’ Christophe says loyally, coming in with cheese. ‘I would squash her beneath my foot. Are you sitting up writing your king book tonight?’

Call-Me turns a curious glance on him. But he does not ask.

When the northern lords have made their excuses for their conduct during the winter past, the king sends them home wearing the badge of St George. He decrees the red cross a mark of allegiance for all men who have a coat to pin it on: wear a red ribbon, or sew a red thread that connects you to your sovereign. Because though the rebels are stood down, and the weapons confiscated, there is no truce in the war of words. The south calls the north traitorous; the north calls the south heretical. The north says, you have abused us for a thousand years: all we represent is a barrier between you and the Scots, a wall of corpses to delay them, while you have time to lock up your wives and daughters and put your gold in store.

The southerners say, have you ever been to Dover? Have you ever stood on the cliffs and seen the lights on the French coast, and considered how narrow is the Narrow Sea – how much we risk, and how much we pay, to save you from the slavers and pirates and barbarians who have been battering our shores since shores were thought of?

He says to the king, in the north they have contempt for the king’s peace, they want to administer their own murders. If Norfolk cannot subdue them they will fall into their old savagery, where each eye or limb or life itself is costed out, and all flesh has a price. In our forefathers’ time a nobleman’s life was worth six times that of a man who followed the plough. The rich man can slaughter as he pleases, if his pocket can bear the fines, but the poor man cannot afford one murder across his lifetime. We repudiate this, he tells the king: we say a man of violence cannot go free because his cousin is the judge, no more than a wealthy sinner can make up for his sins by founding a monastery. Before God and the law, all men are equal.

It takes a generation, he says, to reconcile heads and hearts. Englishmen of every shire are wedded to what their nurses told them. They do not like to think too hard, or disturb the plan of the world that exists inside their heads, and they will not accept change unless it puts them in better ease. But new times are coming. Gregory’s children – and, he adds quickly, your Majesty’s children yet to be born – will never have known their country in thrall to an old fraud in Rome. They will not put their faith in the teeth and bones of the dead, or in holy water, ashes and wax. When they can read the Bible for themselves, they will be closer to God than to their own skin. They will speak His language, and He theirs. They will see that a prince exists not to sit a horse in a plumed helmet, but – as your Majesty always says – to care for his subjects, body and soul. The scriptures enjoin obedience to earthly powers, and so we stick by our prince through thick and thin. We do not reject part of his polity. We take him as a whole, consider him God’s anointed, and suppose God is keeping an eye on him.

Until these blessed days dawn, ‘Let’s have peace,’ he says: ‘Peace is cheap.’ Everyone agrees the north must be governed better, but by whom? Thomas Cromwell thinks we need able men, but the Duke of Norfolk thinks we need noble men.

When fresh insurrection breaks out, it is led by a man who owes the Lord Privy Seal a great deal of money. His name is Francis Bigod: a boy in Wolsey’s household, an Oxford scholar, zealous for the gospel till lately; a man on friendly terms with our archbishop, with Hugh Latimer, with Robert Barnes; on friendliest terms of all with my lord Cromwell. So what does it mean, what can it mean, that such a man is riding about the countryside talking wild and waving a sword, swearing to take back Hull for the rebels, seize the town of Beverley, launch a force against the port of Scarborough? He is tired of people asking him, what does it mean, and whence comes this? Did you quarrel? As if he were responsible for Bigod’s bloody caprice.

He can only say, Bigod asked some strange things of me lately. He asked how the king could be responsible for our souls: as if there were some other candidate on earth, better qualified. He asked if he, Bigod, could preach in the pulpit, like a priest. When I said no, he asked, could he be ordained a priest? Though he was married?

He is brainsick, perhaps, his wits turned. But his folly will undo his countrymen, leading them to the fight through weather in which only a novice would campaign. And Bigod is not so mad he cannot be responsible for his actions. The king’s pardon was once and once only: after that, martial law.

Hans comes to him. ‘He has decided he wants a wall painting.’

‘Is that more difficult?’

Hans rubs his beard. He wants to talk terms; he wants to go on the royal books, with board and lodging and a workspace at Whitehall for the life of this project and beyond. He asks for a guarantee of thirty pounds a year, and then he will turn down other commissions and call himself painter to the King of England.

‘Thirty?’ He frowns. But after all, Hans has a mistress and two children to keep, apart from his family over the sea.

Hans says, ‘There is a piece of wall in the privy chamber here, I measure it at twenty-two feet.’

‘The privy chamber? That’s where he wants it?’

‘I should hardly put it there without his permission.’

‘I thought he would want it in the presence chamber. To awe the whole world.’

‘No. He just wants to awe you. And his attending gentlemen. And I suppose any poor foreigner he brings in for a tour.’

Of course, the privy chamber is not as private these days as its name implies. The king does not reckon to be alone there. If he wants solitude, or the company of one or two, he finds himself a sanctum in every house: a corner room where he tunes a lute, or a secret book store up a winding stair.

Hans says, ‘I do not mind if few people see it, as long as the right people see it. I plan to place his head’ – he indicates above his own head, ‘about here. No harm to give him an extra inch or so.’

‘In the leg,’ he suggests, ‘not the body. Or you mean elsewhere?’

Han sniggers. ‘I will draw him with gown well-parted, so the world can see the wonder. A generous wad of quilting.’

‘How big will it be? The painting, I mean.’

Hans stretches his arms then wheels about, demonstrating in space. ‘He wonders if he should have his father painted too.’

‘In the same picture?’

‘It can be done.’

And his mother, why not? A line of kings and queens, stretching into the blue distance. And an unborn child hovering, like a shadow of a bird against glass.

‘So he must be available to me,’ Hans says. ‘For drawings. They must be detailed, it will take time. Afterwards I can dispense with his body. He need not be present. I can meet separately with his clothes.’

‘You did not give me that choice when you painted me.’

‘But I failed with you,’ Hans says curtly. ‘You should have been painted by some other master, a dead one, for God He knows, you looked dead. You know Antonello, that fellow from Messina? He would have dragged some expression out of you.’

He has seen this master’s work. When Antonello painted the grandees of Venice, he captured the sceptical raised eyebrow, the flicker of a sour smile. But the Venetians didn’t like his work; he knew too much about them.

‘By the way,’ Hans says, ‘how is your daughter?’

‘Gone home.’ He intends to say no more.

‘She did not like England? Or she did not like you?’

Hans, he thinks, has likely known about Jenneke for years. It would explain certain snatches of conversation, broken off: sideways glances, sly. ‘Hans,’ he says, ‘don’t ask questions unless you know what to do with the answers.’

March, 1537: day by day, at the Tower and at the Rolls House, the Lord Privy Seal unpicks the events of the year past. With witnesses, with interrogatories before him, with clerks and Mr Wriothesley, he is laying bare, day by day and name by name, the machinery of revolt.

‘So you say you were coerced into rebellion? That you took an oath against your will? Please name the rebels who resorted to you, and say when. How were they armed? Did they use force against your person? Did they threaten force against your person? You say your horses were seized, your thatch fired, your wife insulted – you have witnesses? You allege the rebels set fire to your property, which included movable goods to the value of …? You did not have an inventory? Ah, I see, they burned your inventory. And what did you do, to counter their threats? Did you not send messages to your friends for help? You did, and they did not stir? Why not? What had you done to them, to cause them to abandon you?’

Mr Wriothesley wears the sables sent him as a present by our man in Brussels. Christophe builds up the fire. He, Lord Privy Seal, now keeps his own wine store here at the Tower. He has a strongroom, to lock up the interrogatories, so no one can interfere with them overnight, writing between the lines. Helpers come in and out – Augmentations men, his relative John ap Rice, and a useful cleric called Edmund Bonner, a fussy, clucking little man with an eye for the ladies and an ear for gossip. The bishops, still working on their new statement of doctrine, send him weighty folios every night: from the snivelling wrecks at the Tower, he goes home to number the sacraments. The interrogations grind on through the spring. For every answer he has six questions. He is willing to pinch a man with pains, if nothing else will work, though the threat will do more, and he regards it as a defeat if he has to call for chains and heated irons.

Wriothesley has not his patience: but then, he is young, and he has a family he would like to see sometimes. He will touch his elbow: ‘Sir, this is a mild pain, and we have a stubborn rebel before us, and it is late. I believe he can stand more.’

But he thinks, no, none of us can stand anything. Scrape our skin, and beneath it there is an infant, howling.

He says, ‘You could try listening. That’s how you find things out.’

‘But if he says nothing?’

‘Then listen to his silence.’ Listen through his silence. Imagine what you could give him, to make him speak – instead of what you could take away. Perhaps he must die, and he knows that; but some deaths can be faced and some not. What is it worth, to be spared castration, and the apprehension of it? You could offer him the shock of the axe, the carpet of blood, not the panic of half-hanging and the agony of the knife in the bowel. It is all about anticipation, he tells Call-Me. Give him something to live for, or offer him a death that spares him shame. Assure him that, whether or not he helps us, the king will pay his debts and look after his family: such small mercies can make a felon weep and break his will.

In no other country could this happen. In the domains of François or Charles there would be no truces, negotiations, or sessions of question and answer that stretch from Advent to Trinity. Once apprehended the noble suspects would be tortured and killed and the common dead would be butchered and lie under the open sky. He says, where we cannot avoid severity, we can still temper justice with mercy. Where loyal men have been despoiled of property, the crown will compensate them. Where the king has been well-served, there must be rewards. Where his authority has been held in contempt, retribution must be swift and public. In the north Norfolk hangs truce-breakers from the trees. He hangs them in chains if he can get them, but iron is so dear, and rope will do. Their wives come by night to cut them down, but the king says any women who are caught must be straitly punished. He wishes the corpses to hang there through Easter and into the warm weather: as you hang a maggoty crow on a fence, as an example to other birds not to steal your crops. In London, heads are spiked on the bridge, and limbs of traitors are nailed to the gates. But the cold weather stops them rotting and the citizens are sickened by the sight.

By the middle of February young Bigod is captured. His captains are in ward. Tyburn waits for them, in season: no rush. The summer will clean up the winter’s spoilage. Thomas Cromwell will never recover the money he is owed. Nor will Henry learn he should bury the dead.

He sends for Thomas Wyatt to see him at the Rolls House. Like every loyal gentleman he has been in the saddle against the rebels, but there is another task for him. He has long begged to be sent out of the kingdom. Now he is going as ambassador to the Emperor. It means pursuing Charles across Europe summer and winter: an ideal posting for a restless man. The role needs honest force and honeyed words, and a certain willingness to obfuscate about the intentions of the King of England: and as Wyatt says that to him nothing is ever clear, and no truth is a single truth, he seems the man for the job.

The Emperor continues to urge that Lady Mary should marry the brother of the Portuguese king. He recommends Dom Luis as wise, discreet and loving. He will be content to reside in England, rather than carry the princess from her native land.

‘Wyatt,’ he says, ‘ask the Emperor how much he will pay us for Mary. Put it suavely – but do not be misled if he names great sums, ask him how he will secure the debt. The king will not part with her for promises.’

‘You don’t want this match,’ Wyatt says.

‘More to the point, she doesn’t.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Only to protect her.’

‘The king needs a friend in Europe,’ Wyatt says. ‘The kind of special friend he can only get through a marriage.’

‘The king could get a troop of friends in Switzerland, and among the German princes. All we need is to agree a bare statement of doctrine, and we will have allies enough.’ He frowns. ‘And if a marriage must be made, better Eliza than Mary.’

‘You are a long thinker, my lord. The young lady is, what, four this year?’

‘So it cannot be consummated,’ he says. ‘Not for ten years – and that would be early. Twelve years, if we plead she is delicate. It will not be a true marriage, so if it turns out not to serve us we can set it aside.’

‘You guard Mary’s virginity,’ Wyatt says.

He shrugs.

‘You were her Valentine. Wriothesley is telling everyone how he carried a handsome present to her.’

At the court’s annual feast – Wyatt well knows – we draw lots for our Valentine. So no one is left out, young or old.

‘One never knows with Cremuello,’ Wyatt says. ‘I remember when the rumour was that you were making your addresses to one Mistress Seymour, who is now queen.’

Cold as a stone he says, ‘What gave rise to that idea?’

‘She would have been better off,’ Wyatt says.

‘The queen is not unhappy.’

‘You would know, my lord. You know much about women that is hidden from the rest of us. How to advance them. How to undo them.’

Last summer, then, abrades Wyatt’s temper, frays his inner peace. Though he has slipped the noose, he must be unpicking the rope, shredding the fibres in his fingers. ‘Wyatt,’ he says, ‘such talk will undo me. Is that your intention?’

‘Put yourself in my place. In every conversation we have held for a twelvemonth, I have had to ask myself, is he trying to save me, or is he trying to drown me? Am I precious cargo, or thrown overboard?’

‘Well, proof of the pudding,’ he says. (Let the poet do what he can with that image.) ‘You are still breathing.’

‘And yours till my last breath.’ Wyatt stands up and stretches. ‘I would follow you to the ends of Christendom. Whither go I now, chasing Carolus.’

Wyatt seeks himself in the mirror. In some invisible adjustment, his finger brushes the feather in his cap. ‘Look after Bess Darrell while I’m gone.’

