Wolf Hall

Chapter I. Anna Regina. 1533

The two children sit on a bench in the hall of Austin Friars. They are so small that their legs stick straight out in front of them, and as they are still in smocks one cannot tell their sex. Under their caps, their dimpled faces beam. That they look so fat and contented is a credit to the young woman, Helen Barre, who now unwinds the thread of her tale: daughter of a bankrupt small merchant out of Essex, wife of one Matthew Barre who beat her and deserted her, ‘leaving me,’ she says, indicating, ‘with that one in my belly.’

The neighbours are always coming at him with parish problems. Unsafe cellar doors. A noisome goose house. A husband and wife who shout and bang pans all night, so the next house can’t get to sleep. He tries not to fret if these things cut into his time, and he minds Helen less than a goose house. Mentally, he takes her out of cheap shrunken wool and re-dresses her in some figured velvet he saw yesterday, six shillings the yard. Her hands, he sees, are skinned and swollen from rough work; he supplies kid gloves.

‘Though when I say he deserted me, it may be that he is dead. He was a great drinker and a brawler. A man who knew him told me he came off worst in a fight, and I should seek him at the bottom of the river. But someone else saw him on the quays at Tilbury, with a travelling bag. So which am I – wife or widow?’

‘I will look into it. Though I think you would rather I didn’t find him. How have you lived?’

‘When he went first I was stitching for a sailmaker. Since I came up to London to search, I’ve been hiring out by the day. I have been in the laundry at a convent near Paul’s, helping at the yearly wash of their bed linen. They find me a good worker, they say they will give me a pallet in the attics, but they won’t take the children.’

Another instance of the church’s charity. He runs up against them all the time. ‘We cannot have you a slave to a set of hypocrite women. You must come here. I am sure you will be useful. The house is filling up all the time, and I am building, as you see.’ She must be a good girl, he thinks, to turn her back on making a living in the obvious way; if she walked along the street, she wouldn’t be short of offers. ‘They tell me you would like to learn to read, so you can read the gospel.’

‘Some women I met took me to what they call a night school. It was in a cellar at Broadgate. Before that, I knew Noah, the Three Kings, and father Abraham, but St Paul I had never heard of. At home on our farm we had pucks who used to turn the milk and blow up thunderstorms, but I am told they are not Christians. I wish we had stayed farming, for all that. My father was no hand at town life.’ Her eyes, anxious, follow the children. They have launched themselves off the bench and toddled across the flagstones to see the picture that is growing on the wall, and their every step causes her to hold her breath. The workman is a German, a young boy Hans recommended for a simple job, and he turns around – he speaks no English – to explain to the children what he is doing. A rose. Three lions, see them jump. Two black birds.

‘Red,’ the elder child cries.

‘She knows colours,’ Helen says, pink with pride. ‘She is also beginning on one-two-three.’

The space where the arms of Wolsey used to be is being repainted with his own newly granted arms: azure, on a fess between three lions rampant or, a rose gules, barbed vert, between two Cornish choughs proper. ‘You see, Helen,’ he says, ‘those black birds were Wolsey’s emblem.’ He laughs. ‘There are people who hoped they would never see them again.’

‘There are other people, of our sort, who do not understand it.’

‘You mean night school people?’

‘They say, how can a man who loves the gospel, have loved such a man as that?’

‘I never liked his haughty manners, you know, and his processions every day, the state he kept. And yet there was never a man more active in the service of England since England began. And also,’ he says sadly, ‘when you came into his confidence, he was a man of such grace and ease … Helen, can you come here today?’ He is thinking of those nuns and the yearly wash of their bed linen. He is imagining the cardinal’s appalled face. Laundry women followed his train as whores follow an army, hot from their hour-by-hour exertions. At York Place he had a bath made, deep enough for a man to stand up in it, the room heated by a stove such as you find in the Low Countries, and many a time he had negotiated business with the cardinal’s bobbing, boiled-looking head. Henry has taken it over now, and splashes about in it with favoured gentlemen, who submit to being ducked under the water and half-drowned by their lord, if his mood takes him that way.

The painter offers the brush to the elder child. Helen glows. ‘Careful, darling,’ she says. A blob of blue is applied. You are a little adept, the painter says. Gefällt es Ihnen, Herr Cromwell, sind Sie stolz darauf?’

He says to Helen, he asks if I am pleased and proud. She says, if you are not, your friends will be proud for you.

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person. Anne to Henry. Henry to Anne. Those days when he wants soothing, and she is as prickly as a holly bush. Those times – they do occur – when his gaze strays after another woman, and she follows it, and storms off to her own apartments. He, Cromwell, goes about like some public poet, carrying assurances of desire, each to each.

It is hardly three o’clock, and already the room is half-dark. He picks up the younger child, who flops against his shoulder and falls asleep with the speed at which someone pushed falls off a wall. ‘Helen,’ he says, ‘this household is full of pert young men, and they will all put themselves forward in teaching you to read, bringing you presents and trying to sweeten your days. Do learn, and take the presents, and be happy here with us, but if anyone is too forward, you must tell me, or tell Rafe Sadler. He is the boy with the little red beard. Though I should not say boy.’ It will be twenty years, soon, since he brought Rafe in from his father’s house, a lowering, dark day like this, rain bucketing from the heavens, the child slumped against his shoulder as he carried him into his hall at Fenchurch Street.

The storms had kept them in Calais for ten days. Ships out of Boulogne were wrecked, Antwerp flooded, much of the countryside put under water. He would like to get messages to his friends, enquiring after their lives and property, but the roads are impassable, Calais itself a floating island upon which a happy monarch reigns. He goes to the king’s lodgings to ask for an audience – business doesn’t stop in bad weather – but he is told, ‘The king cannot see you this morning. He and Lady Anne are composing some music for the harp.’

Rafe catches his eye and they walk away. ‘Let us hope in time they have a little song to show for it.’

Thomas Wyatt and Henry Norris get drunk together in a low tavern. They swear eternal friendship. But their followers have a fight in the inn yard and roll each other in mud.

He never sets eyes on Mary Boleyn. Presumably she and Stafford have found some bolt-hole where they can compose together.

By candlelight, at noon, Lord Berners shows him his library, limping energetically from desk to desk, handling with care the old folios from which he has made his scholarly translations. Here is a romance of King Arthur: ‘When I started reading it I almost gave up the project. It was clear to me it was too fantastical to be true. But little by little, as I read, you know, it appeared to me that there was a moral in this tale.’ He does not say what it is. ‘And here is Froissart done into English, which His Majesty himself bade me undertake. I could not do other, for he had just lent me five hundred pounds. Would you like to see my translations from the Italian? They are private ones, I have not sent them to the printer.’

He spends an afternoon with the manuscripts, and they discuss them at supper. Lord Berners holds a position, chancellor of the exchequer, which Henry has given him for life, but because he is not in London and attending to it, it does not bring him in much money, or the influence it should. ‘I know you are a good man for business. Might you in confidence look over my accounts? They’re not what you’d call in order.’

Lord Berners leaves him alone with the dog’s breakfast that he calls his ledgers. An hour passes: the wind whistles across the rooftops, the candle flames tremble, hail batters the glass. He hears the scrape of his host’s bad foot: an anxious face peers around the door. ‘What joy?’

All he can find is money owing. This is what you get for devoting yourself to scholarship and serving the king across the sea, when you could be at court with sharp teeth and eyes and elbows, ready to seize your advantage. ‘I wish you’d called on me earlier. There are always things that can be done.’

‘Ah, but who knew you, Master Cromwell?’ the old man says. ‘One exchanged letters, yes. Wolsey’s business, king’s business. But I never knew you. It did not seem at all likely I should know you, until now.’

On the day they are finally ready to embark, the boy from the alchemists’ inn turns up. ‘You at last! What have you got for me?’

The boy displays his empty hands, and launches into English, of a sort. ‘On dit those magi have retoured to Paris.’

‘Then I am disappointed.’

‘You are hard to find, monsieur. I go to the place where le roi Henri and the Grande Putain are lodged, “je cherche milord Cremuel,” and the persons there laughed at me and beat me.’

‘That is because I am not a milord.’

‘In that case, I do not know what a milord in your country looks like.’ He offers the boy a coin for his efforts, and another for the beating, but he shakes his head. ‘I thought to take service with you, monsieur. I have made up my mind to go travelling.’

‘Your name is?’

‘Christophe.’

‘You have a family name?’

‘Ça ne fait rien.’

‘You have parents?’

A shrug.

‘Your age?’

‘What age would you say?’

‘I know you can read. Can you fight?’

‘There is much fighting chez vous?’

Christophe has his own squat build; he needs feeding up, but a year or two from now he will be hard to knock over. He puts him at fifteen, no more. ‘You are in trouble with the law?’

‘In France,’ he says, disparagingly: as one might say, in far Cathay.

‘You are a thief?’

The boy makes a jabbing motion, invisible knife in his fist.

‘You left someone dead?’

‘He didn’t look well.’

He grins. ‘You’re sure you want Christophe for your name? You can change it now, but not later.’

‘You understand me, monsieur.’

Christ, of course I do. You could be my son. Then he looks at him closely, to make sure that he isn’t; that he isn’t one of these brawling children the cardinal spoke of, whom he has left by the Thames, and not impossibly by other rivers, in other climes. But Christophe’s eyes are a wide, untroubled blue. ‘You are not afraid of the sea voyage?’ he asks. ‘In my house in London there are many French speakers. You’ll soon be one of us.’

Now at Austin Friars, Christophe pursues him with questions. Those magi, what is it they have? Is it a carte of buried treasure? Is it – he flaps his arms – the instructions for one to make a flying machine? Is it a machine to faire great explosions, or a military dragon, breathes out fire?

He says, ‘Have you ever heard of Cicero?’

‘No. But I am prepared to hear of him. Till today I have never heard of Bishop Gardineur. On dit you have stole his strawberry beds and give them to the king’s mistress, and now he intends …’ the boy breaks off, and again gives his impression of a military dragon, ‘to ruin you utterly and pursue you unto death.’

‘And well beyond, if I know my man.’

There have been worse accounts of his situation. He wants to say, she is not a mistress, not any more, but the secret – though it must soon be an open secret – is not his to tell.

Twenty-fifth of January 1533, dawn, a chapel at Whitehall, his friend Rowland Lee as priest, Anne and Henry take their vows, confirm the contract they made in Calais: almost in secret, with no celebration, just a huddle of witnesses, the married pair both speechless except for the small admissions of intent forced out of them by the ceremony. Henry Norris is pale and sober: was it kind to make him witness it twice over, Anne being given to another man?

William Brereton is a witness, as he is in attendance in the king’s privy chamber. ‘Are you truly here?’ he asks him. ‘Or are you somewhere else? You gentlemen tell me you can bilocate, like great saints.’

Brereton glares. ‘You’ve been writing letters up to Chester.’

‘The king’s business. How not?’

They must do this in a mutter, as Rowland joins the hands of bride and groom. ‘I’ll tell you just once. Keep away from my family’s affairs. Or you’ll come off worse, Master Cromwell, than you can imagine.’

Anne is attended by only one lady, her sister. As they leave – the king towing his wife, hand on her upper arm, towards a little harp music – Mary turns and gives him a sumptuous smile. She holds up her hand, thumb and finger an inch apart.

She had always said, I will be the first to know. It will be me who lets out her bodices.

He calls William Brereton back, politely; he says, you have made a mistake in threatening me.

He goes back to his office in Westminster. He wonders, does the king know yet? Probably not.

He sits down to his drafting. They bring in candles. He sees the shadow of his own hand moving across the paper, his own unconcealable fist unmasked by velvet glove. He wants nothing between himself and the weave of the paper, the black running line of ink, so he takes off his rings, Wolsey’s turquoise and Francis’s ruby – at New Year, the king slid it from his own finger and gave it back to him, in the setting the Calais goldsmith had made, and said, as rulers do, in a rush of confidence, now that will be a sign between us, Cromwell, send a paper with this and I shall know it comes from your hand even if you lack your seal.

A confidant of Henry’s who was standing by – it was Nicholas Carew – had remarked, His Majesty’s ring fits you without adjustment. He said, so it does.

He hesitates, his quill hovering. He writes, ‘This realm of England is an Empire.’ This realm of England is an Empire, and so has been accepted in the world, governed by one Supreme Head and King …

At eleven o’clock, when the day has brightened as much as it will, he eats dinner with Cranmer in his lodging at Cannon Row, where he is living till his new dignity is conferred and he can move into Lambeth Palace. He has been practising his new signature, Thomas Elect of Canterbury. Soon he will dine in state, but today, like a threadbare scholar, he shoves his papers aside while some table linen is laid and they bring in the salt fish, over which he signs a grace.

‘That won’t improve it,’ he says. ‘Who’s cooking for you? I’ll send someone over.’

‘So, is the marriage made?’ It is like Cranmer to wait to be told: to work six hours in silent patience, head down over his books.

‘Yes, Rowland was up to his office. He didn’t wed her to Norris, or the king to her sister.’ He shakes out his napkin. ‘I know a thing. But you must coax it from me.’

He is hoping that Cranmer, by way of coaxing, will impart the secret he promised in his letter, the secret written down the side of the page. But it must have been some minor indiscretion, now forgotten. And because Canterbury Elect is occupied in poking uncertainly at scales and skin, he says, ‘She, Anne, she is already having a child.’

Cranmer glances up. ‘If you tell it in that tone, people will think you take the credit yourself.’

‘Are you not astonished? Are you not pleased?’

‘I wonder what fish this purports to be?’ Cranmer says with mild interest. ‘Naturally I am delighted. But I knew it, you see, because this marriage is clean – why would not God bless it with offspring? And with an heir?’

‘Of course, with an heir. Look.’ He takes out the papers he has been working on. Cranmer washes his fishy fingers and hunches towards the candle flame. ‘So after Easter,’ he says, reading, ‘it will be against the law and the king’s prerogative to make an appeal in any matter to the Pope. So there is Katherine’s suit dead and buried. And I, Canterbury, can decide the king’s cause in our own courts. Well, this has been long enough coming.’

He laughs. ‘You were long enough coming.’ Cranmer was in Mantua when he heard of the honour the king intended for him. He began his journey circuitously: Stephen Vaughan met him at Lyons, and hustled him over the winter roads and through the snowdrifts of Picardy to the boat. ‘Why did you delay? Doesn’t every boy want to be an archbishop? Though not me, if I think back. What I wanted was my own bear.’

Cranmer looks at him, his expression speculative. ‘I’m sure that could be arranged for you.’

Gregory has asked him, how will we know when Dr Cranmer is making a joke? He has told him, you won’t, they are as rare as apple blossom in January. And now, for some weeks, he will be half-fearful that a bear will turn up at his door. As they part that day, Cranmer glances up from the table and says, ‘Of course, I don’t officially know.’

‘About the child?’

‘About the marriage. As I am to be judge in the matter of the king’s old marriage, it would not be proper for me to hear that his new one has already taken place.’

‘Right,’ he says. ‘What Rowland gets up to in the early hours of the morning is a matter for himself alone.’ He leaves Cranmer with head bowed over the remains of their meal, as if studying to reassemble the fish.

As our severance from the Vatican is not yet complete, we cannot have a new archbishop unless the Pope appoints him. Delegates in Rome are empowered to say anything, promise anything, pro tem, to get Clement to agree. The king says, aghast, ‘Do you know how much the papal bulls cost, for Canterbury? And that I shall have to pay for them? And you know how much it costs to install him?’ He adds, ‘It must be done properly, of course, nothing omitted, nothing scanted.’

‘It will be the last money Your Majesty sends to Rome, if it rests with me.’