He takes a day off, and walks the grounds of Austin Friars with his gardeners, Mercy Prior leaning on his arm. The wood of the garden arbour is sodden to the touch and the walls have grown plump pillows of moss. The stakes that support his young trees seem to be quivering with their own, green inner life.

He invites Richard Riche to supper, to ask what can be done for the other Bess – Lady Oughtred. ‘Her husband left her mean provision. She wants a house of her own.’

‘The Seymour family has deserved well of the king,’ Call-Me says. ‘Riche, you might help her to some abbey?’

Riche says, ‘You will find she is positioning herself for a new marriage. I am surprised, sir, your friends among the ladies have not mentioned it. She will look high, and quite proper she should. The Earl of Oxford is mentioned.’

John de Vere is an old widower: two wives killed under him already. He is the fifteenth earl. Imagine, he thinks, being the fifteenth anything.

Thurston has tried a new cod dish – garlic, saffron, fennel. Just white and yellow, as he said: it looks as if they’ve sicked it up. ‘I hear you will have Quarr Abbey,’ he says to Call-Me. ‘Good rents for you from the manors. And the woods are worth a clear hundred pounds, are they not?’

Ten monks at Quarr, all of whom desire continuance in their vows. Some thirty-eight persons waiting on them. White stone, sea views, fifty-five pounds of debt: not a large house, but there are lands in Devon that, obligations discharged, should come to Call-Me within six months. ‘I am thinking about Launde for myself,’ he says.

Riche says, ‘Launde will not come down yet. It is worth four hundred a year.’

‘I can wait.’

He watches the platter of fish go out. He is struck by a happy thought, and it has nothing to do with abbeys at all.

He seeks an audience with the queen. ‘When is your sister Bess coming to court? You will need her company through these next months.’

‘I suppose so,’ Jane says. She counts on her fingers. ‘It seems a long time to October.’

There is a rustle that spreads from where she sits, through the room, through the court, through England and across the sea. At last, the news is public.

‘My lord Beauchamp, I felicitate all your family,’ the court says. Edward’s handsome face relaxes into smiles; he bows and passes on, as if in a radiant cloud, to send a message down to Wolf Hall and a message to his brother Tom, who is with the king’s fleet.

Now the space around the queen becomes a blessed space. All displeasant airs and discordant sounds must be banished. The jelly creature within her flinches at harsh words or bright lights and Jane must be protected from them, as from strong sunlight or draughts. Only the finest cloth must touch her skin, and no scents assail her but the sweetness of summer grass and the light spice scent of petals. The paws of attending lapdogs must be wiped before they can impose on her person. No courtiers who sneeze or cough, or who know anyone who sneezes or coughs, must come in her vicinity. Only beautiful sights must meet her eyes: though, he says to her, ‘We cannot do anything about me, madam.’

When the king meets his council the gentlemen pound the table in their glee. ‘A great day for our nation,’ they shout, and ‘This will astonish the Emperor,’ and ‘This will put France’s great nose out of joint.’

Henry says, ‘There is no need the news should go out to the common sort.’ He sounds strained. ‘Not yet awhile.’

‘I think it is out,’ Fitzwilliam says, ‘and not a man or woman in England who does not wish your Majesty well and pray on his knees nightly that the queen will give you a sturdy boy.’

Henry says, ‘I wish the cardinal were –’ He breaks off. He, Thomas Cromwell, looks down at the documents on the table. The council rises, the babble of congratulation still floating in the air. ‘Fitz, stay,’ Henry says. ‘Cromwell?’

The noise recedes: laughter below; laughter above, perhaps, the cardinal applauding from somewhere beyond the primum mobile. The dead watch us, zealous in old causes.

The king says, ‘Jane wants to make a pilgrimage to Becket’s shrine.’ He frowns. Canterbury does not hold good memories: it was where the prophetess Eliza Barton rose up, and gripped his arm and told him he would soon be dead.

Yet Barton was hanged. And Henry flourishes. God confound all false prophets! ‘Of course we will go,’ Henry says. ‘The queen must go where she likes, while she can safely travel. Even so far as Wolf Hall, if she has a fantasy to it. But my lord – my lord Privy Seal?’

He wants to put his hand on the king’s shoulder, as he sits sweating in a cold room; the lords of the council have taken the cheer and the warmth with them, and there is no power in the stray shafts of spring sun that trace a shivering line down the wall.

The king says, ‘I am a man who … my hopes … after so long … and I want to be sure …’

Fitz raises his eyebrows.

‘When I married the queen, that is, before I married her … I need not remind you of the circumstances, but rest assured that though I was hasty, yet I am constant in my affections –’

‘Spit it out, sir,’ Fitzwilliam says.

‘Are we truly married?’ Henry says. ‘When I entered into that compact, there was nothing to impede or frustrate it?’

‘You mean,’ he says, ‘nothing about the queen that you should have known?’

Fitz sounds shocked. ‘I am sure you found no reason to question that gracious lady’s virginity.’

Henry colours faintly. ‘Not at all. But are you certain you did all you should, as my councillors? The most diligent enquiries? You can be sure she was absolutely free to enter into matrimony?’

‘There was no pre-contract,’ Fitz says, ‘if that is what troubles your Majesty.’

‘But was she not once courted by William Dormer?’

‘It was something and nothing,’ Fitzwilliam says.

He says, ‘It was nothing.’

Fitz says, ‘To be blunt, sir, the Dormer family would not come to a settlement. They concluded the Seymours were not –’

‘Rich enough,’ he finishes.

‘So you think there was nothing between them?’ The king gets to his feet. ‘If you are sure. Because I need to be sure. Because I cannot start hoping again, it will kill me. I have lost Richmond. I never had a son born in wedlock, that lived. I must know that this time I am safe. That no one can question his birthright. I have been patient. Surely God will reward me now.’ There is a glitter of tears in his eyes. He, Cromwell, turns away, and Fitzwilliam turns, so they do not see them spill. But the king says, ‘I should know you by now, eh, Crumb? If ever a man was thorough, you are that man.’

The king squeezes his shoulder. There is a new magic in the royal touch. It transmits a vision, a vision of what England could be. You imagine the city of London in the days when prophets walk its streets, when angels cluster on gable ends; you look up as you leave your house, hearing their strong wingbeats in the air.

At his first session with Hans, the king can hardly walk for the weight of ornamentation. ‘How best to do this, Master Holbein?’ His face is solemn, attentive.

Hans waves his hand towards the privy chamber gentlemen, the pages, the hangers-on: it is a motion of erasure.

The room empties. Space clears around the king. ‘Can I stay?’ he asks.

Henry says, ‘You may sit with me, my lord Cromwell, but I don’t require conversation.’

He smiles. ‘I’ll stay if your Majesty will grant me five minutes when Hans is done.’

Henry does not reply. He has fixed his gaze on nothingness and he looks as if he is thinking about God. He, Master Secretary, clears himself off to the window, sits on a stool and looks through his papers. His spaniel flops down at his feet. There is no sound in the room but her gentle snoring, except with the king’s every respiration, his garments shift and sigh: as if, a fraction after the king breathes, his clothes breathe too. Behind the silence, he begins to hear other sounds: footsteps above, a scuffling outside the door, a soughing wind that tests the window’s glass in its frame. Every so often he glances up at Henry, in case he wants anything. After a time the king grows tired of God, and starts watching his minister instead. ‘I wonder you can see to read.’

‘I am fortunate.’

‘Mm,’ the king says. ‘You should bathe your eyes with a decoction of rue.’

As he works at his drawing Hans purses his lips and sucks his teeth. He bites down on his lower lip. He hums. As he stands back and lets out his breath there is a sibilance, very nearly a whistle.

The king says, ‘We should have music, perhaps.’

‘Master Hans is doing his best to supply it,’ he says.

Henry says, ‘What did you want with me, my lord Privy Seal?’

‘To talk about the King of Scots, by your leave. You know he is still in France, he has not set forth with his bride. Her father is apprehensive at the thought of her putting to sea. They say she is so frail you can see through her.’

Henry snorts. ‘It is Scotland who is apprehensive. He is quaking. He has been boasting to François he will kick my throne from under me, and now he must reckon with the consequences. He is afraid one of my ships will take him as soon as he is out of port.’

‘Indeed, but now he appeals to your Majesty as a gentleman – he wants to shorten the voyage, land with his bride at Dover and have safe conduct to the border.’

Henry says, ‘What, have his train eat up everything in their path, and sow sedition as they march? Parade in their strength through the north country, showing their banners? Does he think I’m a fool?’

Hans breaks off humming. He coughs.

Ah well. It is a chance lost, of a meeting between two monarchs, uncle and nephew, who have long avoided each other.

The king’s hand rests on the pommel of his dagger: ‘Like this?’ he says to Hans.

Hans says, ‘Perfect.’

Henry eases his shoulders, flexes his knees. Portrait-taking freezes muscle, makes feet hard to manage, makes elbows feel as if they belong to someone else. The harder he tries to hold still, the more the king fidgets. He says, ‘I have messages from Ireland. They want you to go over for a season, my lord Cromwell. They think you could bring order. I do suppose you could.’

‘So am I to go?’

‘No. They might murder you.’

Hans hums.

The king shifts his stance. ‘When are the bishops going to utter?’

Since early in the year the bishops have been working on their profession of faith. It is only last July that the ten articles were issued, and gave birth to months of debate. The king hopes a new statement will consolidate opinion. But every time the bishops send Henry some text, he writes over it and makes nonsense of their propositions. Then the papers go back to Thomas Cranmer: who emends the king’s emendations, and corrects his syntax while he is about it.

Hans says, ‘Would your Majesty be so gracious as to turn his face? Not to Lord Cromwell, to me?’

Henry obeys. He stares at the painter and speaks to his minister: ‘Has Lisle’s man been here? I marvel Lady Lisle has not taken to her chamber. She must be near her time.’

‘Your Majesty will be the first to know.’

Hans says, ‘If she has a boy Lord Lisle will shoot off cannon, so if it is a still day they will hear it in Dover and put a rider on the road. I hope the walls of Calais do not fall down.’

‘Master,’ he whispers, ‘you forget yourself. Apply to your trade.’

Sometimes, sitting beside the king – it is late, they are tired, he has been working since first light – he allows his body to confuse with that of Henry, so that their arms, lying contiguous, lose their form and become cloudy like thaw water. He imagines their fingertips graze, his mind meets the royal will: ink dribbles onto the paper. Sometimes the king nods into sleep. He sits by him scarcely breathing, careful as a nursemaid with a fractious brat. Then Henry starts, wakes, yawns; he says, as if he were to blame, ‘It is midnight, master!’ The past peels away: the king forgets he is ‘my lord’; he forgets what he has made him. At dawn, and twilight, when the light is an oyster shell, and again at midnight, bodies change their shape and size, like cats who slide from dormer to gable and vanish into the murk.

But today it is not ten o’clock: a morning in early spring, the light a primrose blur. ‘Is it not dinnertime?’ the king says, and then, ‘What do you hear from Norfolk?’

‘That he has a chill. A lax. Each day a flux.’

The king laughs. ‘So delicate a soul. Like the Princess Madeleine.’

Hans tuts. ‘A solemn countenance, if it sorts with your Majesty? And eyes to me? If my lord Cromwell does anything worth turning around for, I shall let your Majesty know.’

The silence returns. In Florence, he thinks, an artist would make a whole man in a mould. You strip him naked and rub him with grease and close him in a case up to his chin. You pour in plaster and let it set, and when you are ready you take a chisel and open the case like a nut. You draw out the man, his skin rose-red all over, and wash him, then you promise to model his head another day: but you have his form you can use ever after, to make satyrs or saints or gods from Mount Olympus.

Down below in the privy kitchen they are roasting dottrels for dinner. His spaniel starts awake, and runs in excited circles as the savour drifts up. The king’s eye follows her; Hans scoops her up and gives her to a menial, saying severely, ‘Collect her later, my lord.’

As the hour passes, more and more noise crowds into it: the ring of horseshoes on cobbles, bursts of shouting from distant courtyards, trumpeters clattering past to practice: till finally it seems as if the whole of the court is in there with them. Meanwhile the king’s expression changes slowly, as if the moon waxes; so by the time Hans signals that he is done, Henry seems to glow from within. He gathers himself, rearranges his robes. He says, ‘I think the queen should be in my picture.’

Hans groans.

The king says, ‘Come to me later, Cromwell.’

‘How much later, sir?’

No reply: Henry sweeps away. A boy belonging to Hans gathers in the drawings. The king’s heads are turned this way and that; his brow is furrowed or clear, his eyes are blank or hostile, but the mouth is always the same, small and set.

‘Enough time, Hans?’

‘I suppose. I only wanted his head.’

‘We should have a lute player next time.’

‘With you in the room? You’re dangerous to them.’

Mark Smeaton resists oblivion. It is not yet a year, after all. He says, ‘I tell you again, I did not hurt Mark.’

‘I hear when he left your house his eyeballs hung out on his cheeks.’

Hans does not sound indignant: more curious, as if he imagines making an anatomical drawing.

‘Witnesses saw him on the scaffold,’ he says, ‘uninjured. Do not try my patience. And do not try the king’s.’

Hans says, ‘Henry is easy. He never shows he would like to be elsewhere. He takes it as his duty to be painted. Do you not see? His face shines with the wonder of himself.’

Towards the end of May the queen’s child quickens. The Te Deums of Trinity Sunday celebrate not only the hope in her womb but the close of the campaigning season. The parish churches ring their bells, cannon are fired at the Tower, and butts of free wine trundle over the cobbles so even the beggars can join in crying, ‘God bless our good Queen Jane.’ Banners drop from windows, streamers fly from housetops, thrushes sing, salmon leap, and the dead in London’s churchyards jiggle thighbone and knee.

Jane has objected to the taking of her portrait, saying, ‘Master Hans will look at me.’

But she has yielded to the king’s pleasure, requesting only that Lord Cromwell be present: she seems afraid that the artist will shout at her in a foreign tongue. He makes the introductions and then retreats, so he is out of the painter’s eyeline.

‘Here?’ Jane says.

The queen takes up her stance. Her sister Lady Oughtred, now in attendance, stoops to arrange her skirts. Jane is as stiff as a woman on a catafalque. She stands with her hands clasped over her child, as if keeping it in order. ‘It is very correct to breathe,’ Hans reminds her. ‘And certainly your Highness may sit if she pleases.’

Jane’s gaze rests on the middle distance. Her expression is remote and pure. Hans says, ‘If your Highness could lift her chin?’ He sighs; he shuffles, he walks around the queen, and hums. He is dissatisfied; her face is puffy; he cannot find the bones in it.

Jane speaks only once: ‘Is Lady Lisle delivered yet?’

‘It cannot be long, madam,’ he says, from his seat in the window.

‘God send her a good hour,’ Lady Oughtred says.

His mind shifts, wanders: he takes a prayer book out of his pocket and thumbs through it, but an image of water, of daylight on water, begins to flicker and flow between his eyes and the page. He thinks of a woman sitting upright in a tangle of linen sheets, her breasts bare, sunlight sliding over her arms. He thinks of himself at nightfall, on the slippery paving beside the German House in Venice, his friend Heinrich asking as they step out of their boat: ‘You want to see our goddesses on the wall? You, guard, hold up your torch.’

Almost imperceptibly, Jane’s chin has dropped again. Hans approaches him. It does not matter, he whispers, whether she sits, stands, kneels, anything she has a fantasy to do; her hands, her posture, I can fix it later, and we can put her in another gown if she likes, or paint on different sleeves, we can push her hood back a little, and as for her jewellery I will give her pieces of my own design, which will be a good advertisement of my skill, Thomas, do you not think so? But I must have her face, just for this one hour. So implore her – spare me a glance.

‘The king will want her as she is,’ he warns. ‘No flattery.’

‘It is not my habit.’

‘I warrant when he married her,’ her sister says, ‘she did not look so much like a mushroom.’

The queen’s happy condition is now known all over Europe, and the Seymour name exalted. It is time he, Cromwell, opened talks with Edward.

‘Your lady sister,’ he says. ‘Oughtred’s widow.’

‘Yes,’ Edward says.

‘Her hand in marriage.’

‘Yes?’

‘I believe you’re talking to the Earl of Oxford? You know he’s older than I am?’

‘Is he?’ Edward frowns. ‘Yes, I dare say.’

‘So would Bess not prefer a young lad?’

Edward looks as if something improper has been hinted. ‘She knows her duty.’

‘I see it is promotion for you, to marry into the Vere family. Yet the Seymours are as old a house, I would have thought, old and just as good, if less rewarded till now. The Veres have more power, but not more estimation.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Edward is cautious.

‘You don’t need Oxford to make your fortune. It is already made. And I suggest that a bride could be happier elsewhere.’

‘This is a surprise,’ Edward says. ‘Would you then …?’ He closes his eyes as if in prayer. ‘That is, are you willing …’

‘We are willing,’ he says.

‘And ready? To talk about money?’

‘It is my favourite subject,’ he says.

We rough Cromwells, eh? Edward tries to smile.

‘But Edward, this could be a great thing,’ he says. ‘We can make an alliance in blood, as well as in the council chamber. Have no qualms. All the grace and goodwill lie on your side, and the rude substance will come from mine. I will build Bess a new house. While she is waiting she will not be short of a roof over her head – Mortlake is much enlarged, and there is Stepney which is a very pleasant house at any season, and there is Austin Friars of course – all my property is at her disposal, and if there is some house of the king’s she has a fancy to, I feel sure that of his kindness he will lend it us. She will have whatever I can give to make her happy.’

Edward says, ‘I have heard gentlemen venture – saving your lordship – that Thomas Cromwell is not base-born after all. That you are the natural son of some nobleman.’

He is amused. ‘Do they say which one?’

‘They reason, how else to explain your talent for ruling men?’

Walter ruled with his fist, he thinks.

‘Well, however that may be,’ Edward says, ‘I shall talk to my sister, and know her mind. And the queen, she will have a view, of course. I don’t know what I shall say to the Earl of Oxford …’

‘I’ll talk to him.’

‘Would you?’ Edward grasps at that. ‘We have come a long way together, my lord,’ he says, embracing him, ‘since we welcomed you to Wolf Hall.’

He goes home and tells Gregory, ‘I have found you a bride.’

‘Very well,’ Gregory says. ‘I shall contain myself in patience till you mention who.’

He hurries on. There are six bishops here to see him, and a delegation from the French embassy. But that night my lord Privy Seal sleeps soundly, under his canopy of violet and silver tissue, beneath a ceiling dusted with gilded stars.

On St George’s Day, at the chapter of the Order of the Garter, the king selects the Earl of Cumberland to fill a vacant stall, in exchange for his offices on the Scots border. It is the first, my lord Privy Seal hopes, in a series of tacit bargains that will free up posts in the north country for keen young men he will choose, whose loyalty is not to great families but only to himself and the king.

Cumberland’s grandfather was known as the Butcher, and the family has not mellowed since. Generations of raw dealing made his tenants smart; no wonder they turned on him, in the late rebellion. But such magnates, even in our day, are best controlled by offering them rewards. And the Garter is Europe’s most ancient order of chivalry, the highest honour the king can bestow.

Mr Wriothesley edges up to him: ‘Shall I tell your lordship what the heralds are saying?’

He waits.

‘They say that the king is disappointed he must give the Garter to Cumberland. He would rather have filled the vacancy with one he holds more dear.’

The dear one should not have long to fret. Harry Percy has requested the loan of his old house in Hackney; he wants it to die in. The doctors say he will not last the summer, and when he goes, that will free a Garter stall. And when Lord Darcy comes to execution, that will make another vacancy. Mr Wriothesley looks coy. ‘Better order your mantles, sir.’

Your mantles of cerulean velvet: sky blue lined with white damask. Hans busies himself at once with new and better designs for Garter insignia: he never lets slip a chance to market his genius. ‘I am not your enemy, you know,’ Hans says to him. ‘Even though I did paint you.’

As Jane lets out her bodices and appears unlaced, she yearns for cherries and peas, but there are none yet. She asks for quails, and the Lisles send them from Calais by the crate. They are fed on the boat and killed at Dover, to keep them as fat as possible, but even so they dwindle on the road, and Jane complains she must have more, and fatter. She eats them rubbed with spices and basted with honey, cracking and sucking the tiny bones. ‘She sets into them as if they had done her an injury,’ Gregory says. ‘Though she looks as if she would only eat curds and whey.’

The king says, ‘I like to see a woman show her appetite. The late Katherine, God rest her, when first we were married –’ he corrects himself, ‘when first we were thought to be married – she would make short work of a duckling. But then later,’ he glances away, ‘she began to undertake special fasts and penances. Always some strict practice, above the misery prescribed. It was her Spanish blood.’

He thinks, she was praying for us. Offering up her hunger pangs for England.

John Husee brings the quails at seven in the morning. Jane sends word from her suite: roast half for dinner, and we’ll have the rest for supper.

He asks Husee, ‘Is there no child yet? The king is keen for the outcome. It will warm his heart if Lisle has a son and heir.’

Husee shakes his head. He looks harassed, but then he always does.

‘Perhaps Honor has mistaken her reckoning,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘What do the doctors advise?’

‘They advise patience.’

Fitzwilliam says, ‘By the time it is born it will know its letters, and be fit to gnaw a marrowbone and wave a wooden sword.’

In return for quails, and cherries when they are ripe, Jane agrees she will give a position in her household to one of Lady Lisle’s daughters. Jane asks them to send two, and whichever she rejects she will place in the train of some other noble lady. She kindly says that the girls may wear out their French apparel, even though English fashion has changed since last year.

But when the girls arrive, Jane looks at them and says, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no. I will have that one, but take her away and bring her back dressed more seemly.’

Anne Bassett must have finer linen, so fine the skin shows through. She needs a gable hood, and a girdle sewn thickly with pearls. When she reappears by the queen’s side, it is with her hair hidden, her skull squeezed, and in a gown belonging to my lady Sussex.

When next he sees John Husee and hails him, Husee shoots off in the other direction.

Whitehall: he arrives outside the Lady Mary’s presence chamber, Gregory attending him. Some grand arrival is in the air. Household folk crowd him, chattering: ‘Who is it, Lord Cromwell?’ Mary’s silkwoman has brought a basket. A boy has come to tune her virginals. A little dwarf woman called Jane is waddling around the chamber: ‘Welcome, one and all.’

‘Dodd!’ He greets Mary’s usher. ‘Big fish today.’ He speaks for everyone to hear. ‘A Spanish gentleman has come from the Emperor, to assist Ambassador Chapuys in wooing the Lady Mary.’

One of the queen’s ladies, Mary Mounteagle, has coins in a net purse; the queen lost at cards last night, and now pays her debts. Another lady, Nan Zouche, escorts her, as if she might be robbed. Both of them hang on his elbows: ‘A Spanish gentleman? Is not Dom Luis a Portuguese?’

‘Though it is all the same,’ Nan Zouche says. ‘All the Emperor’s cousins.’

Mounteagle asks, ‘Does Dom Luis speak English? If not, Lord Cromwell will have to kneel at their bedside, interpreting.’

‘I do not speak Portuguese, so they must make shift,’ he says. ‘Does the Lady Mary always collect her winnings?’

‘Always,’ Nan says. ‘And she is such a gambler! One day she bet her breakfast on a game of bowls.’

The little woman says, ‘I hope the ambassador does not bring her comfits. Her teeth are not sound.’ She shows her own. ‘Me, I can crack nuts.’

The great men enter to the sound of giggling. The new envoy, Don Diego de Mendoza, is followed by Chapuys, followed in turn by his Flemish bodyguard. Don Diego is one of those men who requires a big space around himself. Chapuys looks jittery: he backs away to allow the new man to be admired, in his plumes and black velvet. Prominently and reverently, Mendoza carries a black-ribboned letter, sealed with the double-headed eagle. ‘Lord Cremuel,’ he says. ‘I have heard a great deal about you.’

‘And I,’ he says pleasantly, ‘feel I know you already. For you must be related to that Mendoza who was ambassador in the cardinal’s time?’

‘I have that honour.’

‘The cardinal locked him up.’

‘A violation of every agreed principle of diplomacy,’ Mendoza says. The chill in his voice would blight a vineyard. ‘I did not know you were at court then.’

‘No. As I was the cardinal’s man, I have inherited his concerns.’

‘But not his methods,’ Chapuys says quickly.

It is evident that Eustache is keen to make a success of the encounter. ‘You have much in common, gentlemen. Don Diego has been in Italy. At the universities of Padua, and Bologna.’

‘You were there, Cremuel?’ Mendoza asks.

‘Yes, but not at the university.’

‘Don Diego knows Arabic,’ Chapuys offers.

He is alert. ‘Does it take years to learn?’

‘Yes,’ Don Diego says. ‘Years and years.’

He asks, ‘Have you brought Dom Luis’s portrait for my lady?’

‘Just this,’ the ambassador says, showing his letter.

‘I thought perhaps you had it in miniature, and carried it next to your heart.’

It is obvious that Don Diego is carrying something of which he is painfully aware: as you might be aware if someone slid a hot iron under your shirt. No doubt it is a second letter, perhaps in code.

‘There are presents, of course. Which follow by mule,’ says Mendoza.

‘Because they are large,’ Chapuys says.

‘Good. Lady Mary has lavish tastes. That’s why her father has brought her to court. He could not maintain her in a separate household. She wrote for more money every week.’

‘She is generous with her small means,’ Chapuys says. ‘Charitable.’

‘I suppose she lives as befits a princess?’ Don Diego says. ‘You would not expect her to do other?’

‘Ordinarily,’ Chapuys advises, ‘Lord Cremuel would kick your shin if you spoke her proper title. They call her by her plain name, Mary. But behold – when they are offering her in marriage, we call her “princess” and suddenly,’ he smirks, ‘Cremuel does not mind at all.’

The door of the chamber opens and out issues Mary’s chaplain, in conference with her doctor, a Spaniard. To the chaplain he says, ‘How do you, Father Baldwin? How does my lady?’ The doctor he greets in his best Castilian: suck on that, Mendoza. ‘I will give you a quarter of an hour, ambassador. Then I regret I shall interrupt you.’