‘And do you know,’ the king says, as if he has discovered something astonishing, ‘that Cranmer has not a penny of his own? He can contribute nothing.’

He borrows the money, on the Crown’s behalf, from a rich Genovese he knows called Salvago. To persuade him into the loan, he sends around to his house an engraving which he knows Sebastian covets. It shows a young man standing in a garden, his eyes turned upwards to an empty window, at which it is to be hoped very soon a lady will appear; her scent hangs already in the air, and birds on the boughs look enquiringly into the vacancy, ready to sing. In his two hands the young man holds a book; it is a book shaped like a heart.

Cranmer sits on committees every day, in back rooms at Westminster. He is writing a paper for the king, to show that even if his brother’s marriage to Katherine was not consummated, it does not affect the case for the annulment, for certainly they intended to be married, and that intention creates affinity; also, in the nights they spent together, it must have been their intention to make children, even if they did not go about it the right way. In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark. Do you like the work, he enquires; looking at their hunched and dusty persons, he judges them to have the experience they need. Cranmer in his writing keeps calling the queen ‘the most serene Katherine’, as if to separate her untroubled face, framed by a linen pillow, from the indignities being forced on her lower body: the boy’s fumbling and scrabbling, the pawing at her thighs.

Meanwhile Anne, the hidden Queen of England, breaks free from her gentleman companions as she walks through a gallery at Whitehall; she laughs as she breaks into a trot, almost a skip, and they reach out to contain her, as if she is dangerous, but she flings their hands away from her, laughing. ‘Do you know, I have a great longing to eat apples? The king says it means I am having a baby, but I tell him no, no, it can’t be that …’ She whirls around, around again. She flushes, tears bounce out of her eyes and seem to fly away from her like the waters of an unregulated fountain.

Thomas Wyatt pushes through the crowd. ‘Anne …’ He snatches at her hands, he pulls her towards him. ‘Anne, hush, sweetheart … hush …’ She collapses into hiccupping sobs, folding herself against his shoulder. Wyatt holds her fast; his eyes travel around, as if he had found himself naked in the road, and is looking for some traveller to come along with a garment to cover his shame. Among the bystanders is Chapuys; the ambassador makes a rapid, purposeful exit, his little legs working, a sneer stamped on his face.

So that’s the news sped to the Emperor. It would have been good if the old marriage were out, the new marriage in, confirmed to Europe before Anne’s happy state were announced. But then, life is never perfect for the servant of a prince; as Thomas More used to say, we should not look to go to Heaven on feather beds.

Two days later he is alone with Anne; she is tucked into a window embrasure, eyes closed, basking like a cat in a scarce shaft of winter sun. She stretches out her hand to him, hardly knowing who he is; any man will do? He takes her fingertips. Her black eyes snap open. It’s like a shop when the shutters are taken down: good morning, Master Cromwell, what can we sell each other today?

‘I am tired of Mary,’ she says. ‘And I would like to be rid of her.’

Does she mean Katherine’s daughter, the princess? ‘She should be married,’ she says, ‘and out of my way. I never want to have to see her. I don’t want to have to think about her. I have long imagined her married to some obscure person.’

He waits, still wondering.

‘I don’t suppose she would be a bad wife, for somebody who was prepared to keep her chained to the wall.’

‘Ah. Mary your sister.’

‘What did you think? Oh,’ she laughs, ‘you thought I meant Mary the king’s bastard. Well, now you put it in my mind, she should be married too. What age is she?’

‘Seventeen this year.’

‘And still a dwarf?’ Anne doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘I shall find some old gentleman for her, some very honourable feeble old gentleman, who will get no children on her and whom I will pay to stay away from court. But as for Lady Carey, what is to be done? She cannot marry you. We tease her that you are her choice. Some ladies have a secret preference for common men. We say, Mary, oh, how you long to repose in the arms of the blacksmith … even at the thought, you are growing hot.’

‘Are you happy?’ he asks her.

‘Yes.’ She drops her eyes, and her small hands rest on her ribcage. ‘Yes, because of this. You see,’ she says slowly, ‘I was always desired. But now I am valued. And that is a different thing, I find.’

He pauses, to let her think her own thoughts: which he sees are precious to her. ‘So,’ she says, ‘you have a nephew Richard, a Tudor of sorts, though I am sure I cannot understand how that came about.’

‘I can draw out for you the tree of descent.’

She shakes her head, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t give you the trouble. Since this,’ her fingers slip downwards, ‘I wake up in the morning and I scarcely remember my name. I always wondered why women were foolish, and now I know.’

‘You mentioned my nephew.’

‘I have seen him with you. He looks a determined boy. He might do for her. What she wants are furs and jewels. You can give her those, can’t you? And a child in the cradle every other year. As for who fathers it, you can make your own household arrangements about that.’

‘I thought,’ he says, ‘that your sister had an attachment?’

He doesn’t want revenge: just clarification.

‘Does she? Oh well, Mary’s attachments … usually passing and sometimes very odd – as you know, don’t you.’ It’s not a question. ‘Bring them to court, your children. Let’s see them.’

He leaves her, eyes closing again, edging into marginal warmth, the small sort of sunbeam that is all February offers.

The king has given him lodgings within the old palace at Westminster, for when he works too late to get home. This being so, he has to walk mentally through his rooms at Austin Friars, picking up his memory images from where he has left them on windowsills and under stools and in the woollen petals of the flowers strewn in the tapestry at Anselma’s feet. At the end of a long day he takes supper with Cranmer and with Rowland Lee, who stamps between the various working parties, urging them along. Sometimes Audley joins them, the Lord Chancellor, but they keep no state, just sit down like a bunch of inky students, and talk till it’s Cranmer’s bedtime. He wants to work them out, these people, test how far he can rely on them, and find out their weaknesses. Audley is a prudent lawyer who can sift a sentence like a cook sifting a sack of rice for grit. An eloquent speaker, he is tenacious of a point, and devoted to his career; now that he’s Chancellor he aims to make an income to go with the office. As for what he believes, it’s up for negotiation; he believes in Parliament, in the king’s power exercised in Parliament, and in matters of faith … let’s say his convictions are flexible. As for Lee, he wonders if he believes in God at all – though it doesn’t stop him having a bishopric in his sights. He says, ‘Rowland, will you take Gregory into your household? I think Cambridge has done all that it can for him. And I admit that Gregory has done nothing for Cambridge.’

‘I’ll take him up the country with me,’ Rowland says, ‘when I go to have a row with the northern bishops. He is a good boy, Gregory. Not the most forward, but I can understand that. We’ll make him useful yet.’

‘You don’t intend him for the church?’ Cranmer asks.

‘I said,’ growls Rowland, ‘we’ll make him useful.’

At Westminster his clerks are in and out, with news and gossip and paperwork, and he keeps Christophe with him, supposedly to look after his clothes, but really to make him laugh. He misses the music they have nightly at Austin Friars, and the women’s voices, heard from other rooms.

He is at the Tower most days of the week, persuading the foremen to keep their men working through frost and rain; checking the paymaster’s accounts, and making a new inventory of the king’s jewels and plate. He calls on the Wardens of the Mint, and suggests a spot check on the weight of the king’s coinage. ‘What I should like to do,’ he says, ‘is make our English coins so sound that the merchants over the sea won’t even bother weighing them.’

‘Do you have authority for this?’

‘Why, what are you hiding?’

He has written a memorandum for the king, setting out the sources of his yearly revenues, and detailing through which government offices they pass. It is remarkably concise. The king reads it and reads it again. He turns the paper over to see if anything convoluted and inexplicable is written on the back. But there is nothing more than meets his eye.

‘It’s not news,’ he says, half-apologetic. ‘The late cardinal carried it in his head. I shall keep calling at the Mint. If Your Majesty pleases.’

At the Tower he calls on a prisoner, John Frith. At his request, which does not count for nothing, the prisoner is cleanly kept above ground, with warm bedding, sufficient food, a supply of wine, paper, ink; though he has advised him to put away his writings if he hears the key in his lock. He stands by while the turnkey admits him, his eyes on the ground, not liking what he is going to see; but John Frith rises from his table, a gentle, slender young boy, a scholar in Greek, and says, Master Cromwell, I knew you would come.

When he takes Frith’s hands he finds them all bones, cold and dry and with tell-tale traces of ink. He thinks, he cannot be so delicate, if he has lived so long. He was one of the scholars shut in the cellar at Wolsey’s college, where the Bible men were held because there was no other secure place. When the summer plague struck underground, Frith lay in the dark with the corpses, till someone remembered to let him out.

‘Master Frith,’ he says, ‘if I had been in London when you were taken –’

‘But while you were in Calais, Thomas More was at work.’

‘What made you come back into England? No, don’t tell me. If you were going about Tyndale’s work, I had better not know it. They say you have taken a wife, is that correct? In Antwerp? The one thing the king cannot abide – no, many things he cannot abide – but he hates married priests. And he hates Luther, and you have translated Luther into English.’

‘You put the case so well, for my prosecution.’

‘You must help me to help you. If I could get you an audience with the king … you would have to be prepared, he is a most astute theologian … do you think you could soften your answers, to accommodate him?’

The fire is built up but the room is still cold. You cannot get away from the mists and exhalations of the Thames. Frith says, his voice barely audible, ‘Thomas More still has some credit with the king. And he has written him a letter, saying,’ he manages to smile, ‘that I am Wycliffe, Luther and Zwingli rolled together and tied up in string – one reformer stuffed inside another, as for a feast you might parcel a pheasant inside a chicken inside a goose. More means to dine on me, so do not injure your credit by asking for mercy. As for softening my answers … I believe, and I will say before any tribunal –’

‘Do not, John.’

‘I will say before any tribunal what I will say before my last judge – the Eucharist is but bread, of penance we have no need, Purgatory is an invention ungrounded in scripture –’

‘If some men come to you and say, come with us, Frith, you go with them. They will be my men.’

‘You think you can take me out of the Tower?’

Tyndale’s Bible says, with God shall nothing be unpossible. ‘If not out of the Tower, then when you are taken to be questioned, that will be your chance. Be ready to take it.’

‘But to what purpose?’ Frith speaks kindly, as if speaking to a young pupil. ‘You think you can keep me at your house and wait for the king to change his mind? I should have to break out of there, and walk to Paul’s Cross, and say before the Londoners what I have already said.’

‘Your witness cannot wait?’

‘Not on Henry. I might wait till I was old.’

‘They will burn you.’

‘And you think I cannot bear the pain. You are right, I cannot. But they will give me no choice. As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life.’

He leaves him. Four o’clock: the river traffic sparse, a fine and penetrative vapour creeping between air and water.

Next day, a day of crisp blue cold, the king comes down in the royal barge to see the progress of the work, with the new French envoy; they are confidential, the king walking with a hand on de Dinteville’s shoulder, or rather on his padding; the Frenchman is wearing so many layers that he seems broader than the doorways, but he is still shivering. ‘Our friend here must get some sport to warm his blood,’ the king says, ‘and he is a bungler with the bow – when we went into the butts last, he shook so much I thought he would shoot himself in the foot. He complains we are not serious falconers, so I have said he should go out with you, Cromwell.’

Is this a promise of time off? The king strolls away and leaves them. ‘Not if it’s cold like this,’ the envoy says. ‘I’m not standing in a field with the wind whistling, it will be the death of me. When shall we see the sun again?’

‘Oh, about June. But the falcons will be moulting by then. I aim to have mine flying again in August, so nil desperandum, monsieur, we shall have some sport.’

‘You wouldn’t postpone this coronation, would you?’ It’s always so; after a little chaff and chat, out of his mouth pops an ambassador’s purpose. ‘Because when my master made the treaty, he didn’t expect Henry to be flaunting his supposed wife and her big belly. If he were to keep her quietly, it would be a different matter.’

He shakes his head. There will be no postponement. Henry claims he has the support of the bishops, the nobles, judges, Parliament and the people; Anne’s coronation is his chance to prove it. ‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘Tomorrow we entertain the papal nuncio. You will see how my master will manage him.’

Henry calls down to them, from the walls, ‘Come up here, sir, see the prospect of my river.’

‘Do you wonder I shake?’ the Frenchman says with passion. ‘Do you wonder I tremble before him? My river. My city. My salvation, cut out and embroidered just for me. My personally tailored English god.’ He swears under his breath, and begins to climb.

When the papal nuncio comes to Greenwich, Henry takes him by the hand and tells him frankly how his ungodly councillors torment him, and how he longs for a return of perfect amity with Pope Clement.

You could watch Henry every day for a decade and not see the same thing. Choose your prince: he admires Henry more and more. Sometimes he seems hapless, sometimes feckless, sometimes a child, sometimes master of his trade. Sometimes he seems an artist, in the way his eye ranges over his work; sometimes his hand moves and he doesn’t seem to see it move. If he had been called to a lower station in life, he could have been a travelling player, and leader of his troupe.

At Anne’s command, he brings his nephew to court, Gregory too; Rafe the king already knows, for he is always at his elbow. The king stands gazing for a long time at Richard. ‘I see it. Indeed I do.’

There is nothing in Richard’s face, as far as he can see, to show that he has Tudor blood, but the king is looking at him with the eye of a man who wants relatives. ‘Your grandfather ap Evan the archer was a great servant to the king my father. You have a fine build. I should like to see you in the tilt yard. I should like to see you carry your colours in the joust.’

Richard bows. And then the king, because he is the essence of courtesy, turns to Gregory, and says, ‘And you, Master Gregory, you are a very fine young man too.’

As the king walks away, Gregory’s face opens in simple pleasure. He puts his hand on his arm, the place the king has touched, as if transferring regal grace to his fingertips. ‘He is very splendid. He is so splendid. Beyond anything I ever thought. And to speak to me!’ He turns to his father. ‘How do you manage to speak to him every day?’

Richard gives him a sideways look. Gregory thumps him on the arm. ‘Never mind your grandfather the archer, what would he say if he knew your father was that big?’ He shows between finger and thumb the stature of Morgan Williams. ‘I have been riding at the ring these many years. I have been riding at the Saracen’s image and putting my lance just so, thud, right over his black Saracen’s heart.’

‘Yes,’ Richard says patiently, ‘but, squib, you will find a living knight a tougher proposition than a wooden infidel. You never think of the cost – armour of show quality, a stable of trained horses –’

‘We can afford it,’ he says. ‘It seems our days as foot soldiers are behind us.’

That night at Austin Friars he asks Richard to come to speak with him alone after supper. Possibly he is at fault, in putting it as a business proposition, spelling out to him what Anne has suggested about his marriage. ‘Build nothing on it. We have yet to get the king’s approval.’

Richard says, ‘But she doesn’t know me.’

He waits, for objections; not knowing someone, is that an objection? ‘I won’t force you.’

Richard looks up. ‘Are you sure?’

When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, ‘No, you don’t, I agree, it’s just that you are practised at persuading, and sometimes it’s quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on.’

‘I know Lady Carey is older than you, but she is very beautiful, I think the most beautiful woman at court, and she is not as witless as everyone thinks, and she has not got any of her sister’s malice in her.’ In a strange way, he thinks, she has been a good friend to me. ‘And instead of being the king’s unrecognised cousin, you would be his brother-in-law. We would all profit.’

‘A title, perhaps. For me, and for you. Brilliant matches for Alice and Jo. What about Gregory? A countess at least for him.’ Richard’s voice is flat. Is he talking himself into it? It’s hard to tell. With many people, most people perhaps, the book of their heart lies open to him, but there are times when it’s easier to read outsiders than your own family. ‘And Thomas Boleyn would be my father-in-law. And Uncle Norfolk would really be our uncle.’

‘Imagine his face.’

‘Oh, his face. Yes, one would go barefoot over hot coals to see his expression.’