Chapuys protests: ‘It is hardly time enough for them to pray together.’

‘Oh, will they do that?’ He smiles.

Dodd the usher bows Mendoza into the presence chamber. ‘Has she attendance?’ Nan Zouche says, and the two ladies exchange a glance and slip in after the ambassador. The door closes.

Chapuys mutters something. It sounds like, ‘Hopeless.’

‘I’m sorry, ambassador?’ he says.

‘I think those ladies are your friends, who have just intruded on the Lady Mary.’

Mary Mounteagle is Brandon’s daughter, from one of his many early marriages; yes, he would say they were friends. Nan Zouche – Nan Gainsford, as she was – gave him matter to use against Anne Boleyn.

‘How is the queen?’ Chapuys says. ‘The king must be very anxious.’

‘She gives no reason for anxiety.’

‘But even so. Given his past losses. They say Edward Seymour is certain of a prince, that he is walking around with his head swelling like a yeasted loaf. Of course, if she has a boy, the Seymour brothers will be promoted – they may come to rival you.’

He cannot see Tom Seymour running the Privy Seal’s office. He says, ‘I’ll have to watch that, won’t I?’

‘But then I am sure they will be wary,’ Chapuys says, ‘remembering what you did to the brother of the other one. If I were them, I would hurry back to Wolf Hall and be forgotten.’ He chuckles. ‘They should become shepherds, or something of that sort.’

He says, ‘Don Diego is not very friendly. I thought it was an ambassador’s duty?’

‘He is fastidious,’ Chapuys admits.

He laughs. A hiatus. From behind Mary’s closed door, voices too faint to be useful. Chapuys says, ‘Mr Call-Me is much in your confidence.’

‘Yes, he is growing into consideration.’

‘He opens your letters.’

‘Someone must. There are too many for one man.’

‘He was Gardiner’s man,’ Chapuys says.

‘Gardiner remains in France.’

‘And loyalty is to the proximate,’ Chapuys says. ‘I see.’

He looks over his shoulder. ‘A word to the wise?’ The ambassador approaches. ‘Aske implicated you.’

‘What?’ Chapuys says.

‘Under questioning. And we have letters you sent to Lord Darcy. Going back three years.’

‘I protest,’ Chapuys says swiftly.

‘You claim they are forgeries?’

‘I make no claim. I say nothing to them.’

‘I know how it is, Eustache. You come to my house and you sit down to supper and you say to me, peace. You go home and light your candle and you write to your master, war.’ A pause. ‘Lucky for you, I am more clement than the cardinal. I shall not lock you up.’ He gestures to the closed door. ‘I think that’s ten minutes.’

He is as good as his word: kicks his way in like a drunken horse-boy. Gregory and the ambassador are at his heels. As they enter, they hear a scream. A large green parrot is bouncing up and down on its perch. When they wheel around, it laughs.

‘It is a present,’ Mary says. ‘I apologise.’

‘Does it speak?’

‘I fear it may.’

Mary, he notices, has not asked Don Diego to sit. The ambassador draws up his person: ‘My lord, go out, we are not done.’

The parrot sways on its perch, and squeaks like an unoiled wheel. He says, ‘I come to remind you of your urgent next engagement.’

Don Diego looks for a second as if he will try to face him down. But Chapuys clears his throat. The moment passes. The Spaniard says, ‘My lady, for now we must part.’

‘No, do not kneel,’ Mary says. ‘Haste away – the Lord Privy Seal is holding the door for you.’ She extends a hand for the ambassador’s kiss. ‘I thank you for your good counsel.’

He cedes the door-holding to Gregory, steps into the room. The ambassador passes out with an ill grace: Chapuys follows, making a comical face at him as he passes. He closes the door. The parrot is still scolding. ‘It has not taken to the Spaniard,’ he says.

Mary says, ‘Neither have you.’

He approaches the bird. He sees the slender gold chain that fastens it to a bar. The creature stamps, and raises its wings in threat. ‘I used to have a magpie when I was a child. I caught it myself.’

She says, ‘I cannot imagine you as a child.’

He thinks, neither can I. I cannot picture myself.

‘I tried to teach it to speak,’ he says. ‘But it flew away, first chance it got.’ But not before it said, Walter is a knave. He turns to Mary. ‘So what passed?’

She is unwilling to divulge. ‘He asked me if I meant what I said.’

‘Generally? Or specifically?’

‘You know well,’ she says. An instant flare of passion: her face is alight, as if someone had forced air into her with a bellows. But the next moment, she drops her eyes, an obedient woman, deflated: reverts to her monotone. ‘He asked if I meant it, when I said I accepted my father as head of the church, and that he and my mother were never truly married. I said I did. I said I accepted it all. I told him I had taken the advice of my uncle the Emperor, as conveyed to me by Ambassador Chapuys. I told him you, Cromwell, had stood my friend. And if he did not believe me that is not my fault.’

He says, ‘But did you tell him how you wrote to the Pope, taking back your statement, and begging to be absolved?’

Her eyes fly to his face.

‘No matter,’ he says. ‘It is another case where I forbear to bring your conduct home to you. I only mention it by way of warning.’

Panic in her voice. ‘What do you want?’

‘Want? My lady, I only want you to pray for me.’

‘Oh, I do,’ Mary says. ‘But do you know what I have discovered? The king has great power, but he has no power to know me, except through what I say and what I do.’

The parrot has put its head on one side, as if listening.

He says, ‘The previous Mendoza was never allowed to be alone with your lady mother. It was for her safety.’

‘I think, rather, it was for the safety of the state.’

‘Everything we do is for that. Without the king’s peace, my lady, we would be in the wilderness with the wild beasts. Or in the oceans with Leviathan.’

He moves about the chamber to put space between them. Zouche and Mounteagle slide back against the wall; if they could weave themselves into the arras, they would do it. The parrot swivels its head to follow him as he moves. ‘I suppose the ambassador promised to get you away from these shores.’

Mary looks down at her feet: as if to catch them going somewhere.

‘If he did not, then he will. He thinks we will force you into a marriage with the French.’

‘I trust my lord father will not do that.’

‘I myself have no such intention. I make you no guarantee, his Majesty’s will being supreme, but you are better to trust to my efforts than to scrambling down a rope ladder in the dark, and setting to sea in a sieve.’

She turns her face away.

‘Give me the letter,’ he says. ‘The ambassador’s letter.’

She takes from the table the fat ribboned packet, the seal broken, and offers it to him. ‘Perhaps you would like to read it and then take it to the king?’

‘The other letter,’ he says.

She hesitates, but only for a moment. Without a word, without glancing at his face, she slides it from her book and gives it him. It lacks a seal. But she has not had time to read it.

‘What is your book?’ He turns it up to see. It is a Herbal, with a device of a wild man and a wild woman, hairy creatures holding a shield with the printer’s initials. ‘I have one of these,’ he says. ‘It is ten years old, it could stand some correction.’ He turns the leaves, looking at the woodcuts. ‘But there will be other matter for us soon. Archbishop Cranmer is sending me a new translation of the scriptures.’

‘Another?’ she says wanly. ‘It must be the third this year.’

‘Cranmer says it is the soundest yet. He is confident your lord father will license it and set it forth.’

‘I am not against the scriptures. Do not think so.’

‘I will make sure you receive an early copy. You will do well to study the Commandments. Honour thy father. Since thy mother is departed.’

Katherine, God pardon her. Katherine, whom God assoil. Katherine, whose children would not stay within her womb: who is responsible nevertheless for the sorry object before him, her eyes dull, her face swollen with toothache.

He thinks of her Spanish grandmother in shining breastplate, mirror of fate to the infidel. Isabella took the field: Andalusia trembled.

On Whitsun eve, after a voyage so long postponed, the King of Scots makes landfall on his own shore. The French bride looks as if she has heaved up her soul on the deep. She falls to the ground, observers report, scoops up two handfuls of the port of Leith and kisses the soil.

A man called William Dalyvell, a follower of Merlin and King James, is put into the Tower. He has been spreading a prophecy that the King of Scots will swoop down from the north, expel the Tudors and rule two kingdoms. He also says he has seen an angel.

In former ages this would have been a cause for congratulation, but times being what they are, Dalyvell is put on the rack.

The Cornish people petition to have their saints back – those downgraded in recent rulings. Without their regular feasts, the faithful are unstrung from the calendar, awash in a sea of days that are all the same. He thinks it might be permitted; they are ancient saints of small worship. They are scraps of paint-flaked wood, or stumps of weathered stone, who say and do nothing against the king. They are not like your Beckets, whose shrines are swollen with rubies, garnets and carbuncles, as if their blood were bubbling up through the ground.

June, second drawing: ‘The king is to stand on this carpet,’ Hans decrees. Boys spread it at their feet: his own feet of Spanish leather, the neat red boots of Mr Wriothesley, the distinguished padded toes of Lord Audley and Sir William Fitzwilliam. It is one of the cardinal’s carpets; he stoops to uncurl an edge.

‘All of them?’ the Lord Chancellor asks. ‘Together on this carpet? The king, the queen, and his royal parents too?’

Hans gives him a withering look. ‘His father I will place behind him. His royal mother, behind the queen that is now.’

He asks, ‘How will you show the old king and queen? At what age?’

‘In eternity they have no age.’

‘There are other pictures to guide you, I suppose.’

‘Did we not make you a gallery?’ Hans says. ‘A whole room of the lost.’

Yes, but that was more like a game, he thinks, a game of kings, their faces like clues in a riddle. No one could point to them as a true or false likeness. They were all so old and they had been gone so long.

Hans begins to pace out the scene. The father here, towards the centre, but Henry in the foreground. Between the two parents I shall place a column, he says, or a piece of marble –

‘A sort of altar?’ Lord Audley offers.

‘He will want verses on it, Hans. Extolling him.’

‘Words are for Lord Cromwell to supply.’

‘Mr Wriothesley,’ he says, ‘will you make a note?’ But Call-Me is already sketching out suggestions.

They look up as the king comes in. He has to walk the length of the gallery. He seems unbalanced, as if the floor were soft. Fitz whispers something: ‘Hush,’ he says.

‘Ah, Cromwell,’ Henry says. ‘Lord Chancellor. I hear a rumour that François is dead.’

‘I fear untrue,’ he says.

The king’s face is pale and puffy. He dare not ask if he is in pain. Henry would not want an underling like Hans to hear the question, let alone the answer.

‘Better light today,’ the king says. ‘Norfolk writes to me that in Yorkshire there is a hard frost every morning. When here, the roses are out!’

Call-Me says, ‘There is always a hard frost in the region of Norfolk.’

Henry smiles. ‘The zephyrs do not play about his person. And young Surrey, he writes, is suffering from a depression of his spirits. Myself I always thought action dispelled melancholy, and I should have thought the Howards would find plenty to do …’

‘The duke should stay up in Yorkshire,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘He is as well-accepted among the northern sort as any lord can be.’

Thomas Howard says another winter will kill him. But he can take his chances till September. He would not want to be in London, surely, with the plague’s incursions? A hundred and twelve buried last week.

‘And what do we hear of Harry Percy?’ The king rubs his nose, reflective. He is looking forward to the reversion of the Percy earldom to the crown. ‘Send young Sadler, will you, to see how the dying goes?’

From Wriothesley, a stir of mute discontent: not him, Majesty, send me!

‘Unless you care to go yourself, my lord Privy Seal? But I think the earl fears you of old, and I do not want to be accused of frightening him to death.’

‘I never hurt the earl,’ he says. A picture rises to his mind of Call-Me at the deathbed, taking off his coat and turning back his sleeves, picking up a pillow …

The king calls, ‘Hans, where are you? We are ready. Today you must finish with the drawing, or you will have to chase me. I shall not linger at Whitehall when I could be hunting.’

The king’s tone is hearty; as if he is trying to encourage himself as well as the painter. Hans whistles through his teeth and flaps over his sheets. When stitched together they will cover the wall. The councillors fall back, making space. Fitz murmurs, ‘What’s the matter with him today? Something’s the matter.’

He thinks, the damage has been done since last October. It is cumulative, but we are only noticing now. The rebels have knocked him out of true. He will not be the same again. The king stands alone on the turkey carpet, feet planted on the cobalt stars. His voice reaches out, as if to loop them into his plans: Hampton Court to Woking, to Guildford, to Easthampstead. ‘You will hunt with me this summer, my lord Cromwell.’

He moves so fast that he is able to grip the king by his upper arms and steadies him as he sways. Fitz is behind him. ‘A seat for the king!’ Audley bawls. Cries of distant alarm – how news flies! – then pounding of feet, and servants and courtiers pour in. ‘Keep away!’ Fitz windmills his arms, bellows as if he were on the battlefield. Wriothesley has a stool, gliding it smoothly under his monarch’s haunches. Gingerly, they lower the afflicted man, so he sits gaping, his face working as if he might cry. He and Audley lean in, propping him up. There is a sheen of sweat on Henry’s face. He takes out a handkerchief. They huddle to shield him from the ring of faces. ‘Have you a pain, sir?’ Audley asks. ‘Where is your pain?’

‘Give me some air,’ the sick man says.

They step away; but Henry takes him by the sleeve; he is reeled in. ‘My lord,’ Henry blots his face, ‘this is not the first time we have felt ourselves fall. A humour has got into our legs. A weakness. No, the doctors don’t know, any better than we know. But it will get better, it must.’

He sees that the king is furious with himself: a low white fury that makes him tremble. ‘Send all these people away. Tell Hans to come tomorrow. Tell them it is only a – no, tell them nothing. Disperse them.’

He thinks the king is done. He eases away from him, straightening up, but the king still holds his sleeve. ‘Cromwell, what if it is a girl?’

His heart sinks. ‘Then boys will follow.’

The king releases him. ‘Where’s Fitz?’ Henry says, plaintive. ‘I want Fitz, send the rest off.’

He turns. No one dares approach. ‘Allons,’ he says. Audley falls in with him, Wriothesley treads on his boot heels. They do not speak till they reach the other end of the gallery. Audley casts a glance back. ‘We must keep this secret.’

Mr Wriothesley says, ‘Of course, my lord.’

He says, ‘Not a chance.’ The painter has followed them. ‘Master Holbein? Bring your drawing. The king’s face. Let me see.’

Hans whistles up a boy, who scuffles through the sheets bearing the king’s head, till he finds a version the master is content to show. He, Cromwell, puts his thumb on the king’s forehead, as if he were smudging him with chrism. ‘Turn the head. Turn it full on. Make him look at us.’

‘God in Heaven,’ Hans says, ‘that will be frightening. Turn body and all?’

Frowning face and massive shoulders. Bloated waist, padded cod. Legs like the pillars that hold the globe in place. Legs that could never stagger, feet never lose the path.

As July comes in Lord Latimer is down from the north, complaining to all who will listen of his sufferings at the hands of the Pilgrims. He will be glad to see much less of Yorkshire; he knows the king’s business will force him back, but for the rest of the time he will be content to live on his property in Pershore: and so says his wife Kate.

Lord Latimer wonders why young men hide smiles. What’s funny about his wife Kate?

News comes from Scotland that Princess Madeleine is dead. Her triumphant entry into Edinburgh will not now take place. The banners are furled, the pageants dismantled, the silver trumpets laid in their cases.

Henry says, ‘Surely James will seek another Frenchwoman. But I do not think François will let him have his younger daughter, to be exposed to the Scottish air. There is the Duchess of Vendôme – though James turned her down once, and I do suppose her people are offended.’

‘The Duke of Longueville has died,’ he says, ‘leaving a widow – a very handsome woman, they say, only three years wed, yet with a son in her arms and another child in the womb. James might look that way.’

But I don’t know, he thinks, if she would look at James. The family of Marie de Guise are such lofty people they might not know where Scotland is. Anyway, James will be mourning a while yet. A pension was to come with Madeleine, thirty thousand francs a year; it will not continue with a corpse.

Madeleine was one month shy of her seventeenth birthday. In fairness to the French, they did advise James to choose a more robust bride.

With Lady Oughtred, on a fine evening, he walks in the queen’s privy garden. Bess rests her hand on his arm. ‘So the marriage, when shall it be?’ she asks.

‘As soon as you like. But,’ he stops and turns her to face him, ‘you do like?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Her eyes are warm. ‘I know some would think …’

‘There are disparities, of course. I have talked it over with your brothers. I have not shirked the point.’

‘But after all, I am a widow,’ she says, ‘and not some inexperienced girl.’

He is not sure what she means; but then, why should he expect to understand this young woman’s mind? ‘My lady, may I ask – it is perhaps too private a matter –’

‘Whatever it is, I am bound in obedience to tell you.’

‘Well then … I should like to know, do you mourn your husband still?’

She turns her face away; he admires her: her face, like Jane’s, has a soft smooth shape, and she has the same habit of dipping her chin, as if taking a covert survey of what’s around her.

She says, ‘I make no complaint of Oughtred. He was a good husband and I regret his passing. But you will not think me heartless if I say I could also be happy with a different kind of man?’ She turns her face up to his, earnest; he sees how she wants to please him. ‘I am quite ready to make trial of it.’

‘When my wife died,’ he says, ‘I missed her out of all measure. Considering what my life was then, always riding up the country, over to Antwerp half a dozen times a year, late nights with the cardinal, livery dinners and conclaves at Gray’s Inn … sometimes when I’d come in she’d say, “I’m Lizzie Cromwell, have you seen my husband?”’

‘Lizzie,’ she says. ‘Just as well I’m Bess these days. It is the same with all Elizabeths – as we are called, we answer.’

He smiles. ‘I won’t confuse the two of you.’

‘We did suppose, myself and Jane, that you were fond of your wife, because you never took any opportunity you were offered – and Jane says you were friendly with Mary Boleyn, and could have married her if you pleased.’

‘Oh, that was just Mary’s whim,’ he says. ‘She wanted to upset her people. Put Uncle Norfolk in a rage. And she thought I would do a good job of that. Mary has a good heart, and they say she suits well with that fellow Stafford she wed. But I thought of her as … God love her, well-used.’

She is anxious. ‘But you do not object to a widow?’

‘My first wife was a widow.’

‘If you had wed Mary Boleyn you would have been related to the king.’

‘After a manner.’

‘You will be related to him now. Though it has taken longer.’

He thinks, how gentle she is, to give thought to my state of mind. How careful she is, for she has mentioned the old gossip about Mary Boleyn, but never the new gossip about Mary the king’s daughter.

He halts; the garden’s scents rise around them; he turns her to face him, taking her two hands. ‘Let’s not talk about the dead. I would rather talk about you. We must dress you up. We must order some silks and velvets. And I thought, emeralds?’

‘I lent my jewel box to Jane, when she was so suddenly elevated. I suppose she will give it back now I am to be married.’

‘I will talk to people in Antwerp. We could go through the king’s man, Cornelius, but I know some setters who do beautiful work, and after all, you won’t want to have what your sister has.’

She drops her eyes. ‘Jane said you would be generous.’

‘You must indulge me. I have no daughters. Though that is not true, I have one, you will have heard.’

‘Your Antwerp daughter.’

‘But I don’t think she cares for such things.’

She lowers her head and smiles. Suddenly she is as shy as her sister. ‘My lord, you may indulge me and I shall indulge you. But I shall hardly be your daughter.’

He says gently, ‘I had hoped that you would see yourself in that way.’

‘Oh, but …’ She stops and puts her hand on his arm. ‘It is to be like that? I did not know. As you please, of course … but you are not so very old, and I had hoped to have your children.’

‘Mine?’

He is shocked to the marrow. He, who has been in Rome! Who has been, frankly, everywhere … ‘Bess,’ he says, ‘we should go inside.’

‘Why?’

These Seymours, he thinks, they are like something from the Greek legends. A curse will fall on them. We know Old Sir John tupped his daughter-in-law, but surely she does not think that is the usual arrangement?

‘It is late, you are tired, it’s cold,’ he says. ‘And we should not be alone.’

‘Why?’

‘It could lead to –’ He passes his hand over his face. What could it lead to? ‘To misunderstandings.’

She says, ‘It is barely eight o’clock, the night is warm, and I am as fresh as a milkmaid at dawn.’

‘Come in,’ he urges her.

‘In other respects I agree.’ Her voice is icy. ‘I think there has been a misunderstanding. I am offering my person to one Cromwell only, the one I marry. But which Cromwell is it meant to be?’

His mind flies back to his conversation with Edward. It lands, light as a fly, and begins to crawl over it: over every meaningful pause, every ellipsis. Were names spoken? Perhaps not. Could Edward have supposed – could Edward have mistaken – yes, he supposes he could.

He lets out his breath. ‘So. Well. I am flattered, Bess. That you would even consider it.’

She says firmly: ‘I am not at fault.’

‘By no means.’

‘You are at fault. I listened to what my brother required of me. I made no objection. I never said, what age is Cromwell, and was his father not a tradesman? I just said, Yes, Edward. For the family, Edward. Anything and anyone you command, Edward.’

‘I see,’ he says. ‘I begin to see.’

‘I know you are a busy man. But I think you might have paused to explain yourself, so Edward could explain to me. But with no elucidation, I assumed –’

‘But why would you? When Gregory is so likely a young man, and of an age to marry?’

‘I think you have no idea, my lord, how much your single state is talked of. How much the whole court looks to you to change it. How they speculate, men and women both, that a great and dangerous honour will come your way.’

‘It is all just gossip,’ he says. ‘And you are right that it is dangerous. Dangerous to me, dishonourable to the Lady Mary.’

‘Then you would do well to be clear in your mind. Who you will marry. Who you will not.’

He begs, ‘Don’t tell Gregory. He thinks you have freely accepted him.’ A qualm overtakes him. ‘You will accept him? Because Bess – my lady – you are relieved, that it is not as you thought?’

A pause, then: ‘My lord, I will not tell you whether I am relieved or not. You must puzzle it out. But I dare say you will be too busy to puzzle for long.’

‘Gregory will make a tender husband,’ he says wretchedly, ‘and he will make you proud of him. He is a kind young man and gentle, and he is a good dancer, and he cuts a fine figure in the tilt yard, as fine as the best gentleman with sixteen quarters of nobility on his shield, and the king likes him, and no doubt he will make him a baron very soon and you will once more have your title and style. He is all together better than me –’ I, he thinks, who am so soiled in life’s battle, so seamed and scarred, so numb, so unwanted, so cold.

‘Stop,’ she says. ‘First, too few words. Now, too many.’

‘But you will? You will wed Gregory?’

‘Tell me when and where, and I will come in my bridal finery and marry whichever Cromwell presents himself. I am an obliging woman,’ she says. ‘Though not so obliging as you thought.’

She walks away on the grassy path, but she does not hurry. Her head is down, she appears to be in prayer. He thinks, she will be plain Mistress Cromwell, and she had not reckoned on that. Does she mind? It is not the least part of it, to find you are not only dropped down a generation, but have no title. Yet surely she would prefer the son, with all his prospects before him, to the father who – well, he thinks, I suppose there are prospects before me. No doubt Wriothesley is right, about the Garter. It seems such a thing could never happen, not to Walter’s son. Yet so much has happened already, that the most credulous child would never believe.

When he was a boy he used to go door to door offering to sharpen scissors and bodge pans. He would scrub out a henhouse or scour pewter or cut up a carcass if a housewife had come by half a pig unexpectedly. He called all his customers ‘my lady’. He saw how it brightened their day. Sometimes it earned him an apple or a halfpenny, and once a kiss: and these things were over and above the fee for his services.

His father’s friends worked the river, piloting travellers and running ferries from bank to bank. So he did river work too: a hungry, ignorant boy. What did he want with a horn book? As soon as he needed to read, he could read. If there was something worth writing, he could scratch it out. He used to search for treasure in the riverine mud, and plenty treasure he found. Let a gentleman’s cap blow off and it will feed a family for a week: it is not the watermarked velvet that you trade, but his cap badge. It could be a gold Becket or Christopher; a flower with enamelled petals; or a jewelled cross, with a garnet where God’s head should be. He learned to hide his finds from Walter, and keep the profit for himself.

One night, drunk, Walter said to him, hand slapping his own breast: ‘This boat is rowing and rowing, Thomas. I’m rowing to save my life.’

Towards the end of June the Cromwells visit the Seymour household at Twickenham. Gifts are exchanged, they take pleasure trips on the river, and musicians play into the dusk: then by the scent and light of beeswax candles he makes his arrangements with Edward, the head of the house. Edward agrees with him that the young couple should have time together without being overlooked by their elders. They will marry in early August when he, the Privy Seal, sees a two-day gap in his schedule; two days when, we trust, the princes of Europe, instead of clashing in arms, sit with dreaming eyes in the shade, listening to water drop in marble basins.

If Edward Seymour shared his sister’s mistake, he does not allude to it: neither of them do. Messages of congratulation pour in, a few of them sincere. Call-Me says, who would have thought Gregory would be so useful to you, as to unite you with the king’s family? I always said he would come to good. Once the paperwork is done, the match is as good as made; and with the short scented nights before them, there is no harm if the young couple go to bed. Try and make her happy, he tells Gregory, happier than an old earl ever could: then she never regrets it, never looks back and says, I could have been the Countess of Oxford.

For his son’s first household he has ordered majolica ware from Venice, from the masters who work by the church of Barnaba. A rush job, but he looks forward to unpacking the crates, running his finger over the glaze. He has stipulated gods and goddesses: Danaë visited by Zeus, who arrives in the form of a cloudburst. This is no ordinary rain: the bride stands, complacent, as gold plummets down on her, and nuggets roll over her bare arms and thighs and pool as a pile of bullion around her ankles. Never was a lass so augmented; and no bruises either. Bess Seymour will recognise Danaë, and no doubt give her a nod.

The faux-pas is forgotten, he thinks. No reason the girl should speak of it: it would make her seem a fool. He wishes Jenneke might come from Antwerp; he will write, or Gregory will write, but he does not know if she will stir. All the household is braced for celebration. The kitchen can build his major cake at last, topped with balls of gilded marzipan: the one he intended for Easter. They will eat Venetian cakes from the new dishes, some made with pine-nuts and ginger, and some with syrup of violets.