‘Think about it. Don’t tell anybody.’

Richard goes out with a bob of the head but without another word. It seems he interprets ‘don’t tell anybody’ as ‘don’t tell anybody but Rafe’, because ten minutes later Rafe comes in, and stands looking at him, with his eyebrows raised. Red-headed people can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrows that aren’t really there. He says, ‘You need not tell Richard that Mary Boleyn once proposed herself to me. There’s nothing between us. It won’t be like Wolf Hall, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘And what if the bride thinks different? I wonder you don’t marry her to Gregory.’

‘Gregory is too young. Richard is twenty-three, it is a good age to marry if you can afford it. And you have passed it – it’s time you married too.’

‘I’m going, before you find a Boleyn for me.’ Rafe turns back and says softly, ‘Only this, sir, and I think it is what gives Richard pause … all our lives and fortunes depend now on that lady, and as well as being mutable she is mortal, and the whole history of the king’s marriage tells us a child in the womb is not an heir in the cradle.’

In March, news comes from Calais that Lord Berners has died. The afternoon in his library, the storm blowing outside: it seems when he looks back a haven of peace, the last hour he had to himself. He wants to make an offer for his books – a generous one, to help Lady Berners – but the folios seem to have jumped off their desks and walked, some in the direction of Francis Bryan, the old man’s nephew, and some to another connection of his, Nicholas Carew. ‘Would you forgive his debts,’ he asks Henry, ‘at least for his wife’s lifetime? You know he leaves –’

‘No sons.’ Henry’s mind has moved ahead: once I was in that unhappy state, no sons, but soon I shall have my heir.

He brings Anne some majolica bowls. The word maschio is painted on the outside, and inside are pictures of plump blond-haired babies, each with a coy little phallus. She laughs. The Italians say for a boy you have to keep warm, he tells her. Heat up your wine to heat up your blood. No cold fruit, no fish.

Jane Seymour says, ‘Do you think it’s already decided, what it will be, or does God decide later? Do you think it knows itself, what it is? Do you think if we could see inside you, we would be able to tell?’

‘Jane, I wish you were still down in Wiltshire,’ Mary Shelton says.

Anne says, ‘You needn’t cut me up, Mistress Seymour. It is a boy, and no one is to say or think otherwise.’ She frowns, and you can see her bending, concentrating, the great force of her will.

‘I’d like a baby,’ Jane says.

‘Watch yourself,’ Lady Rochford tells her. ‘If your belly shows, mistress, we’ll have you bricked up alive.’

‘In her family,’ Anne says, ‘they’d give her a bouquet. They don’t know what continence means, down at Wolf Hall.’

Jane is flushed and trembling. ‘I meant no harm.’

‘Leave her,’ Anne says. ‘It’s like baiting a fieldmouse.’ She turns to him. ‘Your bill is not passed yet. Tell me what is the delay.’

The bill, she means, to forbid appeals to Rome. He begins to explain to her the strength of the opposition, but she raises her eyebrows and says, ‘My father is speaking for you in the Lords, and Norfolk. So who dare oppose us?’

‘I shall have it through by Easter, depend upon it.’

‘The woman we saw in Canterbury, they say her people are printing a book of her prophecies.’

‘That may be, but I shall make sure no one reads it.’

‘They say on St Catherine’s Day last, while we were at Calais, she saw a vision of the so-called princess Mary crowned queen.’ Her voice runs on, fluid, rapid, these are my enemies, this prophetess and those about her, Katherine who is plotting with the Emperor, her daughter Mary the supposed heir, Mary’s old governess Margaret Pole, Lady Salisbury, she and all her family are my enemies, her son Lord Montague, her son Reginald Pole who is abroad, people talk of his claim to the throne so why can he not be brought back, his loyalty examined? Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter, he believes he has a claim, but when my son is born that will put him out of his conceit. Lady Exeter, Gertrude, she is forever complaining that noblemen are being put down from their places by men of low birth, and you know who she means by that.

My lady, her sister says softly, do not distress yourself.

I am not distressed, Anne says. Her hand over the growing child, she says calmly, ‘These people want me dead.’

The days are still short, the king’s temper shorter. Chapuys bows and writhes before him, twisting and grimacing, as if he had in mind to ask Henry to dance. ‘I have read with some perplexity certain conclusions reached by Dr Cranmer –’

‘My archbishop,’ the king says coldly; at great expense, the anointing has taken place.

‘– conclusions regarding Queen Katherine –’

‘Who? You mean my late brother’s wife, the Princess of Wales?’

‘– for Your Majesty knows that dispensations were issued in such form as to allow your own marriage to be valid, whether or no that former marriage was consummated.’

‘I do not want to hear the word dispensation,’ Henry says. ‘I do not want to hear you mention what you call my marriage. The Pope has no power to make incest licit. I am no more Katherine’s husband than you are.’

Chapuys bows.

‘If the contract had not been void,’ Henry says, patient for the last time, ‘God would not have punished me with the loss of my children.’

‘We do not know the blessed Katherine is beyond childbearing.’ He looks up with a sly, delicate glance.

‘Tell me, why do you think I do this?’ The king sounds curious. ‘Out of lust? Is that what you think?’

Kill a cardinal? Divide your country? Split the church? ‘It seems extravagant,’ Chapuys murmurs.

‘But that is what you think. That is what you tell the Emperor. You are wrong. I am the steward of my country, sir, and if I now take a wife in a union blessed by God, it is to have a son by her.’

‘But there is no guarantee that Your Majesty will have a son. Or any living children at all.’

‘Why would I not?’ Henry reddens. He is on his feet, shouting, angry tears spilling down his face. ‘Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?’

He is a game little terrier, the Emperor’s man; but even he knows that when you’ve made a king cry it’s time to back off. On the way out he says – dusting himself down, with his accustomed, self-deprecatory flutter – ‘There is a distinction to be drawn between the welfare of the country and the welfare of the Tudor line. Or do you not think so?’

‘So who is your preferred candidate for the throne? You favour Courtenay, or Pole?’

‘You should not sneer at persons of royal blood.’ Chapuys shakes out his sleeves. ‘At least now I am officially informed of the lady’s state, whereas before I could only deduce it from certain spectacles of folly I had witnessed … Do you know how much you are staking, Cremuel, on the body of one woman? Let us hope no evil comes near her, eh?’

He takes the ambassador by the arm, wheels him around. ‘What evil? Say what you mean.’

‘If you would let go your grip on my jacket. Thank you. Very soon you resort to manhandling people, which shows, as they say, your breeding.’ His words are full of bravado, but he is trembling. ‘Look around you and see how by her pride and her presumption she offends your own nobility. Her own uncle has no stomach for her tricks. The king’s oldest friends make excuses to stay away from court.’

‘Wait till she’s crowned,’ he says. ‘Watch them come running.’

On 12 April, Easter Sunday, Anne appears with the king at High Mass, and is prayed for as Queen of England. His bill went through Parliament just yesterday; he expects a modest reward, and before the royal party go in to break their fast, the king waves him over and gives him Lord Berners’s old post, chancellor of the exchequer. ‘Berners suggested you for it.’ Henry smiles. He likes giving; like a child, he enjoys anticipating how pleased you will be.

During Mass, his mind had wandered through the city. What noisome goose houses have they waiting for him at home? What rows in the street, what babies left on church steps, what unruly apprentices with whom he will please have a word? Have Alice and Jo painted Easter eggs? They are too grown up now, but they are content to be the children of the house until the next generation comes along. It’s time he put his mind to husbands for them. Anne, if she had lived, could be married by now, and to Rafe, as he is still not spoken for. He thinks of Helen Barre; how fast she gets on with her reading, how they cannot do without her at Austin Friars. He believes now that her husband is dead, and he thinks, I must talk to her, I must tell her she is free. She is too proper to show any pleasure, but who would not like to know that she is no longer subject to a man like that?

Through Mass, Henry keeps up a constant buzz of talk. He sorts papers and passes them up and down to his councillors; only at the consecration does he throw himself to his knees in a fever of reverence, as the miracle takes place and a wafer becomes God. As soon as the priest says, ‘Ita, missa est,’ he whispers, come to me in my closet, alone.

First the assembled courtiers must make their bows to Anne. Her ladies sweep back and leave her alone in a little sunlit space. He watches them, watches the gentlemen and councillors, among whom, on this feast day, are many of the king’s boyhood friends. He watches Sir Nicholas Carew in particular; nothing is wanting in his reverence to his new queen, but he cannot help a downturn of his mouth. Arrange your face, Nicholas Carew, your ancient family face. He hears Anne saying, these are my enemies: he adds Carew to the list.

Behind the chambers of state are the king’s own rooms, which only his intimates see, where he is served by his gentlemen, and where he can be free of ambassadors and spies. This is Henry Norris’s ground, and Norris gently congratulates him on his new appointment, and moves away, soft-footed.

‘You know Cranmer is to convene a court to make a formal dissolution of the …’ Henry has said he does not want to hear any more about his marriage, so he will not even say the word. ‘I have asked him to convene at the priory at Dunstable, because it is, what, ten, twelve miles to Ampthill, where she is lodged – so she can send her lawyers, if she likes. Or come to the court herself. I want you to go to see her, go secretly, just talk to her –’

Make sure she springs no surprises.

‘Leave Rafe with me while you are gone.’ At being so easily understood, the king relaxes into good humour. ‘I can rely on him to say what Cromwell would say. You have a good boy there. And he is better than you are at keeping his face straight. I see you, when we sit in council, with your hand before your mouth. Sometimes, you know, I want to laugh myself.’ He drops into a chair, covers his face as if to shade his eyes. He sees that, once again, the king is about to cry. ‘Brandon says my sister is dying. There is no more the doctors can do for her. You know that fair hair she had once, hair like silver – my daughter had that. When she was seven she was the image of my sister, like a saint painted on a wall. Tell me, what am I to do with my daughter?’

He waits, till he knows it is a real question. ‘Be good to her, sir. Conciliate her. She should not suffer.’

‘But I must make her a bastard. I need to settle England on my lawful children.’

‘Parliament will do it.’

‘Yes.’ He sniffs. Scrubs his tears away. ‘After Anne is crowned. Cromwell, one thing, and then we will have our breakfast, because I am really very hungry. This project of a match for my cousin Richard …’

He thinks his way, rapidly, around the nobility of England. But no, he sees it’s his Richard, Richard Cromwell. ‘Lady Carey …’ The king’s voice softens. ‘Well, I have thought it over, and I think, no. Or at least, not at this time.’

He nods. He understands his reason. When Anne understands it, she will spit nails.

‘Sometimes it is a solace to me,’ Henry says, ‘not to have to talk and talk. You were born to understand me, perhaps.’

That is one view of their situations. He was six years or so in this world before Henry came into it, years of which he made good use. Henry takes off his embroidered cap, throws it down, runs his hands through his hair. Like Wyatt’s golden mane, his hair is thinning, and it exposes the shape of his massive skull. For a moment he seems like a carved statue, like a simpler form of himself, or one of his own ancestors: one of the race of giants that roamed Britain, and left no trace of themselves except in the dreams of their petty descendants.

He goes back to Austin Friars as soon as he can get away. Surely he can have one day off? The crowds outside his gate have dispersed, as Thurston has fed them an Easter dinner. He goes out to the kitchen first, to give his man a slap on the head and a gold piece. ‘A hundred open maws, I swear,’ Thurston says. ‘And by supper time they’ll be round again.’

‘It is a shame there should be beggars.’

‘Beggars my arse. What comes out of this kitchen is so good, there are aldermen out there, with their hoods up so we don’t know them. And I have a houseful here, whether you are with us or not – I have Frenchmen, Germans, I have Florentiners, they all claim to know you and they all want their dinner to their own liking, I have their servants down here, pinch of that, soupçon of the other. We must feed fewer, or build another kitchen.’

‘I’ll get it in hand.’

‘Master Rafe says for the Tower you have bought out the whole of a quarry in Normandy. He says the Frenchmen are all undermined, and dropping into holes in the ground.’

Such beautiful stone. The colour of butter. Four hundred men on the payroll, and anyone standing about instantly redeployed to the building work at Austin Friars. ‘Thurston, don’t let anybody put pinches or soupçons in our dinner.’ He thinks, that’s how Bishop Fisher nearly died; unless it was an unboiled stockpot after all. You could never fault Thurston’s stockpot. He goes and views it, bubbling away. ‘Where is Richard, do you know?’

‘Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where’s anybody?’

He goes up. The Easter eggs, he sees, bear his own unmistakable features. Jo has painted his hat and his hair in one, so he seems to be wearing a cap with ear-flaps. She has given him at least two chins. ‘Well, sir,’ Gregory says, ‘it is true you are getting stout. When Stephen Vaughan was here he could not believe you.’

‘My master the cardinal waxed like the moon,’ he says. ‘It is a mystery, because he hardly sat down to dine but he would be leaping up to deal with some exigency, and even when he was at the table he could hardly eat for talking. I feel sorry for myself. I have not broken bread since last night.’ He breaks it, and says, ‘Hans wants to paint me.’

‘I hope he can run fast,’ Richard says.

‘Richard –’

‘Have your dinner.’

‘My breakfast. No, never mind it. Come.’

‘The happy bridegroom,’ Gregory says, taunting.

‘You,’ his father threatens him, ‘are going north with Rowland Lee. If you think I’m a hard man, wait till you meet Rowland.’

In his office, he says, ‘How is your practice in the lists?’

‘Good. Cromwells will knock down all-comers.’

He is afraid for his son; that he will fall, be maimed, be killed. Afraid for Richard too; these boys are the hope of his house. Richard says, ‘So am I? The happy bridegroom?’

‘The king says no. It is not because of my family, or your family – he calls you his cousin. He is, at this moment, his disposition to us, I would say it is excellent. But he needs Mary for himself. The child is due in late summer and he is afraid to touch Anne. And he does not wish to resume his celibate life.’

Richard looks up. ‘He said this?’

‘He left me to understand it. And as I understand it, I convey it to you, and we are both amazed, but we get over it.’

‘I suppose if the sisters were more alike, one could begin to understand it.’

‘I suppose,’ he says, ‘one could.’

‘And he is the head of our church. No wonder foreigners laugh.’

‘If he were a model of conduct in his private life, one would be … surprised … but for me, you see, I can only concern myself with his kingship. If he were oppressive, if he were to override Parliament, if he were to pay no heed to the Commons and govern only for himself … But he does not … so I cannot concern myself with how he behaves to his women.’

‘But if he were not king …’

‘Oh, I agree. You’d have him locked up. But again, Richard, leave aside Mary and he has behaved well enough. He hasn’t filled a nursery with his bastards, as the Scottish kings do. There have been women, but who can name them? Only Richmond’s mother, and the Boleyns. He has been discreet.’

‘I dare say Katherine knew their names.’

‘Who can say he will be a faithful husband? Will you?’

‘I may not get the chance.’

‘On the contrary, I have a wife for you. Thomas Murfyn’s girl? A Lord Mayor’s daughter is not a bad prospect. And your fortune will more than match hers, I will make sure of that. And Frances likes you. I know because I have asked her.’

‘You have asked my wife to marry me?’

‘Since I was dining there yesterday – no point in delay, was there?’

‘Not really.’ Richard laughs. He stretches back in his chair. His body – his capable, admirable body, which has impressed the king so much – is rinsed with relief. ‘Frances. Good. I like Frances.’

Mercy approves. He cannot think how she would have taken to Lady Carey; he had not broached the topic with the women. She says, ‘Don’t leave it too long to make a match for Gregory. He is very young, I know. But some men never grow up until they have a son of their own.’

He hasn’t thought about it, but it might be true. In that case, there’s hope for the kingdom of England.