By midsummer the Pilgrims are all dead: hanged or beheaded, along with those who assisted them, excused them, or fed them with money and hope. Bigod, Lord Darcy, and Captain Cobbler himself, the great rebel of Louth; the Abbot of Jervaux, the one-time Abbot of Fountains: some executed at Tyburn, some at the Tower, some sent to be killed in York or Hull. They say old Darcy spent his last days cursing Thomas Cromwell, when he should have been telling his beads. The recalcitrant monks of the London Charterhouse are chained up at Newgate, and in less than a week the plague takes five of them, leaves others dying: dispatched, it seems, by the hand of God.

Harry Percy does not outlast the month of June. Rafe is at his deathbed, where he lies sans sight and speech, yellow as saffron and with belly blown. You would have pitied him, sir, Rafe says, and he says, I am sure I should. Did he mention his wife Mary Talbot?

After a manner, Rafe says. When the onlookers reminded him he had made no provision for her he nodded that yes, he knew: but she was not his wife, never his wife, he was married to Anne Boleyn. And all this he showed them, Rafe says, by pushing away any papers they laid before him, and by a petulant sweep of his hand over his embroidered coverlet: his palm, damp with his last secretions, brushing the emblems of Percy rule, the blue lion and lozenges of gold.

He says, ‘His memory was still good, despite his pain, if he remembered Anne Boleyn. I wonder if he remembered the night he walked in to arrest the cardinal?’

The Percys’ noble house is now utterly undone. Harry Percy has no offspring, and the king is his heir. His brother Thomas has pre-deceased him, beheaded for treason in the late broils; his brother Ingram lies in the Tower, under threat of the same.

And Robert Aske is dead. Norfolk supervises the execution. He is hanged in York, from the Clifford Tower, on a market day. Where now his tawny silk jacket with the velvet facings, his crimson satin doublet? Still in London at the Cardinal’s Hat. Aske begs to be full dead before he is cut up: the king concedes it.

After that, his mercy appears exhausted. Among the traitors fetched to London is a woman, Margaret Cheney – known as wife to Sir John Bulmer, but really his concubine. It is indecent to cut a woman apart in public or strip her to draw out her entrails, so if guilty of high treason she is burned. He goes to Henry. Asking for quick deaths devolves to him, a duty inherited from the cardinal. For Anne Boleyn he procured not only the swifter end, but the Calais swordsman: she too could have died by fire.

He says, ‘Sir, Bulmer’s woman is sent to suffer at Smithfield – I know the penalty is specified, but it is not often enforced.’

Henry grunts.

‘Consider, sir, she made a guilty plea.’

‘She could hardly do other,’ the king says. ‘No, my lord, there is no help for it, she must endure – it will be an example to other women, should they incline to papistry and rebellion.’

Margaret Cheney is beautiful. He has seen her. She is tender and young. He says, ‘Majesty, let me bring her where you can see her.’

Her beauty might move him. He can be moved. We have seen it happen.

Henry says, ‘I have no curiosity to see a traitor. Except Pole. I would be curious to see Pole, but you seem unable to get hold of him.’

He bows, withdraws: a failure, twice a failure. He thinks, perhaps Cranmer and I, perhaps if we pleaded on our knees for him to stop the burning … But Cranmer is in the country. In times past, the king’s women might have appealed to him, for one of their own sex. But the Lady Mary has been warned stiffly, by him, not to speak for any rebel; and the queen, he supposes, has been told the same by her brother.

He leans against the wall in the privy chamber. He thinks, do not falter, Master Secretary. Have no qualms, my lord Privy Seal; Baron Cromwell, do not fail. You must not soften now.

A young man approaches: ‘May I offer you assistance, my lord?’

‘Tom Culpeper,’ he says. The young fellow bows. Doublet silk, manners honed: by blood, some sort of Howard. Is there no end to them?

The young man says smoothly, ‘Messages from Calais, my lord.’

‘Lady Lisle is delivered at last?’

‘Ah, no, it is not yet her time.’

‘Then do not trouble the king. He looks every hour to hear Lisle has a son.’

He brushes past Culpeper, hugging his folio of papers. You cannot falter, he thinks, and you must not. You must crunch up the enemy, flesh, bones and all. You cannot afford to fail, you must bring Henry good news, you must dredge it up from somewhere; he is outwardly serene, but not serene or patient when he wakes in the night, not when his leg pains him in the small hours.

The king has pulled Francis Bryan back from France, saying, ‘What’s the use? This ingrate Pole always eludes us.’ The difficulty is not how to seize his person – it is where. In the Low Countries, jurisdictions lie so close that a man may easily pass from France to Empire and back in a day; territory is so contested that the border can change while a traveller is hearing Mass or taking a nap. But Pole does not hover in mid-air, he is always in someone’s jurisdiction. Any violence involved in arresting him could be taken as a hostile act on foreign soil: a provocation to war, or an excuse for it.

But where can Pole go next? Neither France nor the Low Countries will receive him, but they will not extradite him either. He says to Wriothesley, he will go to Italy now. He has missed his chance with our rebels. He will retreat to warmer climes, where his pedigree is applauded, and where with fellow prelates in scarlet he will pace on a white mule, while poor peasants throw money under the hooves.

And that is our chance to kill him, he thinks. For in Italy who owns the night, who can patrol it?

He says, ‘I wish I had the man who shot Packington. Were he the greatest papist alive, I would turn him, and send him after Reginald.’

At the Charterhouse – the property now shuttered and barred – lights have appeared at night. Papists spread the word that ghosts walk abroad. ‘Probably thieves,’ he says to Wriothesley. ‘Tell them, set a good watch. All the movables belong to the king.’

But the watchmen see who holds the lights; it is the plague-stricken brothers themselves, tiptoeing the cloisters in their stinking shrouds. They bring dispatches from the world beyond, apparently: they have seen the martyred Bishop Fisher, seated at the right hand of God.

‘What about Thomas More?’ he says. ‘Anybody seen him?’

Revenues from the London Charterhouse should be £642.0s.4d. Riche has the figures. Take all the Carthusians’ houses together, and you are looking at the annual sum of £2,947.

‘And fifteen shillings, four pence, and one farthing,’ says Richard Riche.

He says, ‘It seems to me, Sir Richard, that you have done service to the state. You can have the farthing, and spend it on your little pleasures.’

The Lisles’ man, John Husee, is never away from his door, jostling with other petitioners and begging for ten minutes. When Richard Cromwell waves him in at last, he has his arms full of maps and account books, but he has the face of a downtrodden spaniel. ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘Lord Lisle’s promised abbey – he is desperate to get it signed over.’

‘I’ve said I’ll see to it, Husee, and I will. Give all those papers to Master Richard.’

‘With respect, sir, my lord – you have been promising to attend to it since last November. My lord is so beleaguered, you would not imagine how his creditors press. And Sir Richard Riche has brought in a delay at every turn. Without a fee Riche will do nothing. And my lord cannot pay his prices.’

‘Sit down, Husee,’ he says. ‘Shall we have a glass to keep up our strength?’

Husee sits, but he shifts on his stool. ‘The abbey – my lord trusts to have the rents for the months he has been waiting?’

He sighs. ‘I’ll talk to Riche. No more delays, I swear. But now, look, Husee, I have always known you for an honest man, so give me an honest answer. Only this morning at early Mass the queen asked me, how does my lady in Calais, is she not a mother yet? By my reckoning, she said, the child should be teething by now.’

To his astonishment, tears fill Husee’s eyes. He says, ‘My lord, I do not dare to tell you.’

‘She has lost it?’ Richard says.

‘No.’ Husee looks wild. ‘It has gone away.’

He says, ‘I know that prodigies and wonders have been seen in Calais this year. But a child does not vanish before its birth.’

Richard says, ‘Is her belly down?’

‘No.’ Husee rubs his eyes. ‘She appears as ripe as ever woman was. But it comes not forth and it comes not forth, and now the midwives say they were in error.’

‘We thought she was carrying some fabulous beast,’ Richard says. ‘But she never conceived, is that not the truth?’

A tear drops on a map of Lisle’s new property. He leans across. ‘Tell Lord Lisle we will pray his lady will amend.’

‘Oh, she must,’ Husee says. ‘Were she to die, how would we settle her debts? She has wept a salt ocean. My lord set so much store by his heir. But good gentleman that he is, he will love her no less, he only asks her to stop grieving. If I could tell her the abbey were signed over, it would do her heart good.’

‘Husee, go away,’ Richard says. He sounds tired.

‘I will, Master Richard. But by your favour, do not forget the abbey.’

The door closes. ‘Christ,’ Richard says. ‘Who will tell the king?’

‘That lucky man sits not far from you.’ He lifts the topmost papers from the pile Husee has left. ‘If Lisle wants his abbey he needs to find money for the clerks’ fees, they will not give him credit.’ He scratches his chin. ‘I wish John Husee worked for me. He only gets eightpence a day with the Calais garrison, and I warrant Lisle never shows him gratitude. He is a tenacious man.’

Richard says, ‘This will strike Henry to the heart.’

He gets up, heavily. His feet seem reluctant to walk. ‘I’ll make sure he is sitting down, and help at hand.’

Henry does not stagger at the news. He just stares, mute, his colour rising, till he says, ‘Gone? Gone where? St Gabriel help and guide us.’

‘I have never heard of such a case,’ he says, ‘nor I suppose have the physicians.’

‘Oh, have you not?’ Henry’s tone is savage. ‘If your memory were longer you would know that Katherine misled me in the same fashion. God punish these women, they are serpents!’

‘I did not know,’ he says. ‘I was not here then.’ He feels like Tom Thumb, an inch high.

‘We were but newly wed,’ Henry says. ‘What did I know of women and their schemes? She miscarried of one child, but kept her chamber, and claimed she was carrying its twin. Till the imposture was found out.’

‘Majesty, was it not an honest mistake?’

‘Women are the beginning of all mistakes. Read any of the divines, and they will tell you.’ Henry turns and looks at him. ‘Always you, Cromwell, with the bad news.’

Tom Thumb is caught in a mousetrap. He is baked in a pudding. He is swallowed by what beast you please, not to emerge till it shits.

‘But then, no one else tells the truth,’ the king says. ‘So how does Lady Lisle now?’

‘Weeping.’

‘She may well. My poor uncle.’ A pause. ‘Send my doctors over.’

Relieved, he bows again. ‘Lord Lisle will be indebted.’

Henry says, ‘I want to know what is inside her. Some women carry dead flesh in their wombs, they call it a mole, it is not alive and it cannot be born. But sometimes it is sloughed off, it proves to have the features of a monster child, such as hair, or teeth.’

When the king sees the mural Hans has painted, he says nothing. It is not for him to thank a mere artist. But he glitters: not merely augmented, but enhanced.

The queen stands by him, and his hand steals out, and rests on her belly, as if testing what he finds there: as he has many times in the last few days, while she holds her breath and wonders why. On the advice of her brother, her ladies and the doctors, the news from Calais has been kept from her. And she has trained herself not to pull away, but to keep her frame steady and her face as immobile as the face of a marble Madonna. If she shrinks a little now, and averts her eyes, it is from the man on the wall: from his fist planted on his hip, from his hand on the pommel of his dagger, from his belligerent gaze; from his straddled legs, unbandaged calves bulging with muscle; from his bejewelled manhood, with a bow tied on top.

Jane stands herself, caught in her own gaze, crimson and tawny: her painted eyes resting beyond the frame. Behind her, our king’s gracious mother, in an old-fashioned hood with long lappets. And leaning on the altar which bears his son’s praises, the pale invader who carried his banners from the sea to the altar at Paul’s: narrow-faced, narrow of shoulder, his robe twitched across his person, his hand half-concealed by the ermine lining his great sleeve. Four-square in front of him, his son seems twice his girth; he could tuck mother and father both inside his jacket, he could swallow them whole.

‘By the saints you were right,’ Hans whispers, ‘when you said I should turn him to face us.’ He seems awed by his own creation. ‘Jesus Maria. He looks as if he would spring out of the frame and trample you.’

‘I wish France could see this,’ Henry tells the company. ‘Or the Emperor. Or the King of Scots.’

‘There can be copies, Majesty,’ Hans says, modestly. Mirrors of his lively image: ever larger, more active with every telling.

‘Come, Jane.’ The king plucks his eyes away. ‘We are done here. Time to be off to the country.’

Like a cottager he takes his wife by the hand, and kisses her mouth. My dear darling, I to Esher, you to Hampton Court. I to pleasure, you to pain: but not just yet.

August: the Lady Mary requests a greyhound to course with the royal party, and so before the sport begins he is taking her one: pure white, clean-limbed, with a small proud head and a green and white collar of plaited leather. Himself, Richard his nephew, Gregory his son – soon to be a happy bridegroom – and Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp – soon to be a happy brother-in-law. And as their escort, Dick Purser to lead the hound, and the boy Mathew, in his Cromwell livery coat; and a score of followers who have tagged along.

Lord Beauchamp frowns at the boy Mathew. ‘Did you not use to be my man, down at Wolf Hall?’

‘Aye, sir. But I came to seek my fortune, and I have found it.’

‘I am at fault,’ he says. ‘I drew the boy from his rustic innocence.’

‘Country mouse to town rat,’ Dick Purser says, shoving Mathew in the back.

‘Stop that,’ he says. ‘Arrange your faces. Here is Norfolk’s boy.’

A blazing day, a young lord in orange satin: Surrey advances, his long limbs flying, his eyes screwed up, his hands beating the air like a man in a cloud of mosquitoes; the court is swarming with rumours about his father, and all of them sting.

‘Seymour!’ the young man yells.

I shall speak first, he thinks, the soul of courtesy – ‘My lord, I see you have quit Kenninghall –’

‘You are not wrong,’ Surrey says.

‘– and the court is the gainer.’

Surrey is upon them. His father is right, he looks ill: his face has fallen in. ‘My business is with Lord Beauchamp. I have nothing to say to you.’

Edward Seymour says, ‘Surrey, stand where you are.’

‘Or take a pace back,’ Richard Cromwell says. ‘I sincerely advise it.’

‘I stop where I please,’ Surrey says. ‘Do not tell me where to stop.’

‘Armed like a man,’ Richard says, ‘yet talks like a three-year-old.’

Surrey does step back, as if he wants to view them better: the servants in their grey marbled coats, Gregory and Richard and Seymour in their peacock silks, and Lord Cromwell in his indigo gown, body solid beneath its soft folds. The greyhound steps sideways, grizzles and yaps, and Dick Purser bundles her backwards for fear she should snap: how tempting must be Surrey’s thigh, the tender flesh in its flashing hose. Surrey jerks a thumb at him – at the Lord Privy Seal: ‘Seymour, are you so in love with this churl’s money that you drag your family name through the mire? When they told me of this match you have made I could scarce believe it – not even of you.’

‘He means me,’ Gregory says. ‘I am the match.’

‘Aye, you,’ Surrey says, ‘you squat little clod.’ He whips around, long body glinting like a viper’s and ready to bite. ‘What evil persuasion is this, Seymour, to marry your sister to these shearsmen, these sheep-runners – I ask you, what disparagement is it, to your own family’s coat of arms, and to the name of the late Oughtred, so worthy a man –’

‘Oughtred is dead,’ Gregory says. ‘He is well dead, worthy or not.’

‘He sees you!’ Surrey yelps.

‘And I see you, you sorry piece of work.’ Now Richard Cromwell steps forward. He does not touch Surrey, but he locks his gaze.

He, Lord Cromwell, pats a hand to his own chest: there is his knife, but no man must draw. He sees the pain that clouds Surrey’s face – belligerence, bewilderment. ‘Surrey, you are not yourself.’ As he speaks he takes Richard by the elbow to hold him back. ‘Your lord father has told me you are mourning still for young Richmond, God rest him.’

‘It is a year,’ Surrey says, ‘a year my friend has been mouldering in his tomb at Thetford – and blackguards like you left to run above ground. I come here and the whole court is buzzing like a muckheap in a sty. I dare say there are a score of rascals who would perjure themselves to pull the Howards down. They are so eaten by envy that they would consent to have both their legs broken if they could see us take a fall.’

‘You will take a fall anyway,’ Richard says, ‘if you do not back off.’

‘My father could be king of the north. All the great families support him. But witness his loyalty. He has refused all offers to turn his coat –’

‘Has he?’ Edward says. ‘Offers from whom?’

‘And where are the rewards for him? Does he not deserve more rewards and greater than any other subject? Instead, we of noble blood must stand by and watch knaves filching manors from those who have owned them time out of mind, and trusting to mingle their seed with the finest blood this land affords. What does the king do, keeping about him such a set of common thieves and dip-pockets? Thrusting out of his council gentlemen of high birth –’

He puts his hand on Surrey’s arm. Surrey dashes it away. ‘Cromwell, you plan to murder all noblemen. One by one you will cut off our heads till only vile blood is left in England, and then you will have all to rule.’

‘This is my quarrel,’ Edward Seymour says. He steps up to Surrey, lays a soldier’s hand on orange satin and silver fringing. Surrey lurches forward, hand on his dagger. The dog barks in panic. The boy Mathew shouts, ‘No blades, Spindle-shanks.’

My lord Privy Seal roars, ‘Drop your hands all. Hands at your sides.’ Shocked, they do it – but Surrey flails overarm, and the boy Mathew throws up a hand and then sags against his master. A bright spatter of blood drops to the tiles.

Surrey steps back, aghast. His face is smeared with sweat and tears. Richard twitches the dagger out of his hand. It was like disarming a child, he will say later. He will recall how the young man’s fingers felt: numb, cold and blue.

Mathew has righted himself. Furiously he sucks the wound in his palm. The greyhound licks the floor: vile blood. ‘A scratch,’ the boy claims, but his blood runs down his chin.

Gregory takes out a handkerchief. ‘Here, Mathew.’ The youth Culpeper has appeared, alarmed, and other gentlemen, sprinting from gallery and guard chamber.

Richard says, ‘Are the tendons cut?’

‘Culpeper, run and seek a surgeon,’ Gregory says. In the hubbub he notes his son’s ease of manner.

Edward says, ‘An inch, Surrey, and you would have severed his veins at the wrist, a defenceless lad who never did you harm.’

‘Well, he called him spindle-shanks,’ Gregory says. ‘And so do I.’

Surrey rubs his face and glares at Gregory. ‘Meet me in the fields, Cromwell – or no, I will not fight you, you are not my match, find some nobleman to fight for you if you can, and I will skewer him and you may come and collect his carcass at your pleasure.’

‘You’ll skewer nobody, boy,’ Richard says. ‘You won’t be able to skewer your own dinner. You won’t have a right hand to pick your nose with.’

‘What?’ Surrey says.

Edward says, ‘It is forbidden to draw blood within the precincts of the court. Any such action is a threat to the sovereign.’

‘He’s not here,’ Surrey says stupidly.

‘The queen is here,’ Richard says. ‘With a child in her womb. So is the king’s maiden daughter.’

He says soberly, ‘My lords, gentlemen, you are all witness. One blow was struck, and my lord Surrey struck it.’

Edward says, ‘Surrey, you know the penalty.’

The dog’s tongue diligently polishes the tiles at their feet. Surrey gazes at his right hand, holding it before him. It is limp, as if already it does not belong to him. ‘I did not mean to wound him. I only meant to make a show. And he is not much hurt, is he?’

Mathew begins to agree. But Surrey turns on him: ‘Mathew – is that your name? I am sure I know you under another.’

No doubt, he thinks. From some household under suspicion, where he waits at table or carries coals: hands clean or hands dirty, working for the safety of the realm.

Richard says, ‘It does not matter if he has as many names as the God of the Jews. It is not a servant you have injured, it is the king’s peace.’

Surrey’s hand goes to his purse. ‘Let me give the boy some recompense.’

‘Offer it to the king.’ Seymour looks as grim as if he is presiding over the punishment already. ‘Your father will be shocked to his marrow when he hears this. He will know the punishment laid down – and you Howards, you always say that old customs should be kept.’

There is a method for it: ten men are required. The sergeant surgeon with his instrument; the sergeant of the wood-yard with mallet and block. The master cook, who brings the butcher’s knife; the sergeant of the larder, who knows how meat should be cut; the sergeant ferrer, with irons to sear the wound; the yeoman from the chandlery, with waxed cloths; the yeoman of the scullery, with a dish of coals to heat the searing iron, a chafing dish to cool them; the sergeant of the cellar with wine and ale; the sergeant of the ewery with basin and towels. And the sergeant of the poultry, with a cock, its legs strung, struggling and squawking as he holds it against the block and strikes off its head.

When the fowl has been sacrificed the right arm of the offender is bared. His forearm is laid down. The butcher fits the blade to the joint. A prayer is said. Then the sword hand is severed, the veins seared, and the body of the collapsed offender is rolled onto a cloth and carried away.

He takes two days off for the wedding, as promised: leaving the king at his hunting lodge in Sunninghill on 1 August, heading to Mortlake on 2 August for the ceremony next day, and back with the king in Windsor by the fifth. It is a modest wedding, not one of those that ape the nobility; but the sun shines on the bride and groom, and the guests are in high good humour. ‘Where’s Call-Me?’ Gregory asks.

He has to draw his son aside. ‘At home. His little boy has died.’

‘God save us. Does the king know?’

Gregory is a courtier, he thinks: he is what I have made him: his mind goes first to the king, to whether the news might frighten him or put him in a bilious humour.

He says, ‘The king need not be told. He does not usually enquire after our sons and daughters.’ He has not, for instance, alluded to Jenneke, though someone must have told him all about her. ‘I do not think he knows how many children Wriothesley has, and it would be a pity if the first he heard of William was his decease.’

They are at Mortlake: Cromwells en fête, in their old country. What would Walter say, if he knew his grandson was the king’s brother-in-law? Though it was Walter who used to claim the Cromwells were gentry. He said he could show parchments about it, but then he said that rats had eaten them. Walter said, your mother came from good stock, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, places up north; no paupers they. This may be true. But these strangers who write to him, claiming kin; what if he had made a claim on them, when he was a boy? They would likely have kicked him downstairs. Prised his fingers from the ironwork of their gate.

Gregory says, ‘Surrey lies under a heavy sentence. Perhaps the king would pardon him, as a wedding gift to me?’

‘Three points,’ he says. ‘First, I am hoping he will give you an abbey. Second, you are not the person offended – it is the crown that is offended, this is not a private matter. Third – I thought you hated Surrey.’

‘He hates me,’ Gregory says. ‘That is different. Though I am not squat, am I?’

‘By no measure,’ he says. ‘You are happy? You and Bess do not seem shy of each other.’

‘Yes, I am happy,’ his son says. ‘We are both happy. So please not to look at her, sir. Converse with her when others are present, and do not write to her. I ask this of you. I have never asked anything much.’

His heart misgives. She has told him, then. ‘Gregory,’ he says, ‘I do not defend myself. I should have made myself clear.’ He looks at his son and sees he must say more. ‘It was only out of duty she consented, when she thought I was the groom, for surely I could never be preferred, not to a goodly young man like you – and as for how the muddle came about – Seymour, you know he can be brisk. One gentleman going past another in conversation, it can happen.’

‘Other things can happen. But do not let them.’

He feels himself flush. ‘I am a man of honour.’

Gregory will say, what honour is that? The Putney sort?

‘I mean,’ he says, ‘I am a man of my word.’

‘So many words,’ Gregory says. ‘So many words and oaths and deeds, that when folk read of them in time to come they will hardly believe such a man as Lord Cromwell walked the earth. You do everything. You have everything. You are everything. So I beg you, grant me an inch of your broad earth, Father, and leave my wife to me.’

Gregory is going. But then he turns. ‘Bess says she could not eat her breakfast.’

‘It is a big day for her.’

‘She says it means she has conceived already. It is how it took her before, when she was carrying both her children.’

‘Congratulations, Gregory. You are a man of action.’

He wants to stand up and embrace his son, but perhaps not. They have never had a harsh word till today, he thinks, and perhaps what has passed is less harsh than sad: that a son can think evil of his father, as if he is a stranger and you cannot tell what he might do; as if he is a traveller on the road, who might bless your journey and cheer you on, or equally rob you and roll you in a ditch. ‘Gregory, I am glad with all my heart. Do not tell Bess I know, she might take it amiss.’

‘Anything else?’ Gregory says.

‘Yes. It will be the back end of the year before the world needs to know, and meanwhile, it is another thing not to tell the king.’

Henry will think, why so easy for some? How are children so cheap they are left on doorsteps to be scooped up and parented by the parish, and yet the King of England is begging God for one solitary boy? How are they got so easy that a hot kiss in a garden arbour springs fertile desire, and leads to the font and the chrisom cloth when we have scarcely blessed the wedding bed?

‘And also,’ he says, ‘we do not want it said, Cromwell’s son is so keen to be at his bride he does not wait for the blessing of holy church.’

‘It would be true,’ Gregory says. ‘I did not wait for it. I do not give a fig for their blessing. What do priests know about marriage? The king bars them from it. It is time they were put out of the business entirely. They have no more to do there than cripples in a footrace.’

‘I’ll not argue with that. Though I wish them able-bodied.’

‘Oh, the archbishop is your friend,’ Gregory says. ‘I sometimes wonder what Cranmer will do in Heaven, where there is no marriage or giving in marriage. He will have no pastime.’

‘Do not talk about Cranmer’s wife.’

‘I know,’ Gregory says. ‘It goes into the big box of secrets, where an ogre squats on the lid.’

A late-spring child, he thinks. I shall be a grandfer. If we can get through next winter.

‘Go and find your bride,’ he says. ‘You have left her too long.’ But then: ‘Gregory? You are the master in your household – you are the head of it and there is not a soul will doubt it.’

And I like wandering Odysseus, salt-hardened, befogged, making my long way home to a house full of raucous strangers. When I see ordinary happiness the horizon tilts and I see something else. And now I sound like a dotard, saying ‘If we can get through next winter.’ As if I were Uncle Norfolk, claiming the damp will finish me.

On his next mission he takes Fitzwilliam with him: they chase Henry up-country, find him sulking indoors on a wet day, and looking, except that he is seated, much as he does on the mural at Whitehall: less ornamented, but with the same glare. All the same, he seems glad to see them: ‘Thomas! You were to hunt with me, I thought. I have been expecting you. But now the weather turns.’