Two days later he is back at the Tower. The time goes quickly between Easter and Whit, when Anne will be crowned. He inspects her new apartments and orders in braziers to help dry out the plaster. He wants to get on with the frescoes – he wishes Hans would come down, but he is painting de Dinteville and says he needs to push on with it, as the ambassador is petitioning Francis for his recall, a whining letter on every boat. For the new queen we are not going to have those hunting scenes you see painted everywhere, or grim virgin saints with the instruments of their torture, but goddesses, doves, white falcons, canopies of green leaves. In the distance, cities seated on the hills: in the foreground, temples, groves, fallen columns and hot blue skies delineated, as within a frame, by borders of Vitruvian colours, quicksilver and cinnabar, burnt ochre, malachite, indigo and purple. He unrolls the sketches the craftsmen have made. Minerva’s owl spreads her wings across a panel. A barefoot Diana fits an arrow to her bow. A white doe watches her from the trees. He scribbles a direction to the overseer: Arrow to be picked out in gold. All goddesses have dark eyes. Like a wingtip from the dark, dread brushes him: what if Anne dies? Henry will want another woman. He will bring her to these rooms. Her eyes may be blue. We will have to scour away the faces and paint them again, against the same cities, the same violet hills.

Outside he stops to watch a fight. A stonemason and the bricklayer’s gaffer are swiping at each other with battens. He stands in the ring with the trowel men. ‘What’s it about?’

‘Nuffing. Stone men have to fight brick men.’

‘Like Lancaster and York?’

‘Like that.’

‘Have you ever heard of the field called Towton? The king tells me more than twenty thousand Englishmen died.’

The man gapes at him. ‘Who were they fighting?’

‘Each other.’

It was Palm Sunday, the year 1461. The armies of two kings met in the driving snow. King Edward the king’s grandfather was the winner, if you can say there was a winner at all. Corpses made a bobbing bridge across the river. Uncounted numbers crawled away, rolled and tumbled in their own blood: some blinded, some disfigured, some maimed for life.

The child in Anne’s womb is the guarantee of no more civil war. He is the beginning, the start of something, the promise of another country.

He walks into the fight. He bellows at them to stop. He gives them both a push and they bowl over backwards: two crumbly Englishmen, snappable bones, chalky teeth. Victors of Agincourt. He’s glad Chapuys isn’t there to see.

The trees are in full leaf when he rides into Bedfordshire, with a small train on unofficial business. Christophe rides beside him and pesters him: you have said you will tell me who is Cicero, and who is Reginald Pole.

‘Cicero was a Roman.’

‘A general?’

‘No, he left that to others. As I, for example, might leave it to Norfolk.’

‘Oh, Norferk.’ Christophe subjects the duke to his peculiar pronunciation. ‘He is one who pisses on your shadow.’

‘Dear God, Christophe! I’ve heard of spitting on someone’s shadow.’

‘Yes, but we speak of Norferk. And Cicero?’

‘We lawyers try to memorise all his speeches. If any man were walking around today with all of Cicero’s wisdom in his head he would be …’ He would be what? ‘Cicero would be on the king’s side,’ he says.

Christophe is not much impressed. ‘Pole, he is a general?’

‘A priest. That is not quite true … He has offices in the church, but he has not been ordained.’

‘Why not?’

‘No doubt so he can marry. It is his blood that makes him dangerous. He is a Plantagenet. His brothers are here in this kingdom under our eye. But Reginald is abroad and we are afraid he is plotting with the Emperor.’

‘Send one to kill him. I will go.’

‘No, Christophe, I need you to stop the rain spoiling my hats.’

‘As you wish.’ Christophe shrugs. ‘But I will kill a Pole when you require it, it will be my pleasure.’

The manor at Ampthill, once fortified, has airy towers and a splendid gatehouse. It stands on a hill with views over wooded countryside; it is a pleasant seat, the kind of house you’d visit after an illness to get your strength back. It was built with money gained in the French wars, in the days when the English used to win them.

To accord with Katherine’s new status as Dowager Princess of Wales, Henry has trimmed her household, but still she is surrounded by chaplains and confessors, by household officers each with their own train of menials, by butlers and carvers, physicians, cooks, scullions, maltsters, harpers, lutenists, poultry keepers, gardeners, laundresses, apothecaries, and an entourage of wardrobe ladies, bedchamber ladies and their maids. But when he is ushered in she nods to her attendants to withdraw. No one had told her to expect him, but she must have spies on the road. Hence her nonchalant parade of occupation: a prayer book in her lap, and some sewing. He kneels to her, nods towards these encumbrances. ‘Surely, madam, one or the other?’

‘So, English today? Get up, Cromwell. We will not waste our time, as at our last interview, selecting which language to use. Because nowadays you are such a busy man.’

Formalities over, she says, ‘First thing. I shall not attend your court at Dunstable. That is what you have come to find out, is it not? I do not recognise this court. My case is at Rome, awaiting the attention of the Holy Father.’

‘Slow, isn’t he?’ He gives her a puzzled smile.

‘I will wait.’

‘But the king wishes to settle his affairs.’

‘He has a man who will do it. I do not call him an archbishop.’

‘Clement issued the bulls.’

‘Clement was misled. Dr Cranmer is a heretic.’

‘Perhaps you think the king is a heretic?’

‘No. Only a schismatic.’

‘If a general council of the church were called, His Majesty would submit to its judgment.’

‘It will be too late, if he is excommunicate, and put outside the church.’

‘We all hope – I am sure you do, madam – that day will never come.’

‘Nulla salus extra ecclesiam. Outside the church there is no salvation. Even kings come to judgment. Henry knows it, and is afraid.’

‘Madam, give way to him. For the present. Tomorrow, who knows? Do not cut off every chance of rapprochement.’

‘I hear Thomas Boleyn’s daughter is having a child.’

‘Indeed, but …’

Katherine, above anyone, should know that guarantees nothing. She takes his meaning; thinks about it; nods. ‘I see circumstances in which he might turn back to me. I have had much opportunity to study that lady’s character, and she is neither patient nor kind.’

It doesn’t matter; she only has to be lucky. ‘In the event they have no children, you should think of your daughter Lady Mary. Conciliate him, madam. He may confirm her as his heir. And if you will give way, he will offer you every honour, and a great estate.’

‘A great estate!’ Katherine stands up. Her sewing slides from her skirts, the prayer book hits the floor with a fat leathery thump, and her silver thimble goes skittering across the boards and rolls into a corner. ‘Before you make me any more preposterous offers, Master Cromwell, let me offer you a chapter from my history. After my lord Arthur died, I passed five years in poverty. I could not pay my servants. We bought in the cheapest food we could find, coarse food, stale food, yesterday’s fish – any small merchant kept a better table than the daughter of Spain. The late King Henry would not let me go back to my father because he said he was owed money – he haggled over me like one of the doorstep women who sold us bad eggs. I put my faith in God, I did not despair, but I tasted the depth of humiliation.’

‘So why would you want to taste it again?’

Face to face. They glare at each other. ‘Assuming,’ he says, ‘humiliation is all the king intends.’

‘Say it plainly.’

‘If you are found out in treason the law will take its course with you, as if you were any other subject. Your nephew is threatening to invade us in your name.’

‘That will not happen. Not in my name.’

‘That is what I say, madam.’ He softens his tone. ‘I say the Emperor is busy with the Turks, he is not so fond of his aunt – saving your presence – that he will raise another army. But others say, oh, be quiet, Cromwell, what do you know? They say we must fortify our harbours, we must raise troops, we must put the country in a state of alert. Chapuys, as you know, continually agitates with Charles to blockade our ports and impound our goods and our merchant ships abroad. He urges war in every dispatch.’

‘I have no knowledge of what Chapuys puts in his dispatches.’

It is a lie so staggering that he has to admire it. Having delivered it, Katherine seems weakened; she sinks down again into her chair, and before he can do it for her she wearily bends from the waist to pick up her sewing; her fingers are swollen, and bending seems to leave her breathless. She sits for a moment, recovering herself, and when she speaks again she is calm, deliberate. ‘Master Cromwell, I know I have failed you. That is to say, I have failed your country, which by now is my country too. The king was a good husband to me, but I could not do that which is most necessary for a wife to do. Nevertheless, I was, I am, a wife – you see, do you, that it is impossible for me to believe that for twenty years I was a harlot? Now the truth is, I have brought England little good, but I would be loath to bring her any harm.’

‘But you do, madam. You may not will it, but the harm is done.’

‘England is not served by a lie.’

‘That is what Dr Cranmer thinks. So he will annul your marriage, whether you come to the court or not.’

‘Dr Cranmer will be excommunicated too. Does it not cause him a qualm? Is he so lost to everything?’

‘This archbishop is the best guardian of the church, madam, that we have seen in many centuries.’ He thinks of what Bainham said, before they burned him; in England there have been eight hundred years of mystification, just six years of truth and light; six years, since the gospel in English began to come into the kingdom. ‘Cranmer is no heretic. He believes as the king believes. He will reform what needs reformation, that is all.’

‘I know where this will end. You will take the church’s lands and give them to the king.’ She laughs. ‘Oh, you are silent? You will. You mean to do it.’ She sounds almost light-hearted, as people do sometimes when they’re told they’re dying. ‘Master Cromwell, you may assure the king I will not bring an army against him. Tell him I pray for him daily. Some people, those who do not know him as I do, they say, “Oh, he will work his will, he will have his desire at any price.” But I know that he needs to be on the side of the light. He is not a man like you, who just packs up his sins in his saddlebags and carries them from country to country, and when they grow too heavy whistles up a mule or two, and soon commands a train of them and a troop of muleteers. Henry may err, but he needs to be forgiven. I therefore believe, and will continue to believe, that he will turn out of this path of error, in order to be at peace with himself. And peace is what we all wish for, I am sure.’

‘What a placid end you make, madam. “Peace is what we all wish for.” Like an abbess. You are quite sure by the way that you would not think of becoming an abbess?’

A smile. Quite a broad smile. ‘I shall be sorry if I don’t see you again. You are so much quicker in conversation than the dukes.’

‘The dukes will be back.’

‘I am braced. Is there news of my lady Suffolk?’

‘The king says she is dying. Brandon has no heart for anything.’

‘I can well believe it,’ she murmurs. ‘Her income as dowager queen of France dies with her, and that is the greater part of his revenue. Still, no doubt you will arrange him a loan, at some iniquitous rate of interest.’ She looks up. ‘My daughter will be curious to know I have seen you. She believes you were kind to her.’

He only remembers giving her a stool to sit on. Her life must be bleak, if she remembers that.

‘Properly, she should have remained standing, awaiting a sign from me.’

Her own pain-racked little daughter. She may smile, but she doesn’t yield an inch. Julius Caesar would have had more compunction. Hannibal.

‘Tell me,’ she says, testing the ground. ‘The king would read a letter from me?’

Henry has taken to tearing her letters up unread, or burning them. He says they disgust him with their expressions of love. He does not have it in him to tell her this. ‘Then rest for an hour,’ she says, ‘while I write it. Unless you will stay a night with us? I should be glad of company at supper.’

‘Thank you, but I must start back, the council meets tomorrow. Besides, if I stayed, where would I put my mules? Not to mention my team of drivers.’

‘Oh, the stables are half-empty. The king makes sure I am kept short of mounts. He thinks that I will give my household the slip and ride to the coast and escape on a ship to Flanders.’

‘And will you?’

He has retrieved her thimble; he hands it back; she bounces it in her hand as if it were a die and she were ready to cast it.

‘No. I shall stay here. Or go where I am sent. As the king wills. As a wife should.’

Until the excommunication, he thinks. That will free you from all bonds, as wife, as subject. ‘This is yours too,’ he says. He opens his palm; in it a needle, tip towards her.

The word is about town that Thomas More has fallen into poverty. He laughs about it with Master Secretary Gardiner. ‘Alice was a rich widow when he married her,’ Gardiner says. ‘And he has land of his own; how can he be poor? And the daughters, he’s married them well.’

‘And he still has his pension from the king.’ He is sifting through paperwork for Stephen, who is preparing to appear as leading counsel for Henry at Dunstable. He has filed away all the depositions from the Blackfriars hearings, which seem to have happened in another era.

‘Angels defend us,’ Gardiner says, ‘is there anything you don’t file?’

‘If we keep on to the bottom of this chest I’ll find your father’s love letters to your mother.’ He blows dust off the last batch. ‘There you are.’ The papers hit the table. ‘Stephen, what can we do for John Frith? He was your pupil at Cambridge. Don’t abandon him.’

But Gardiner shakes his head and busies himself with the documents, leafing through them, humming under his breath, exclaiming ‘Well, who’d have known!’ and ‘Here’s a nice point!’

He gets a boat down to Chelsea. The ex-Chancellor is at ease in his parlour, daughter Margaret translating from the Greek in a drone barely audible; as he approaches, he hears him pick her up on some error. ‘Leave us, daughter,’ More says, when he sees him. ‘I won’t have you in this devil’s company.’ But Margaret looks up and smiles, and More rises from his chair, a little stiff as if his back is bad, and offers a hand.

It is Reginald Pole, lying in Italy, who says he is a devil. The point is, he means it; it’s not an image with him, as in a fable, but something he takes to be true, as he takes the gospel to be true.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘We hear you can’t come to the coronation because you can’t afford a new coat. The Bishop of Winchester will buy you one himself if you’ll show your face on the day.’

‘Stephen? Will he?’

‘I swear it.’ He relishes the thought of going back to London and asking Gardiner for ten pounds. ‘Or the guildsmen will make a collection, if you like, for a new hat and a doublet as well.’

‘And how are you to appear?’ Margaret speaks gently, as if she has been asked to mind two children for the afternoon.

‘They are making something for me. I leave it to others. If I only avoid exciting mirth, it will be enough.’

Anne has said, you shall not dress like a lawyer on my coronation day. She has called out to Jane Rochford, taking notes like a clerk: Thomas must go into crimson. ‘Mistress Roper,’ he says, ‘are you not yourself curious to see the queen crowned?’

Her father cuts in, talking over her: ‘It is a day of shame for the women of England. One can hear them say on the streets – when the Emperor comes, wives shall have their rights again.’

‘Father, I am sure they take care not to say that in Master Cromwell’s hearing.’

He sighs. It’s not much, to know that all the merry young whores are on your side. All the kept women, and the runaway daughters. Though now Anne is married, she sets herself up for an example. Already she has slapped Mary Shelton, Lady Carey tells him, for writing a riddle in her prayer book, and it was not even an indecent one. The queen sits very erect these days, child stirring in her belly, needlework in hand, and when Norris and Weston and their gentlemen friends come swarming into her apartments, she looks at them, when they lay compliments at her feet, as if they were strewing her hem with spiders. Unless you approach her with a Bible text in your mouth, better not approach her at all.

He says, ‘Has the Maid been up to see you again? The prophetess?’

‘She has,’ Meg says, ‘but we would not receive her.’

‘I believe she has been to see Lady Exeter. At her invitation.’

‘Lady Exeter is a foolish and ambitious woman,’ More says.

‘I understand the Maid told her that she would be Queen of England.’

‘I repeat my comment.’

‘Do you believe in her visions? Their holy nature, that is?’

‘No. I think she is an impostor. She does it for attention.’

‘Just that?’

‘You don’t know what young women will do. I have a houseful of daughters.’

He pauses. ‘You are blessed.’

Meg glances up; she recalls his losses, though she never heard Anne Cromwell demand, why should Mistress More have the pre-eminence? She says, ‘There were holy maids before this. One at Ipswich. Only a little girl of twelve. She was of good family, and they say she did miracles, and she got nothing out of it, no personal profit, and she died young.’

‘But then there was the Maid of Leominster,’ More says, with gloomy relish. ‘They say she is a whore at Calais now, and laughs with her clients after supper at all the tricks she worked on the believing people.’

So he does not like holy maids. But Bishop Fisher does. He has seen her often. He has dealings with her. As if taking the words out of his mouth, More says, ‘Of course, Fisher, he has his own views.’

‘Fisher believes she has raised the dead.’ More lifts an eyebrow. ‘But only for so long as it took for the corpse to make his confession and get absolution. And then he fell down and died again.’

More smiles. ‘That sort of miracle.’

‘Perhaps she is a witch,’ Meg says. ‘Do you think so? There are witches in the scriptures. I could cite you.’

Please don’t. More says, ‘Meg, did I show you where I put the letter?’ She rises, marking with a thread her place in the Greek text. ‘I have written to this maid, Barton … Dame Elizabeth, we must call her, now she is a professed nun. I have advised her to leave the realm in tranquillity, to cease to trouble the king with her prophecies, to avoid the company of great men and women, to listen to her spiritual advisers, and, in short, to stay at home and say her prayers.’

‘As we all should, Sir Thomas. Following your example.’ He nods, vigorously. ‘Amen. And I suppose you kept a copy?’

‘Get it, Meg. Otherwise he may never leave.’

More gives his daughter some rapid instructions. But he is satisfied that he is not ordering her to fabricate such a letter on the spot. ‘I would leave,’ he says, ‘in time. I’m not going to miss the coronation. I’ve got my new clothes to wear. Will you not come and bear us company?’

‘You’ll be company for each other, in Hell.’

This is what you forget, this vehemence; his ability to make his twisted jokes, but not take them.

‘The queen looks well,’ he says. ‘Your queen, I mean, not mine. She seems very comfortable at Ampthill. But you know that, of course.’

More says, unblinking, I have no correspondence with the, with the Princess Dowager. Good, he says, because I am watching two friars who have been carrying her letters abroad – I am beginning to think that whole order of the Franciscans is working against the king. If I take them and if I cannot persuade them, and you know I am very persuasive, into confirming my suspicion, I may have to hang them up by their wrists, and start a sort of contest between them, as to which one will emerge first into better sense. Of course, my own inclination would be to take them home, feed them and ply them with strong drink, but then, Sir Thomas, I have always looked up to you, and you have been my master in these proceedings.

He has to say it all before Margaret Roper comes back. He raps his fingers on the table, to make More sit up and pay attention. John Frith, he says. Ask to see Henry. He will welcome you like a lost child. Talk to him and ask him to meet Frith face-to-face. I’m not asking you to agree with John – you think he’s a heretic, perhaps he is a heretic – I’m asking you to concede just this, and to tell it to the king, that Frith is a pure soul, he is a fine scholar, so let him live. If his doctrine is false and yours is true you can talk him back to you, you are an eloquent man, you are the great persuader of our age, not me – talk him back to Rome, if you can. But if he dies you will never know, will you, if you could have won his soul?

Margaret’s footstep. ‘Is this it, Father?’

‘Give it to him.’

‘There are copies of the copy, I suppose?’

‘You would expect us,’ the girl says, ‘to take all reasonable care.’

‘Your father and I were discussing monks and friars. How can they be good subjects of the king, if they owe their allegiance to the heads of their orders, who are abroad in other countries, and who are themselves perhaps subjects of the King of France, or the Emperor?’

‘I suppose they are still Englishmen.’

‘I meet few who behave as such. Your father will enlarge on what I say.’ He bows to her. He takes More’s hand, holding its shifting sinews in his own palm; scars vanish, it is surprising how they do, and now his own hand is white, a gentleman’s hand, flesh running easily over the joints, though once he thought the burn marks, the stripes that any smith picks up in the course of business, would never fade.

He goes home. Helen Barre meets him. ‘I’ve been fishing,’ he says. ‘At Chelsea.’

‘Catch More?’

‘Not today.’

‘Your robes came.’

‘Yes?’

‘Crimson.’

‘Dear God.’ He laughs. ‘Helen –’ She looks at him; she seems to be waiting. ‘I haven’t found your husband.’

Her hands are plunged into the pocket of her apron. She shifts them, as if she were holding something; he sees that one of her hands is clutching the other. ‘So you suppose he is dead?’

‘It would be reasonable to think so. I have spoken with the man who saw him go into the river. He seems a good witness.’

‘So I could marry again. If anybody wanted me.’

Helen’s eyes rest on his face. She says nothing. Just stands. The moment seems to last a long time. Then: ‘What happened to our picture? The one with the man holding his heart shaped like a book? Or do I mean his book shaped like a heart?’

‘I gave it to a Genovese.’

‘Why?’

‘I needed to pay for an archbishop.’

She moves, reluctant, slow. She drags her eyes from his face. ‘Hans is here. He has been waiting for you. He is angry. He says time is money.’

‘I’ll make it up to him.’

Hans is taking time off from his preparations for the coronation. He is building a living model of Mount Parnassus on Gracechurch Street, and today he has to put the Nine Muses through their paces, so he doesn’t like being kept waiting by Thomas Cromwell. He is banging around in the next room. It seems he is moving the furniture.

They take Frith to the archbishop’s palace at Croydon, to be examined by Cranmer. The new archbishop could have seen him at Lambeth; but the way to Croydon is longer, and lies through the woods. In the depth of these woods, they say to him, it would be a bad day for us if you were to give us the slip. For see how thick the trees are on the Wandsworth side. You could hide an army in there. We could spend two days searching there, more – and if you’d gone east, to Kent and the river, you’d be clear away before we got around to that side.

But Frith knows his road; he is going towards his death. They stand on the path, whistling, talking about the weather. One pisses, leisurely, against a tree. One follows the flight of a jay through the branches. But when they turn back, Frith is waiting, placid, for his journey to resume.

Four days. Fifty barges in procession, furnished by the city livery companies; two hours from the city to Blackwall, their rigging hung with bells and flags; a light but brisk breeze, as ordered from God in his prayers. Reverse order, anchor at the steps of Greenwich Palace, collect incoming queen in her own barge – Katherine’s old one, rebadged, twenty-four oars: next her women, her guard, all the ornaments of the king’s court, all those proud and noble souls who swore they’d sabotage the event. Boats packed with musicians; three hundred craft afloat, banners and pennants flying, the music ringing bank to bank, and each bank lined with Londoners. Downstream with the tide, led by an aquatic dragon spitting fire, and accompanied by wild men throwing fireworks. Sea-going ships discharge their ordnance in salute.

By the time they reach the Tower the sun is out. It looks as if the Thames is ablaze. Henry is waiting to greet Anne as she lands. He kisses her without formality, scooping back her gown, pinning it at her sides to show her belly to England.

Next, Henry makes knights: a shoal of Howards and Boleyns, their friends and followers. Anne rests.

Uncle Norfolk is missing the show. Henry has sent him to King Francis, to reaffirm the most cordial alliance between our two kingdoms. He is Earl Marshal and should be in charge of the coronation, but there is another Howard to step in as his deputy, and besides he, Thomas Cromwell, is running everything, including the weather.

He has conferred with Arthur Lord Lisle, who will preside at the coronation banquet: Arthur Plantagenet, a gentle relic of a former age. He is to go to Calais, directly this is over, to replace Lord Berners as Governor, and he, Cromwell, must brief him before he goes. Lisle has a long bony Plantagenet face, and he is tall like his father King Edward, who no doubt had many bastards, but none so distinguished as this elderly man, bending his creaky knee in obeisance before Boleyn’s daughter. His wife Honor, his second wife, is twenty years his junior, small and delicate, a toy wife. She wears tawny silk, coral bracelets with gold hearts, and an expression of vigilant dissatisfaction, bordering on the peevish. She looks him up and down. ‘I suppose you are Cromwell?’ If a man spoke to you in that tone, you’d invite him to step outside and ask someone to hold your coat.

Day Two: bringing Anne to Westminster. He is up before first light, watching from the battlements as thin clouds disperse over the Bermondsey bank, and an early chill as clear as water is replaced by a steady, golden heat.

Her procession is led by the retinue of the French ambassador. The judges in scarlet follow, the Knights of the Bath in blue-violet of antique cut, then the bishops, Lord Chancellor Audley and his retinue, the great lords in crimson velvet. Sixteen knights carry Anne in a white litter hung with silver bells which ring at each step, at each breath; the queen is in white, her body shimmering in its strange skin, her face held in a conscious solemn smile, her hair loose beneath a circle of gems. After her, ladies on palfreys trapped with white velvet; and ancient dowagers in their chariots, their faces acidulated.

At every turn on the route there are pageants and living statues, recitations of her virtue and gifts of gold from city coffers, her white falcon emblem crowned and entwined with roses, and blossom mashed and minced under the treading feet of the stout sixteen, so scent rises like smoke. The route is hung with tapestries and banners, and at his orders the ground beneath the horses’ hooves is gravelled to prevent slipping, and the crowds restrained behind rails in case of riots and crush; every law officer London can muster is among the crowd, because he is determined that in time to come, when this is remembered and told to those who were not here, no one is going to say, oh, Queen Anne’s coronation, that was the day I got my pocket picked. Fenchurch Street, Leadenhall, Cheap, Paul’s Churchyard, Fleet, Temple Bar, Westminster Hall. So many fountains flowing with wine that it’s hard to find one flowing with water. And looking down on them, the other Londoners, those monsters who live in the air, the city’s uncounted population of stone men and women and beasts, and things that are neither human nor beasts, fanged rabbits and flying hares, four-legged birds and pinioned snakes, imps with bulging eyes and ducks’ bills, men who are wreathed in leaves or have the heads of goats or rams;: creatures with knotted coils and leather wings, with hairy ears and cloven feet, horned and roaring, feathered and scaled, some laughing, some singing, some pulling back their lips to show their teeth; lions and friars, donkeys and geese, devils with children crammed into their maws, all chewed up except for their helpless paddling feet; limestone or leaden, metalled or marbled, shrieking and sniggering above the populace, hooting and gurning and dry-heaving from buttresses, walls and roofs.

That night, the king permitting, he goes back to Austin Friars. He visits his neighbour Chapuys, who has secluded himself from the events of the day, bolting his shutters and stuffing his ears against the fanfares, the ceremonial cannon fire. He goes in a small satirical procession led by Thurston, taking the ambassador sweetmeats to ease his sulks, and some fine Italian wine sent to him by the Duke of Suffolk.

Chapuys greets him without a smile. ‘Well, you have succeeded where the cardinal failed, Henry has what he wants at last. I say to my master, who is capable of looking at these things impartially, it is a pity from Henry’s point of view that he did not take up Cromwell years ago. His affairs would have gone on much better.’ He is about to say, the cardinal taught me everything, but Chapuys talks over him. ‘When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it – oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same.’ He pours himself some of the duke’s present. ‘But in the last resort, you just kick it in.’

The wine is one of those big, noble wines that Brandon favours, and Chapuys drinks appreciatively and says I don’t understand it, nothing do I understand in this benighted country. Is Cranmer Pope now? Or is Henry Pope? Perhaps you are Pope? My men who were among the press today say they heard few voices raised for the concubine, and plenty who called upon God to bless Katherine, the rightful queen.

Did they? I don’t know what city they were in.

Chapuys sniffs: they may well wonder. These days it is nothing but Frenchmen about the king, and she, Boleyn, she is half-French herself, and wholly bought by them; her entire family are in the pocket of Francis. But you, Thomas, you are not taken in by these Frenchmen, are you?

He reassures him: my dear friend, not for one instant.

Chapuys weeps; it’s unlike him: all credit to the noble wine. ‘I have failed my master the Emperor. I have failed Katherine.’

‘Never mind.’ He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.

He is at the abbey by dawn. The procession is forming up by six. Henry will watch the coronation from a box screened by a lattice, sequestered in the painted stonework. When he puts his head in about eight o’clock the king is already sitting expectantly on a velvet cushion, and a kneeling servant is unpacking his breakfast. ‘The French ambassador will be joining me,’ Henry says; and he meets that gentleman as he is hurrying away.

‘One hears you have been painted, Maître Cremuel. I too have been painted. You have seen the result?’

‘Not yet. Hans is so occupied.’ Even on this fine morning, here beneath fan vaulting the ambassador looks blue-tinged. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it appears that with the coronation of this queen, our two nations have reached a state of perfect amity. How to improve on perfection? I ask you, monsieur.’

The ambassador bows. ‘Downhill from here?’

‘Let’s try, you know. To maintain a state of mutual usefulness. When our sovereigns are once again snapping at each other.’

‘Another Calais meeting?’

‘Perhaps in a year.’

‘No sooner?’

‘I will not put my king on the high seas for no cause.’

‘We’ll talk, Cremuel.’ Flat-palmed, the ambassador taps him on the chest, over the heart.

Anne’s procession forms up at nine. She is mantled in purple velvet, edged in ermine. She has seven hundred yards to walk, on the blue cloth that stretches to the altar, and her face is entranced. Far behind her, the dowager duchess of Norfolk, supporting her train; nearer, holding up the hem of her long robe, the Bishop of Winchester at one side, the Bishop of London at the other. Both of them, Gardiner and Stokesley, were king’s men in the matter of the divorce; but now they look as if they wish they were far distant from the living object of his remarriage, who has a fine sheen of sweat on her high forehead, and whose compressed lips – by the time she reaches the altar – seem to have vanished into her face. Who says two bishops should hold up her hem? It’s all written down in a great book, so old that one hardly dare touch it, breathe on it; Lisle seems to know it by heart. Perhaps it should be copied and printed, he thinks.

He makes a mental note, and then concentrates his will on Anne: Anne not to stumble, as she folds herself towards the ground to lie face-down in prayer before the altar, her attendants stepping forward to support her for the crucial twelve inches before belly hits sacred pavement. He finds himself praying: this child, his half-formed heart now beating against the stone floor, let him be sanctified by this moment, and let him be like his father’s father, like his Tudor uncles; let him be hard, alert, watchful of opportunity, wringing use from the smallest turn of fortune. If Henry lives twenty years, Henry who is Wolsey’s creation, and then leaves this child to succeed him, I can build my own prince: to the glorification of God and the commonwealth of England. Because I will not be too old. Look at Norfolk, already he is sixty, his father was seventy when he fought at Flodden. And I shall not be like Henry Wyatt and say, now I am retiring from affairs. Because what is there, but affairs?

Anne, shaky, is back on her feet. Cranmer, in a dense cloud of incense, is pressing into her hand the sceptre, the rod of ivory, and resting the crown of St Edward briefly on her head, before changing for a lighter and more bearable crown: a prestidigitation, his hands as supple as if he’d been shuffling crowns all his life. The prelate looks mildly excited, as if someone had offered him a cup of warm milk.

Anointed, Anna withdraws, incense billowing around her, swallowed into its murk: Anna Regina, to a bedchamber provided for her, to prepare for the feast in Westminster Hall. He pushes unceremoniously through the dignitaries – all you, all you who said you would not be here – and catches sight of Charles Brandon, Constable of England, mounted on his white horse and ready to ride into the hall among them. He is a huge, blazing presence, from which he withdraws his sight; Charles, he thinks, will not outlive me either. Back into the dimness, towards Henry. Only one thing checks him, the sight, whisking around a corner, of the hem of a scarlet robe; no doubt it is one of the judges, escaped from his procession.

The Venetian ambassador is blocking the entrance to Henry’s box, but the king waves him aside, and says, ‘Cromwell, did not my wife look well, did she not look beautiful? Will you go and see her, and give her …’ he looks around, for some likely present, then wrenches a diamond from his knuckle, ‘will you give her this?’ He kisses the ring. ‘And this too?’