He opens his mouth to tell the king about the heap of papers on his desk at home. Henry says, ‘What is this we hear, that France and the Emperor have stopped fighting? Can it be true?’

‘They will be fighting again next week,’ Fitzwilliam says, ‘depend upon it. But Majesty, we are here about young Surrey. You cannot cut off his hand, you know.’

The king says, ‘I expect Thomas Howard has written to you? Begging?’

True. You can see the stains seeping through the paper: sweat, tears, bile. Good Lord Cromwell, stand my friend: exert yourself for Thomas Howard, who is your daily beadsman, your debtor for life. Let my foolish son suffer any punishment, but not maiming, a Howard cannot live without his sword hand …

‘Norfolk thinks you bear much credit with me,’ Henry says. ‘That whatever you say, I will do. He thinks me your minion, my lord Privy Seal.’

He cannot think of an answer. Not a safe one.

Henry says, ‘Why should I not punish Surrey according to custom? Let me hear your reasoning.’

Because, Fitzwilliam says. Because it is almost worse to maim a nobleman, than to kill him. It savours of barbarity, or at best of an alien code.

He, Thomas Cromwell, takes up the theme: because he is young, and experience will temper his pride. Because your Majesty is far-seeing, sagacious, and merciful.

‘Merciful,’ Henry says. ‘Not soft-hearted.’ He stirs crossly. ‘I know the Howards and what they are. They expect prizes, when they should expect forfeits. I have kept Tom Truth alive, have I not, when I might have cut off his head for his knavery with my niece?’

He says, ‘My advice, sir – let Surrey sweat for a space. It is a lesson he will not forget. And he will be in your debt thereafter.’

‘Yes, but you always say this, Cromwell. You say, remit them, and they will behave better. Three years back Edward Courtenay’s wife entertained that false prophetess, Barton – ah, you said, forgive her, she is but a woman and weak. I believe now she intrigues again.’

Fitzwilliam says, ‘Courtenay’s wife is clear of present offence, to my mind. And if she is not, Cromwell will soon know, for he has a woman in her household.’

‘And the Pole family? Whom I prospered? Whom I restored in blood, whom I plucked from penury and disgrace? How am I repaid? By Reginald parading around Europe calling me the Antichrist.’

He says, ‘Perhaps there must be a new policy. But – craving your Majesty’s favour in this – we will not start it by cutting off Surrey’s hand.’

Fitz says, ‘I beg you, do not lightly shed ancient blood.’

‘Ancient blood?’ The king laughs. ‘Was there not a Howard who was a lawyer at Lynn?’

‘Majesty, that is true.’ It was some 250 years back, and what is that but the blink of an eye, in a land where the heads of giants emerge from the treetops?

He thinks of them: Bolster, Grip and Wade. He watches Henry. He is about to yield, he thinks, and spare the boy; but Surrey should be aware. The king is like the shrike or butcher bird, who sings in imitation of a harmless seed-eater to lure his prey, then impales it on a thorn and digests it at his leisure. He says, ‘Saving your Majesty, I believe if you go back far enough we were all lawyers. At Lynn or some other place.’

‘And not long before that, we were all beasts.’ Henry smiles, but his smile fades. ‘Send the boy to Windsor. He must stay within the bounds. He may take his exercise in the park, but tell him he will be watched. When we come there ourselves, he need not approach us till we give him leave.’ He stares into space. ‘My lord Cromwell, it is blessed work, to reconcile great families. But you do not imagine Norfolk will ever be your friend, do you?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘And it is not to please him that I ask for mercy.’

‘I see. It is not to please him. Yet I hear you are talking to him about the great priory at Lewes? Howard territory, and yours too I think?’

The king has been in a huddle with Richard Riche: asking what gentleman wants which abbey, and why. Lisle, for instance, has tried to get Beaulieu, Southwick and Waverley, before settling for a modest Devon property. He, Cromwell, has been buying up land in the county of Sussex: terrain where he means to push the Howards, to nudge up against them, run his borders with theirs. ‘I thought that when Lewes comes down, if your Majesty is not averse, the prior’s lodging might be rebuilt to make a house for my son.’

The king’s anger has drained away. He has remembered to be the Well-Beloved. ‘Gregory and his wife should expect every kindness at my hand. Only, my lord, such a great church as there is at Lewes, will it not take many months to pull it down?’

‘I’m not going to pull it down. I’m going to blow it up.’

‘Really?’ The king looks respectful.

‘I know an Italian. He is confident it can be done.’

‘Come to me after supper,’ Henry says. ‘Bring drawings.’ He looks as excited as a child.

When the chapter of the Order of the Garter is held in the king’s closet at Windsor, the king runs his eye along the list and says what everybody is primed to hear: ‘One place we will keep for the prince who will soon be born to us, by God’s grace. The other is for the Lord Privy Seal.’

A muffled – what? The gentlemen rustle in acknowledgement but cannot bring themselves, for a moment, to applaud. They knew it was going to happen. But they are still shocked. A brewer’s son: it takes time to get used to it.

He kneels before the king and makes an eloquent thanks. Henry lowers over his head his Garter collar, a thirty-ounce chain of gold knots and enamelled roses. Affixed to it is the Garter badge, with the image of St George, a golden saint astride a golden horse. ‘Stand up, my lord,’ the king whispers.

Only the dragon is missing: not killed, he thinks but sated, lolling, curled up in the hot sun. His sister Kat used to tell him about a dragon that ate seven women every Saturday, not sparing them even in Lent.

Henry says, ‘You are entered into a sacred brotherhood now. All you need to know of the rites to come, my lord Exeter here will tell you. Or Nicholas Carew, or any of these most noble confreres of mine. I hold them all next my heart, as I do you, my dear Thomas. I hope you will live many years to enjoy your new state.’

There is a sort of groaning, a heavy banging, which signifies the knights’ assent. Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter, is laggard in joining in. The ceremony is to come: late August. In Europe the peace holds. The king says the gospel may be given to the people, this new translation is fit: and the bishops sign off on their deliberations, and send both of them to the printer.

The night before the Garter ceremony, he rides to Windsor, where the canons receive him kindly. But they are hesitant, he perceives, afraid of offending the recruit. My lord, one advises gently, tonight you should think on your failures and derelictions, and make confession if you will: tomorrow you must be perfect, for tomorrow you enter into this order where, if all the knights happened to gather, you would be joined in procession with the kings of France and Scotland, and Charles the Holy Roman Emperor himself.

Do you know, a man from the Wardrobe asks him, the king still has young Richmond’s Garter robes stored here? They are hanging up. If he came down from Heaven, he could step right into them.

In one of the canons’ houses, painted foliage grows over the wall: Tudor roses with giant pomegranates. These are the only licit paintings of such fruits, the canon tells him, and why are they so? Because there, you see, above the door, is the image of Arthur, Prince of Wales, portrayed as he was when he took his Spanish bride: and there she is herself, indicated by the image of the wheel, on which St Catherine was martyred. And we have always said, we canons, the paintings are very clean and fine and we can keep them without penalty or fear, because though our king has denied he was married to the Princess of Aragon, he has never denied she was married to his brother.

‘But all that is a long time ago,’ he says.

‘Really,’ the canon says, ‘you think so? It does not seem so very long ago to me.’

In the precincts there has been a song school, for as long as anyone can remember. As he searches out the old queen’s image above him, he can hear the children learning a motet, and the sound leads him out into the splash of sunlight, under ancient walls. He has seen them in their schoolroom, a nest of chirping birds, little bodies huddled together, their voices soaring above their circumstances: when their voices break, who will they be, will they live meanly? They will be music masters and teach the virginals to oafish boys with thick fingers, to simpering girls who toss their heads and try to see their reflections in the window. They will sing in church on a Sunday: verses of the new gospel, perhaps. He has such children in his own household, though they are not so polished as the king’s performers. In the song school the notes are painted on the wall so the whole group can learn at once. When they are well learned, the notes are whitewashed over. But none of the songs vanish. They sink deep, receding through the plaster, abiding in the wall.

Tomorrow there must be no mishaps, so they walk him through: Lord Exeter, Carew, William Fitzwilliam an encouraging presence at his shoulder. Everything is laid at hand: his cerulean mantle, his feathered hat. He has billed the king for eighteen yards of crimson velvet and nine yards of white sarcenet. Everything is ready to furnish his stall: his helm, cushion, banner, all as prescribed in the statutes. The knights will process to St George’s Chapel, then in the chapter house they will take away his cloak and he will put on his surcoat, and receive his sword. Then he will walk to the quire, head bare, supporters at each side, and there place his hand on the gospel and take the oath. Then, they say, you may ascend to your appointed stall, and Garter Herald – who will be standing just there, please note – he will hand your mantle to your supporters and they will place it on your shoulders. Then they will take your collar and – be ready – they will put it over your head. Then the blessing is read, beseeching St George that he will guide you through the prosperities and adversities of this world.

That’s what we want, he thinks: help in prosperity. We can brace ourselves for the seven lean years. But when the fat years come, are we prepared? We never know how to take it when our life begins to be charmed.

I failed with Jenneke, he thinks. I had her and I let her go, I was handed a precious vessel and I dropped it in shock. I was not prepared for the past to yield such sweet fruit: I was busy painting it out, whitewashing my wall for what was to come.

The Marquis of Exeter says sharply, ‘Have I your attention, my lord? When the blessing is read, you take the book of statutes in your hand. Then put on your cap. Bow to the altar. Bow to the king’s stall. Then take your place, among the illustrious knights.’

Those present, those absent. Those quick and those dead.

It is hard for Exeter to call him ‘my lord’. It sticks in the Courtenay craw. Four years back, he thinks, I salvaged you and Gertrude your wife, and now the king suspects me of too much forbearance; he thinks I am trying to make friends of you people. You and Lord Montague, you are sprinting to the end of your silken rope. One more step, then see if I favour you.

That night he prays and goes to bed early. I am not ill, he says to Christophe, do not fret. He needs a space in which he can watch the future shaping itself, as dusk steals over the river and the park, smudges the forms of ancient trees: there are nightingales in the copses, but we will not hear them again this year. Tomorrow, all eyes will turn, not to the Garter stall he fills, but to the vacancy, where a prince as yet unborn reaches for the statute book, and bows his blind head in its caul. Why does the future feel so much like the past, the uncanny clammy touch of it, the rustle of bridal sheet or shroud, the crackle of fire in a shuttered room? Like breath misting glass, like the nightingale’s trace on the air, like a wreath of incense, like vapour, like water, like scampering feet and laughter in the dark … furiously, he wills himself into sleep. But he is tired of trying to wake up different. In stories there are folk who, observed at dawn or dusk in some open, watery space, are seen to flit and twist in the air like spirits, or fledge leather wings through their flesh. Yet he is no such wizard. He is not a snake who can slip his skin. He is what the mirror makes, when it assembles him each day: Jolly Tom from Putney. Unless you have a better idea?

The morning of his installation he is awake early. He should lie rigid, he thinks, like an effigy on a tomb, waiting for the ritual to commence. But instead he climbs out of bed. He needs a candle, till he doesn’t; when he lowers the shutter a wan light filters through. A knight of the Garter begins his day as any other man – pissing, stretching, rubbing his blue chin. If you are alert to the workings of the household it is hard to go back to sleep after dawn. The noise only ceases in the darkest hours; hemmed in by the town below, the castle is supplied by wagons that rumble constantly over the cobbles and in at the great gate. And as you make your way about those precincts, point to point, the ages joust and clash: as if armoured monarchs were colliding, a wall built by a Henry driving into a wall built by an Edward who is long ago dust. All these holy kings gone to their rest: time is battering their works like siege engines, and when you descend a step you are walking on another layer of the past.

He wants a walk, perhaps to exchange a good morning with some fellow creature who will dissipate his dreams. The kitchens, the larder, are stirring, ready for goods inward. Men rub their eyes and sleepwalk past each other as if swimming in a grey sea: no one speaks, they merely blink and swerve him as if they were skimming through his dreams, or he through theirs. When he hears footsteps, purposive, descending, he follows them. Down and down, to a stone-floored room, where a deep gutter runs with brown water, burbling like a running stream.

When he was a child at Lambeth he saw the coupage, as the dead animals were carried in, beef and sheep and pig. He learned to stand still as blades sang in the air and whistled past his ears. He grew to relish the company of men who feel a cleaver fit their hands, who plunge skewers into shy flesh, who split and spit and haul great joints with flesh-hooks. He saw beasts disassembled, becoming dinner; witnessed the household officers shovel up their perquisites and portions, neck and scrag-end, forelegs, feet, trotters and tripes, the calf’s head, the sheep’s heart. He learned to sweep out the sawdust clogged with blood and swab down the slabs where lung and liver clump, to chase the jelly particles stained with gore. He learned to do it all without a contraction of the gut: to do it calmly, to do it without feeling. Twilight coupage or dawn, the light is the same, grey-streaked, wine-dark: the butchers pass without seeing him, eyes front, their burdens hoisted on their shoulders.

Get out of their way: he moves back against the wall. They ignore him, in the dimness taking him perhaps for some inventory clerk. Still they tread, with their cadavers the size of men, eyes on their feet, their heads bent and hooded, silent, undeterred, squishing the gore from their bloody boots, around the winding stair and, guided by the sound of rushing waters, down into the dark.