‘I shall hope to convey the sentiment,’ he says, and sighs, as if he were Cranmer.

The king laughs. His face is alight. ‘This is my best,’ he says. ‘This is my best day.’

‘Until the birth, Majesty,’ says the Venetian, bowing.

It is Mary Howard, Norfolk’s little daughter, who opens the door to him.

‘No, you most certainly cannot come in,’ she says. ‘Utterly not. The queen is undressed.’

Richmond is right, he thinks; she has no breasts at all. Still. For fourteen. I’ll charm this small Howard, he thinks, so he stands spinning words around her, complimenting her gown and her jewels, till he hears a voice from within, muffled like a voice from a tomb; and Mary Howard jumps and says, oh, all right, if she says so you can see her.

The bedcurtains are drawn close. He pulls them back. Anne is lying in her shift. She looks flat as a ghost, except for the shocking mound of her six-month child. In her ceremonial robes, her condition had hardly showed, and only that sacred instant, as she lay belly-down to stone, had connected him to her body, which now lies stretched out like a sacrifice: her breasts puffy beneath the linen, her swollen feet bare.

‘Mother of God,’ she says. ‘Can you not leave Howard women alone? For an ugly man, you are very sure of yourself. Let me look at you.’ She bobs her head up. ‘Is that crimson? It’s a very black crimson. Did you go against my orders?’

‘Your cousin Francis Bryan says I look like a travelling bruise.’

‘A contusion on the body politic.’ Jane Rochford laughs.

‘Can you do this?’ he asks: almost doubting, almost tender. ‘You are exhausted.’

‘Oh, I think she will bear up.’ There is no sisterly pride in Mary’s voice. ‘She was born for this, was she not?’

Jane Seymour: ‘Is the king watching?’

‘He is proud of her.’ He speaks to Anne, stretched out on her catafalque. ‘He says you have never looked more beautiful. He sends you this.’

Anne makes a little sound, a moan, poised between gratitude and boredom: oh, what, another diamond?

‘And a kiss, which I said he had better bring in person.’

She shows no sign of taking the ring from him. It is almost irresistible, to place it on her belly and walk away. Instead he hands it to her sister. He says, ‘The feast will wait for you, Highness. Come only when you feel ready.’

She levers herself upright, with a gasp. ‘I am coming now.’ Mary Howard leans forward and rubs her lower back, with an unpractised hand, a fluttering virginal motion as if she were stroking a bird. ‘Oh, get away,’ the anointed queen snaps. She looks sick. ‘Where were you last evening? I wanted you. The streets cheered for me. I heard them. They say the people love Katherine, but really, it is just the women, they pity her. We will show them something better. They will love me, when this creature is out of me.’

Jane Rochford: ‘Oh, but madam, they love Katherine because she is the daughter of two anointed sovereigns. Make your mind up to it, madam – they will never love you, any more than they love … Cromwell here. It is nothing to do with your merits. It is a point of fact. There is no use trying to evade it.’

‘Perhaps enough,’ Jane Seymour says. He turns to her and sees something surprising; she has grown up.

‘Lady Carey,’ Jane Rochford says, ‘we must get your sister on her feet now and back in her robes, so see Master Cromwell out and enjoy your usual confabulation. This is not a day to break with tradition.’

At the door: ‘Mary?’ he says. Notices the dark stains under her eyes.

‘Yes?’ She speaks in a tone of ‘yes, and what is it now?’

‘I am sorry the marriage with my nephew did not come off.’

‘Not that I was ever asked, of course.’ She smiles tightly. ‘I shall never see your house. And one hears so much of it.’

‘What do you hear?’

‘Oh … of chests bursting with gold pieces.’

‘We would never allow that. We would get bigger chests.’

‘They say it is the king’s money.’

‘It’s all the king’s money. His image is on it. Mary, look,’ he takes her hand, ‘I could not dissuade him from his liking for you. He –’

‘How hard did you try?’

‘I wish you were safe with us. Though of course it was not the great match you might expect, as the queen’s sister.’

‘I doubt there are many sisters who expect what I receive, nightly.’

She will get another child by Henry, he thinks. Anne will have it strangled in the cradle. ‘Your friend William Stafford is at court. At least, I think he is still your friend?’

‘Imagine how he likes my situation. Still, at least I get a kind word from my father. Monseigneur finds he needs me again. God forbid the king should ride a mare from any other stable.’

‘This will end. He will free you. He will give you a settlement. A pension. I’ll speak for you.’

‘Does a dirty dishcloth get a pension?’ Mary sways on the spot; she seems dazed with misery and fatigue; great tears swell in her eyes. He stands catching them, dabbing them away, whispering to her and soothing her, and wanting to be elsewhere. When he breaks free he gives her a backward glance, as she stands in the doorway, desolate. Something must be done for her, he thinks. She’s losing her looks.

Henry watches from a gallery, high above Westminster Hall, as his queen takes her seat in the place of honour, her ladies around her, the flower of the court and the nobility of England. The king has fortified himself earlier, and is picking at a spice plate, dipping thin slices of apple into cinnamon. In the gallery with him, encore les ambassadeurs, Jean de Dinteville furred against the June chill, and his friend the Bishop of Lavaur, wrapped in a fine brocade gown.

‘This has all been most impressive, Cremuel,’ de Selve says; astute brown eyes study him, taking everything in. He takes in everything too: stitching and padding, studding and dyeing; he admires the deep mulberry of the bishop’s brocade. They say these two Frenchmen favour the gospel, but favour at François’s court extends no further than a small circle of scholars that the king, for his own vanity, wishes to patronise; he has never quite been able to grow his own Thomas More, his own Erasmus, which naturally piques his pride.

‘Look at my wife the queen.’ Henry leans over the gallery. He might as well be down there. ‘She is worth the show, is she not?’

‘I have had all the windows reglazed,’ he says. ‘The better to see her.’

‘Fiat lux,’ de Selve murmurs.

‘She has done very well,’ de Dinteville says. ‘She must have been six hours on her feet today. One must congratulate Your Majesty on obtaining a queen who is as strong as a peasant woman. I mean no disrespect, of course.’

In Paris they are burning Lutherans. He would like to take it up with the envoys, but he cannot while the odour of roast swan and peacock drifts up from below.

‘Messieurs,’ he asks (music rising around them like a shallow tide, silver ripples of sound), ‘do you know of the man Guido Camillo? I hear he is at your master’s court.’

De Selve and his friend exchange glances. This has thrown them. ‘The man who builds the wooden box,’ Jean murmurs. ‘Oh yes.’

‘It is a theatre,’ he says.

De Selve nods. ‘In which you yourself are the play.’

‘Erasmus has written to us about it,’ Henry says, over his shoulder. ‘He is having the cabinetmakers create him little wooden shelves and drawers, one inside another. It is a memory system for the speeches of Cicero.’

‘With your permission, he intends it as more than that. It is a theatre on the ancient Vitruvian plan. But it is not to put on plays. As my lord the bishop says, you as the owner of the theatre are to stand in the centre of it, and look up. Around you there is arrayed a system of human knowledge. Like a library, but as if – can you imagine a library in which each book contains another book, and a smaller book inside that? Yet it is more than that.’

The king slips into his mouth an aniseed comfit, and snaps down on it. ‘Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all.’

‘I do not see how you understand so much about it,’ de Selve says. ‘All credit to you, Maître Cremuel. Guido will only speak his own Italian dialect, and even in that he stammers.’

‘If it pleases your master to spend his money,’ Henry says. ‘He is not a sorcerer, is he, this Guido? I should not like Francis to fall into the hands of a sorcerer. By the way, Cromwell, I am sending Stephen back to France.’

Stephen Gardiner. So the French do not like doing business with Norferk. Not surprising. ‘His mission will be of some duration?’

De Selve catches his eye. ‘But who will do Master Secretary’s job?’

‘Oh, Cromwell will do it. Won’t you?’ Henry smiles.

He is hardly down into the body of the hall before Master Wriothesley intercepts him. This is a big day for the heralds and their officers, their children and their friends; fat fees coming their way. He says so, and Call-Me says, fat fees coming your way. He edges back against the screens, voice low; one could foresee this, he says, because Henry is tired of it, Winchester’s grinding opposition to him every step of the way. He is tired of arguing; now he is a married man he looks for a little more douceur. With Anne? he says and Call-Me laughs: you know her better than me, if as they say she is a lady with a sharp tongue, then all the more he needs ministers who are kind to him. So devote yourself to keeping Stephen abroad, and in time he will confirm you in the post.

Christophe, dressed up for the afternoon, is hovering nearby and making signals to him. You will excuse me, he says, but Wriothesley touches his gown of crimson, as if for luck, and says, you are the master of the house and the master of the revels, you are the origin of the king’s happiness, you have done what the cardinal could not, and much more besides. Even this – he gestures around him, to where the nobility of England, having already eaten their words, are working through twenty-three dishes – even this feast has been superbly managed. No one need call for anything, it is all at his hand before he thinks of it.

He inclines his head, Wriothesley walks away, and he beckons the boy. Christophe says, one tells me to impart nothing of confidence in the hearing of Call-Me, as Rafe says he go trit-trot to Gardineur with anything he can get. Now sir, I have a message, you must go quick to the archbishop. When the feast is done. He glances up to the dais where the archbishop sits beside Anne, under her canopy of state. Neither of them is eating, though Anne is pretending to, both of them are scanning the hall.

‘I go trit-trot,’ he says. He is taken with the phrase. ‘Where?’

‘His old lodging which he says you know. He wishes you to be secret. He says not to bring any person.’

‘Well, you can come, Christophe. You’re not a person.’

The boy grins.

He is apprehensive; does not quite like the thought of the abbey precincts, the drunken crowds at dusk, without somebody to watch his back. Unfortunately, a man cannot have two fronts.

They have almost reached Cranmer’s lodging when fatigue enwraps his shoulders, an iron cloak. ‘Pause for a moment,’ he says to Christophe. He has hardly slept these last nights. He takes a breath, in shadow; here it is cold, and as he passes into the cloisters he is dipped in night. The rooms around are shuttered, empty, no sound from within. From behind him, an inchoate shouting from the Westminster streets, like the cries of those lost after a battle.

Cranmer looks up; he is already at his desk. ‘These are days we will never forget,’ he says. ‘No one who has missed it would believe it. The king spoke warm words in your praise today. I think it was intended I should convey them.’

‘I wonder why I ever gave any thought to the cost of brick-making for the Tower. It seems such a small item now. And tomorrow the jousts. Will you be there? My boy Richard is listed for the bouts on foot, fighting in single combat.’

‘He will prevail,’ Christophe declares. ‘Biff, and one is flat, never to rise again.’

‘Hush,’ Cranmer says. ‘You are not here, child. Cromwell, please.’

He opens a low door at the back of the chamber. He dips his head, and framed by the doorway in the half light he sees a table, a stool, and on the stool a woman sitting, young, tranquil, her head bowed over a book. She looks up. ‘Ich bitte Sie, ich brauch’ eine Kerze.’

‘Christophe, a candle for her.’

The book before her he recognises; it is a tract of Luther’s. ‘May I?’ he says, and picks it up.

He finds himself reading. His mind leaps along the lines. Is she some fugitive Cranmer is sheltering? Does he know the cost if she is taken? He has time to read half a page, before the archbishop trickles in, like a late apology. ‘This woman is …?’

Cranmer says, ‘Margarete. My wife.’

‘Dear God.’ He slams Luther down on the table. ‘What have you done? Where did you find her? Germany, evidently. This is why you were slow to return. I see it now. Why?’

Cranmer says meekly, ‘I could not help it.’

‘Do you know what the king will do to you when he finds you out? The master executioner of Paris has devised a machine, with a counterweighted beam – shall I draw it for you? – which when a heretic is burned dips him into the fire and lifts him out again, so that the people can see the stages of his agony. Now Henry will be wanting one. Or he will get some device to tease your head off your shoulders, over a period of forty days.’

The young woman looks up. ‘Mein Onkel –’

‘Who is that?’

She names a theologian, Andreas Osiander: a Nuremberger, a Lutheran. Her uncle and his friends, she says, and the learned men of her town, they believe –

‘It may be the belief in your country, madam, that a pastor should have a wife, but not here. Did Dr Cranmer not warn you of this?’

‘Please,’ Cranmer begs, ‘tell me what she is saying. Does she blame me? Is she wishing herself at home?’

‘No. No, she says you are kind. What took hold of you, man?’

‘I told you I had a secret.’

So you did. Down the side of the page. ‘But to keep her here, under the king’s nose?’

‘I have kept her in the country. But I could not refuse her wish to see the celebrations.’

‘She has been out on the streets?’

‘Why not? No one knows her.’

True. The protection of the stranger in the city; one young woman in a cheerful cap and gown, one pair of eyes among the thousands of eyes: you can hide a tree in a forest. Cranmer approaches him. He holds out his hands, so lately smeared with the sacred oil; fine hands, long fingers, the pale rectangles of his palms crossed and recrossed by news of sea voyages and alliances. ‘I asked you here as my friend. For I count you my chief friend, Cromwell, in this world.’

So there is nothing to do, in friendship, but to take these bony digits in his own. ‘Very well. We will find a way. We will keep your lady secret. I only wonder that you did not leave her with her own family, till we can turn the king our way.’

Margarete is watching them, blue eyes flitting from face to face. She stands up. She pushes the table away from her; he watches her do it, and his heart lurches. Because he has seen a woman do this before, his own wife, and he has seen how she puts her palms down on the surface, to haul herself up. Margarete is tall, and the bulge of her belly juts above the table top.

‘Jesus,’ he says.

‘I hope for a daughter,’ the archbishop says.

‘About when?’ he asks Margarete.

Instead of answering, she takes his hand. She places it on her belly, pressing it down with her own. At one with the celebrations, the child is dancing: spanoletta, Estampie Royal. This is a perhaps a foot; this is a fist. ‘You need a friend,’ he says. ‘A woman with you.’

Cranmer follows him as he pounds out of the room. ‘About John Frith …’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Since he was brought to Croydon, I have seen him three times in private conversation. A worthy young man, a most gentle creature. I have spent hours, I regret not a second of it, but I cannot turn him from his path.’

‘He should have run into the woods. That was his path.’

‘We do not all …’ Cranmer drops his gaze. ‘Forgive me, but we do not all see as many paths as you.’

‘So you must hand him to Stokesley now, because he was taken in Stokesley’s diocese.’

‘I never thought, when the king gave me this dignity, when he insisted I occupy this seat, that among my first actions would be to come against a young man like John Frith, and to try to argue him out of his faith.’

Welcome to this world below. ‘I cannot much longer delay,’ Cranmer says.

‘Nor can your wife.’

The streets around Austin Friars are almost deserted. Bonfires are starting up across the city, and the stars are obscured by smoke. His guards are on the gate: sober, he is pleased to note. He stops for a word; there is an art to being in a hurry but not showing it. Then he walks in and says, ‘I want Mistress Barre.’

Most of his household have gone to see the bonfires, and they will be out till midnight, dancing. They have permission to do this; who should celebrate the new queen, if they do not? John Page comes out: something want doing, sir? William Brabazon, pen in hand, one of Wolsey’s old crew: the king’s business never stops. Thomas Avery, fresh from his accounts: there’s always money flowing in, money flowing out. When Wolsey fell, his household deserted him, but Thomas Cromwell’s servants stayed to see him through.

A door bangs overhead. Rafe comes down, boots clattering, hair sticking up. He looks flushed and confused. ‘Sir?’

‘I don’t want you. Is Helen here, do you know?’

‘Why?’

At that moment Helen appears. She is fastening up her hair under a clean cap. ‘I need you to pack a bag and come with me.’

‘For how long, sir?’

‘I cannot say.’

‘To go out of London?’

He thinks, I’ll make some arrangement, the wives and daughters of men in the city, discreet women, they will find her servants, and a midwife, some competent woman who will put Cranmer’s child into his hands. ‘Perhaps for a short time.’

‘The children –’

‘We will take care of your children.’

She nods. Speeds away. You wish you had men in your service as swift as she. Rafe calls after her. ‘Helen …’ He looks irate. ‘Where is she going, sir? You can’t just drag her off into the night.’

‘Oh, I can,’ he says mildly.

‘I need to know.’

‘Believe me, you don’t.’ He relents. ‘Or if you do, this is not the time – Rafe, I’m tired. I’m not going to argue.’

He could perhaps leave it to Christophe, and some of the more unquestioning members of his household, to take Helen from the warmth of Austin Friars to the chill of the abbey precincts; or he could leave it till the morning. But his mind is alive to the loneliness of Cranmer’s wife, the strangeness of the city en fête, the deserted aspect of Cannon Row, where even in the shadow of the abbey robbers are bound to lurk. Even in the time of King Richard the district was home to gangs of thieves, who issued out by night at their pleasure, and when the dawn came swarmed back to claim the privilege of sanctuary, and no doubt to share the spoils with the clergy. I shall clean out that lot, he thinks. My men will be after them like ferrets down a hole.

Midnight: stone exhales a mossy breath, flagstones are slippery with the city’s exhalations. Helen puts her hand into his. A servant admits them, eyes downcast; he slips him a coin to raise his eyes no higher. No sign of the archbishop: good. A lamp is lit. A door pushed ajar. Cranmer’s wife is lying in a little cot. He says to Helen, ‘Here is a lady who needs your compassion. You see her situation. She does not speak English. In any case, you need not ask her name.’

‘Here is Helen,’ he says. ‘She has two children of her own. She will help you.’

Mistress Cranmer, her eyes closed, merely nods and smiles. But when Helen places a gentle hand on her, she reaches out and strokes it.

‘Where is your husband?’

‘Er betet.’

‘I hope he is praying for me.’

The day of Frith’s burning he is hunting with the king over the country outside Guildford. It is raining before dawn, a gusty, tugging wind bending the treetops: raining all over England, soaking the crops in the fields. Henry’s mood is not to be dented. He sits down to write to Anne, left back at Windsor. After he has twirled his quill in his fingers, turned his paper about and about, he loses the will: you write it for me, Cromwell. I’ll tell you what to put.

A tailor’s apprentice is going to the stake with Frith: Andrew Hewitt.

Katherine used to have relics brought to her, Henry says, for when she was in labour with her children. A girdle of the Blessed Virgin. I hired it.

I don’t think the queen will want that.

And special prayers to St Margaret. These are women’s things.

Best left to them, sir.

Later he will hear that Frith and the boy suffered, the wind blowing the flames away from them repeatedly. Death is a japester; call him and he will not come. He is a joker and he lurks in the dark, a black cloth over his face.

There are cases of the sweat in London. The king, who embodies all his people, has all the symptoms every day.

Now Henry stares at the rain falling. Cheering himself up, he says, it may abate, Jupiter is rising. Now, tell her, tell the queen …

He waits, his pen poised.

No, that’s enough. Give it to me, Thomas, I will sign it.

He waits to see if the king will draw a heart. But the frivolities of courtship are over. Marriage is a serious business. Henricus Rex.

I think I have a stomach cramp, the king says. I think I have a headache. I feel queasy, and there are black spots before my eyes, that’s a sign, isn’t it?

If Your Majesty will rest a little, he says. And take courage.

You know what they say about the sweat. Merry at breakfast, dead by dinner. But do you know it can kill you in two hours?

He says, I have heard that some people die of fear.

By afternoon the sun is struggling out. Henry, laughing, spurs away his hunter under the dripping trees. At Smithfield Frith is being shovelled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.

The king has two bodies. The first exists within the limits of his physical being; you can measure it, and often Henry does, his waist, his calf, his other parts. The second is his princely double, free-floating, untethered, weightless, which may be in more than one place at a time. Henry may be hunting in the forest, while his princely double makes laws. One fights, one prays for peace. One is wreathed in the mystery of his kingship: one is eating a duckling with sweet green peas.

The Pope now says his marriage to Anne is void. He will excommunicate him if he does not return to Katherine. Christendom will slough him off, body and soul, and his subjects will rise up and eject him, into ignominy, exile; no Christian hearth will shelter him, and when he dies his corpse will be dug with animal bones into a common pit.

He has taught Henry to call the Pope ‘The Bishop of Rome’. To laugh when his name is mentioned. If it is uncertain laughter, it is better than his former genuflection.

Cranmer has invited the prophetess, Elizabeth Barton, to a meeting at his house in Kent. She has seen a vision of Mary, the former princess, as queen? Yes. Of Gertrude, Lady Exeter, as queen? Yes. He says gently, both cannot be true. The Maid says, I only report what I see. He writes that she is bouncing and full of confidence; she is used to dealing with archbishops, and she takes him for another Warham, hanging on her every word.

She is a mouse under the cat’s paw.

Queen Katherine is on the move, her household much reduced, to the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Buckden, an old red-brick house with a great hall and gardens that run out into copses and fields and so into the fenland landscape. September will bring her the first fruits of autumn, as October will bring the mists.

The king demands that Katherine give up for his coming child the robes in which the child Mary was christened. When he hears Katherine’s answer, he, Thomas Cromwell, laughs. Nature wronged Katherine, he says, in not making her a man; she would have surpassed all the heroes of antiquity. A paper is put before her, in which she is addressed as ‘Princess Dowager’; shocked, they show him how her pen has ripped through it, as she scores out the new title.

Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushrooms in the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell’s household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter. Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don’t defend my honour. I have women like that all over the place.

They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious …

Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me.

All the astrologers say that the king will have a son. But you are better not to deal with these people. A man came to him, months ago, offering to make the king a philosopher’s stone, and when he was told to make himself scarce he turned rude and contrary, as these alchemists do, and now gives it out that the king will die this year. Waiting in Saxony, he says, is the eldest son of the late King Edward. You thought him a rattling skeleton beneath the pavements of the Tower, only his murderers know where: you are deceived, for he is a man grown, and ready to claim his kingdom.

He counts it up: King Edward V, were he living, would be sixty-four this November coming. He’s a bit late to the fight, he says.

He puts the alchemist in the Tower, to rethink his position.

No more from Paris. Whatever Maître Guido’s up to, he’s very quiet about it.

Hans Holbein says, Thomas, I’ve got your hands done but I haven’t paid much attention to your face. I promise this autumn I’ll finish you off.

Suppose within every book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.

Lord Mountjoy, Katherine’s Chamberlain, has sent him a list of all the necessities for the confinement of a Queen of England. It amuses him, the smooth and civil handover; the court and its ceremonies roll on, whoever the personnel, but it is clear Lord Mountjoy takes him as the man in charge of everything now.

He goes down to Greenwich and refurbishes the apartments, ready for Anne. Proclamations (undated) are prepared, to go out to the people of England and the rulers of Europe, announcing the birth of a prince. Just leave a little gap, he suggests, at the end of ‘prince’, so if need be you can squash in … But they look at him as if he’s a traitor, so he leaves off.

When a woman withdraws to give birth the sun may be shining but the shutters of her room are closed so she can make her own weather. She is kept in the dark so she can dream. Her dreams drift her far away, from terra firma to a marshy tract of land, to a landing stage, to a river where a mist closes over the further bank, and earth and sky are inseparate; there she must embark towards life and death, a muffled figure in the stern directing the oars. In this vessel prayers are said that men never hear. Bargains are struck between a woman and her God. The river is tidal, and between one feather-stroke and the next, her tide may turn.

On 26 August 1533, a procession escorts the queen to her sealed rooms at Greenwich. Her husband kisses her, adieu and bon voyage, and she neither smiles nor speaks. She is very pale, very grand, a tiny jewelled head balanced on the swaying tent of her body, her steps small and circumspect, a prayer book in her hands. On the quay she turns her head: one lingering glance. She sees him; she sees the archbishop. One last look and then, her women steadying her elbows, she puts her foot into the boat.

Chapter II. Devil’s Spit. Autumn and winter 1533

It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king’s eyes are open, his body braced for the atteint; he takes the blow perfectly, its force absorbed by a body securely armoured, moving in the right direction, moving at the right speed. His colour does not alter. His voice does not shake.

‘Healthy?’ he says. ‘Then I thank God for his favour to us. As I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence.’

He thinks, Henry has been rehearsing. I suppose we all have.

The king walks away towards his own rooms. Says over his shoulder, ‘Call her Elizabeth. Cancel the jousts.’

A bleat from a Boleyn: ‘The other ceremonies as planned?’

No reply. Cranmer says, all as planned, till we hear different. I am to stand godfather to the … the princess. He falters. He can hardly believe it. For himself, he ordered a daughter, and he got a daughter. His eyes follow Henry’s retreating back. ‘He did not ask after the queen. He did not ask how she does.’

‘It hardly matters, does it?’ Edward Seymour, saying brutally what everyone is thinking.

Then Henry, on his long solitary walk, stops, turns back. ‘My lord archbishop. Cromwell. But you only.’

In Henry’s closet: ‘Had you imagined this?’

Some would smile. He does not. The king drops into a chair. The urge arises to put a hand on his shoulder, as one does for any inconsolable being. He resists it; simply folds his fingers, protectively, into the fist which holds the king’s heart. ‘One day we will make a great marriage for her.’

‘Poor scrap. Her own mother will wish her away.’

‘Your Majesty is young enough,’ Cranmer says. ‘The queen is strong and her family are fertile. You can get another child soon. And perhaps God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess.’

‘My dear friend, I am sure you are right.’ Henry sounds dubious, but he looks around to take strength from his surroundings, as if God might have left some friendly message written on the wall: though there is only precedent for the hostile kind. He takes a breath and stands up and shakes out his sleeves. He smiles: and one can catch in flight, as if it were a bird with a strong-beating heart, the act of will that transforms a desolate wretch into the beacon of his nation.

He whispers to Cranmer later, ‘It was like watching Lazarus get up.’

Soon Henry is striding about the palace at Greenwich, putting the celebrations under way. We are young enough, he says, and next time it will be a boy. One day we will make a great marriage for her. Believe me, God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess.

Boleyn faces brighten. It’s Sunday, four in the afternoon. He goes and laughs a bit at the clerks who have ‘prince’ written on their proclamations, and who now have to squeeze extra letters in, then he goes back to working out the expenses for the new princess’s household. He has advised that Gertrude, Lady Exeter, be among the child’s godparents. Why should only the Maid have a vision of her? It will do her good to be seen by the whole court, smiling a forced smile and holding Anne’s baby at the font.

The Maid herself, brought to London, is kept in a private house, where the beds are soft and the voices around her, the voices of Cromwell women, hardly disturb her prayers; where the key is turned in the oiled lock with a click as small as the snap of a bird’s bone. ‘Does she eat?’ he asks Mercy, and she says, she eats as heartily as you: well, no, Thomas, perhaps not quite so heartily as you.

‘I wonder what happened to her project of living on the Communion host?’

‘They can’t see her dining now, can they? Those priests and monks who set her on this course.’

Away from their scrutiny, the nun has started to act like an ordinary woman, acknowledging the simple claims of her body, like anyone who wants to live; but it may be too late. He likes it that Mercy doesn’t say, ahh, the poor harmless soul. That she is not harmless by nature is clear when they have her over to Lambeth Palace to question her. You would think Lord Chancellor Audley, his chain of office hung about his splendid person, would be enough to subdue any country girl. Throw in the Archbishop of Canterbury, and you would imagine a young nun might feel some awe. Not a bit of it. The Maid treats Cranmer with condescension – as if he were a novice in the religious life. When he challenges her on any point and says, ‘How do you know that?’ she smiles pityingly and says, ‘An angel told me.’

Audley brings Richard Riche with him to their second session, to take notes for them, and put any points that occur to him. He is Sir Richard now, knighted and promoted to Solicitor General. In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverence to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty? Riche turns out to have a talent for drafting legislation which is second only to his own. His features, beneath his soft fair hair, are pinched with concentration; the boys call him Sir Purse. You’d never think, to see him precisely laying out his papers, that he was once the great disgrace of the Inner Temple. He says so, in an undertone, teasing him, while they wait for the girl to be brought in. Well, Master Cromwell! Riche says; what about you and that abbess in Halifax?

He knows better than to deny it: or any of those stories the cardinal told about him. ‘Oh, that,’ he says. ‘It was nothing – they expect it in Yorkshire.’

He is afraid the girl may have caught the tail end of the exchange, because today, as she takes the chair they have placed for her, she gives him a particularly hard stare. She arranges her skirts, folds her arms and waits for them to entertain her. His niece Alice Wellyfed sits on a stool by the door: just there in case of fainting, or other upset. Though a glance at the Maid tells you she is no more likely to faint than Audley is.

‘Shall I?’ Riche says. ‘Start?’

‘Oh, why not?’ Audley says. ‘You are young and hearty.’

‘These prophecies of yours – you are always changing the timing of the disaster you foresee, but I understood you said that the king would not reign one month after he married Lady Anne. Well, the months have passed, Lady Anne is crowned queen, and has given the king a fine daughter. So what do you say now?’

‘I say in the eyes of the world he seems to be king. But in the eyes of God,’ she shrugs, ‘not any more. He is no more the real king than he,’ she nods towards Cranmer, ‘is really archbishop.’

Riche is not to be sidetracked. ‘So it would be justified to raise rebellion against him? To depose him? To assassinate him? To put another in his place?’

‘Well, what do you think?’

‘And among the claimants your choice has fallen on the Courtenay family, not the Poles. Henry, Marquis of Exeter. Not Henry, Lord Montague.’

‘Or,’ he says sympathetically, ‘do you get them mixed up?’

‘Of course not.’ She flushes. ‘I have met both those gentlemen.’

Riche makes a note.

Audley says, ‘Now Courtenay, that is Lord Exeter, descends from a daughter of King Edward. Lord Montague descends from King Edward’s brother, the Duke of Clarence. How do you weigh their claims? Because if we are talking of true kings and false kings, some say Edward was a bastard his mother got by an archer. I wonder if you can cast any light?’

‘Why would she?’ Riche says.

Audley rolls his eyes. ‘Because she talks to the saints on high. They’d know.’

He looks at Riche and it is as if he can read his thoughts: Niccolò’s book says, the wise prince exterminates the envious, and if I, Riche, were king, those claimants and their families would be dead. The girl is braced for the next question: how is it she has seen two queens in her vision? ‘I suppose it will sort itself out,’ he says, ‘in the fighting? It’s good to have a few kings and queens in reserve, if you’re going to start a war in a country.’

‘It is not necessary to have a war,’ the nun says. Oh? Sir Purse sits up: this is new. ‘God is sending a plague on England instead. Henry will be dead in six months. So will she, Thomas Boleyn’s daughter.’

‘And me?’

‘You too.’

‘And all in this room? Except you, of course? All including Alice Wellyfed, who never did you harm?’

‘All the women of your house are heretics, and the plague will rot them body and soul.’

‘And what about the princess Elizabeth?’

She turns in her seat, to aim her words at Cranmer. ‘They say when you christened her you warmed the water to spare her a shock. You should have poured it boiling.’

Oh, Christ in Heaven, Riche says. He throws his pen down. He is a tender young father, with a daughter in the cradle.

He drops a consoling hand on his, the Solicitor General’s. You would think Alice would need consoling; but when the Maid condemned her to death, he had looked down the room at his niece to note that her face was the perfect picture of derision. He says to Riche, ‘She didn’t think it up herself, the boiling water. It is a thing they are saying on the streets.’

Cranmer huddles into himself; the Maid has bruised him, she has scored a point. He, Cromwell, says, ‘I saw the princess yesterday. She is thriving, in spite of her ill-wishers.’ His voice suggests calm: we must get the archbishop back in the saddle. He turns to the Maid: ‘Tell me: did you locate the cardinal?’

‘What?’ Audley says.

‘Dame Elizabeth said she would look out for my old master, on one of her excursions to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and I offered to pay her travelling expenses on the occasion. I gave her people a down-payment – I hope we see some progress?’

‘Wolsey would have had another fifteen years of life,’ the girl says. He nods: he has said the same himself. ‘But then God cut him off, as an example. I have seen devils disputing for his soul.’

‘You know the result?’ he asks.

‘There is no result. I searched for him all over. I thought God had extinguished him. Then one night I saw him.’ A long, tactical hesitation. ‘I saw his soul seated among the unborn.’

There is a silence. Cranmer shrinks in his seat. Riche gently nibbles the end of his pen. Audley twists a button on his sleeve, round and round till the thread tightens.

‘If you like I can pray for him,’ the Maid says. ‘God usually answers my requests.’

‘Formerly, when you had your advisers about you, Father Bocking and Father Gold and Father Risby and the rest, you would start bargaining at this point. I would propose a further sum for your goodwill, and your spiritual directors would drive it up.’

‘Wait.’ Cranmer lays a hand over his ribcage. ‘Can we go back? Lord Chancellor?’

‘We can go in any direction you choose, my lord archbishop. Three times round the mulberry bush …’

‘You see devils?’

She nods.

‘They appear how?’

‘Birds.’

‘A relief,’ Audley says drily.

‘No, sir. Lucifer stinks. His claws are deformed. He comes as a cockerel smeared in blood and shit.’

He looks up at Alice. He is ready to send her out. He thinks, what has been done to this woman?

Cranmer says, ‘That must be disagreeable for you. But it is a characteristic of devils, I understand, to show themselves in more than one way.’

‘Yes. They do it to deceive you. He comes as a young man.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Once he brought a woman. To my cell at night.’ She pauses. ‘Pawing her.’

Riche: ‘He is known to have no shame.’

‘No more than you.’

‘And what then, Dame Elizabeth? After the pawing?’

‘Pulled up her skirts.’

‘And she didn’t resist?’ Riche says. ‘You surprise me.’

Audley says, ‘Prince Lucifer, I don’t doubt he has a way with him.’

‘Before my eyes, he had to do with her, on my bed.’

Riche makes a note. ‘This woman, did you know her?’ No answer. ‘And the devil did not try the same with you? You can speak freely. It will not be held against you.’

‘He came to sweet-talk me. Swaggering in his blue silk coat, it’s the best he has. And new hose with diamonds down his legs.’

‘Diamonds down his legs,’ he says. ‘Now that must have been a temptation?’

She shakes her head.

‘But you are a fine young woman – good enough for any man, I’d say.’

She looks up; a flicker of a smile. ‘I am not for Master Lucifer.’

‘What did he say when you refused him?’

‘He asked me to marry him.’ Audley puts his head in his hands. ‘I said I was vowed to chastity.’

‘Was he not angry when you would not consent?’

‘Oh yes. He spat in my face.’

‘I would expect no better of him,’ Riche says.

‘I wiped his spit off with a napkin. It’s black. It has the stench of Hell.’

‘What is that like?’

‘Like something rotting.’

‘Where is it now, the napkin? I suppose you didn’t send it to the laundry?’

‘Dom Edward has it.’

‘Does he show it to people? For money?’

‘For offerings.’

‘For money.’

Cranmer takes his face from his hands. ‘Shall we pause?’

‘A quarter hour?’ Riche says.

Audley: ‘I told you he was young and hearty.’

‘Perhaps we will meet tomorrow,’ Cranmer says. ‘I need to pray. And a quarter of an hour will not do it.’

‘But tomorrow is Sunday,’ the nun says. ‘There was a man who went out hunting on a Sunday and he fell down a bottomless pit into Hell. Imagine that.’

‘How was it bottomless,’ Riche asks, ‘if Hell was there to receive him?’

‘I wish I were going hunting,’ Audley says. ‘Christ knows, I’d take a chance on it.’

Alice rises from her stool and signals for her escort. The Maid gets to her feet. She is smiling broadly. She has made the archbishop flinch, and himself grow cold, and the Solicitor General all but weep with her talk of scalded babies. She thinks she is winning; but she is losing, losing, losing all the time. Alice puts a gentle hand on her arm, but the Maid shakes it off.

Outside, Richard Riche says, ‘We should burn her.’

Cranmer says, ‘Much as we may mislike her talk of the late cardinal appearing to her, and devils in her bedchamber, she speaks in this way because she has been taught to ape the claims of certain nuns who have gone before her, nuns whom Rome is pleased to recognise as saints. I cannot convict them of heresy, retrospectively. Nor have I evidence to try her for heresy.’

‘Burned for treason, I meant.’

It is the woman’s penalty; where a man is half-hanged and castrated, then slowly gutted by the executioner.

He says, ‘There is no overt action. She has only expressed an intent.’

‘Intent to raise rebellion, to depose the king, should that not be treason? Words have been construed as treasons, there are precedents, you know them.’

‘I should be astonished,’ Audley says, ‘if they have escaped Cromwell’s attention.’

It is as if they can smell the devil’s spit; they are almost jostling each other to get into the air, which is mild, damp: a faint scent of leaves, a green-gold, rustling light. He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

‘I think new laws are needed,’ Riche says.

‘I have it in hand.’

‘And I think this woman is too leniently kept. We are too soft. We are just playing with her.’

Cranmer walks away, shoulders stooped, his trailing habit brushing up the leaves. Audley turns to him, bright and resolute, a man keen to change the subject. ‘So, the princess, you say she was well?’

The princess, unswaddled, had been placed on cushions at Anne’s feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature. It seems stories have been put about that Anne’s child was born with teeth, has six fingers on each hand, and is furred all over like a monkey, so her father has shown her off naked to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display in the hope of countering the rumours. The king has chosen Hatfield for her seat, and Anne says, ‘It seems to me waste might be saved, and the proper order of things asserted, if Spanish Mary’s household were broken up and she were to become a member of the household of the princess Elizabeth my daughter.’

‘In the capacity of …?’ The child is quiet; only, he notes, because she has crammed a fist into her maw, and is cannibalising herself.

‘In the capacity of my daughter’s servant. What else should she be? There can be no pretence at equality. Mary is a bastard.’

The brief respite is over; the princess sets up a screech that would bring out the dead. Anne’s glance slides away sideways, and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, and she leans down towards her daughter, but at once women swoop, flapping and bustling; the screaming creature is plucked up, wrapped up, swept away, and the queen’s eyes follow pitifully as the fruit of her womb exits, in procession. He says gently, ‘I think she was hungry.’

Saturday evening: supper at Austin Friars for Stephen Vaughan, so often in transit: William Butts, Hans, Kratzer, Call-Me Risley. Conversation is in various tongues and Rafe Sadler translates adroitly, smoothly, his head turning from side to side: high topics and low, statecraft and gossip, Zwingli’s theology, Cranmer’s wife. About the latter, it has not been possible to suppress the talk at the Steelyard and in the city; Vaughan says, ‘Can Henry know and not know?’

‘That is perfectly possible. He is a prince of very large capacities.’

Larger by the day, Wriothesley says, laughing; Dr Butts says, he is one of those men who must be active, and recently his leg is troubling him, that old injury; but think, is it likely that a man who has not spared himself on the hunting field and in the tilt yard should not get some injury by the time he is the king’s age? He is forty-three this year, you know, and I should be glad, Kratzer, to have your view on what the planets suggest, for the later years of a man whose chart is so dominated by air and fire; by the by, did I not always warn of his moon in Aries (rash and hasty planet) in the house of marriage?

He says, impatient, we heard very little about the Aries moon when he was settled with Katherine for twenty years. It is not the stars that make us, Dr Butts, it is circumstance and necessità, the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don’t you agree?

He beckons to Christophe to fill their glasses. They talk about the Mint, where Vaughan is to have a position; about Calais, where Honor Lisle seems more busy in affairs than her husband the Governor. He thinks about Guido Camillo in Paris, pacing and fretting between the wooden walls of his memory machine, while knowledge grows unseen and of itself in its cavities and concealed inner spaces. He thinks of the Holy Maid – by now established as not holy, and not a maid – no doubt at this moment sitting down to supper with his nieces. He thinks of his fellow interrogators: Cranmer on his knees in prayer, Sir Purse frowning over the day’s transcripts, Audley – what will the Lord Chancellor be doing? Polishing his chain of office, he decides. He thinks of saying to Vaughan, below the conversation, was there not a girl in your house called Jenneke? What happened to her? But Wriothesley breaks in on his train of thought. ‘When shall we see my master’s portrait? You have been at work on it a while, Hans, it is time it came home. We are keen to see what you have made of him.’

‘He is still busy with the French envoys,’ Kratzer says. ‘De Dinteville wants to take his picture home with him when he gets his recall …’

There is some laughter at the expense of the French ambassador, always doing his packing and having to undo it again, as his master commands him to stay where he is. ‘Anyway, I hope he does not take it too quick,’ Hans says, ‘because I mean to show it and get commissions off it. I want the king to see it, indeed I want to paint the king, do you think I can?’

‘I will ask him,’ he says easily. ‘Let me choose the time.’ He looks down the table to see Vaughan glow with pride, like Jupiter on a painted ceiling.

After they get up from the table his guests eat ginger comfits and candied fruits, and Kratzer makes some drawings. He draws the sun and the planets moving in their orbits according to the plan he has heard of from Father Copernicus. He shows how the world is turning on its axis, and nobody in the room denies it. Under your feet you can feel the tug and heft of it, the rocks groaning to tear away from their beds, the oceans tilting and slapping at their shores, the giddy lurch of Alpine passes, the forests of Germany ripping at their roots to be free. The world is not what it was when he and Vaughan were young, it is not what it was even in the cardinal’s day.

The company has left when his niece Alice comes in, past his watchmen, wrapped up in a cloak; she is escorted by Thomas Rotherham, one of his wards who lives in the house. ‘Never fear, sir,’ she says, ‘Jo is sitting up with Dame Elizabeth, and nothing gets by Jo.’

Does it not? That child perpetually in tears over her spoiled sewing? That grubby little girl sometimes found rolling under a table with a wet dog, or chasing a peddler down the street? ‘I would like to talk to you,’ Alice says, ‘if you have time for me?’ Of course, he says, taking her arm, folding her hand in his; Thomas Rotherham turns pale – which puzzles him – and slides away.

Alice sits down in his office. She yawns. ‘Excuse me – but she is hard work and the hours are long.’ She tucks a strand of hair into her hood. ‘She is ready to break,’ she says. ‘She is brave to your faces, but she cries at night, because she knows she is a fraud. And even while she is crying, she peeps under her eyelids to see what effect she is making.’

‘I want it over with now,’ he says. ‘For all the trouble she has caused, we do not find ourselves an edifying spectacle, three or four of us learned in the law and the scriptures, convening day after day to try to trip one chit of a girl.’

‘Why did you not bring her in before?’

‘I didn’t want her to shut the prophecy shop. I wanted to see who would come to her whistle. And Lady Exeter has, and Bishop Fisher. And a score of monks and foolish priests whose names I know, and a hundred perhaps whose names I don’t know yet.’

‘And will the king kill them all?’

‘Very few, I hope.’

‘You incline him to mercy?’

‘I incline him to patience.’

‘What will happen to her? Dame Eliza?’

‘We will frame charges.’

‘She will not go in a dungeon?’

‘No, I shall move the king to treat her with consideration, he is always – he is usually – respectful of any person in the religious life. But Alice,’ he sees that she is dissolving into tears, ‘I think this has all been too much for you.’

‘No, not at all. We are soldiers in your army.’

‘She has not been frightening you, talking about the devil’s wicked offers?’

‘No, it’s Thomas Rotherham’s offers … he wants to marry me.’

‘So that’s what’s wrong with him!’ He is amused. ‘Could he not ask himself?’

‘He thought you would look at him in that way you have … as if you were weighing him.’

Like a clipped coin? ‘Alice, he owns a fat slice of Bedfordshire, and his manors prosper very nicely since I have been looking after them. And if you like each other, how could I object? You are a clever girl, Alice. Your mother,’ he says softly, ‘and your father, they would be very pleased with you, if they were able to see.’

This is why Alice is crying. She must ask her uncle’s permission because this last year has left her orphaned. The day his sister Bet died, he was up-country with the king. Henry was receiving no messengers from London for fear of contagion, so she was dead and buried before he knew she was ill. When the news crept through at last, the king spoke to him with tenderness, a hand on his arm; he spoke of his own sister, the silver-haired lady like a princess in a book, removed from this life to gardens of Paradise, he had claimed, reserved for royal dead; for it is impossible, he had said, to think of that lady in any low place, any place of darkness, the barred charnel house of Purgatory with its flying cinders and sulphur reek, its boiling tar and roiling clouds of sleet.

‘Alice,’ he says, ‘dry your tears, find Thomas Rotherham, and end his pain. You need not come to Lambeth tomorrow. Jo can come, if she is as formidable as you say.’

Alice turns in the doorway. ‘I will see her again, though? Eliza Barton? I should like to see her before …’

Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just as well. Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.

He hears Alice running upstairs. He hears her calling, Thomas, Thomas … It is a name that will bring half the house out, tumbling from their bedside prayers, from their very beds: yes, are you looking for me? He pulls his furred gown around him and goes outside to look at the stars. The precincts of his house are kept well lit; the gardens by torchlight are the site of excavations, trenches dug out for foundations, earth banked up into barrows and mounds. The vast timber frame of a new wing juts against the sky; in the middle distance, his new planting, a city orchard where Gregory, one day, will pick the fruit, and Alice, and Alice’s sons. He has fruit trees already, but he wants cherries and plums like the ones he has eaten abroad, and late pears to use in the Tuscan fashion, to match their crisp metallic flesh with winter’s salt cod. Then next year he means to make another garden at the hunting lodge he has at Canonbury, make it a retreat from the city, a summer house in the fields. He has work in hand at Stepney too, expansion; John Williamson is looking after the builders for him. Strange, but like a miracle the family’s prosperity seems to have cured him of his killing cough. I like John Williamson, he thinks, why ever did I, with his wife … Beyond the gate, cries and shouts, London never still or quiet; so many in the graveyards, but the living parading in the streets, drunken fighters pitching from London Bridge, sanctuary men stealing out to thieve, Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.

He goes inside. His desk draws him back. In a small chest he keeps his wife’s book, her book of hours. Inside it are prayers on loose papers which she has inserted. Say the name of Christ a thousand times and it keeps fever away. But it doesn’t, does it? The fever comes anyway and kills you. Beside the name of her first husband, Thomas Williams, she has written his own name, but she never, he notices, crossed Tom Williams out. She has recorded the births of her children, and he has written in beside them the dates of his daughters’ deaths. He finds a space where he will note the marriages of his sisters’ children: Richard to Frances Murfyn, Alice to his ward.

He thinks, perhaps I have got over Liz. It didn’t seem possible that weight would ever shift from inside his chest, but it has lightened enough to let him get on with his life. I could marry again, he thinks, but is this not what people are always telling me? He says to himself, I never think of Johane Williamson now: not Johane as she was for me. Her body once had special meaning, but that meaning is now unmade; the flesh created beneath his fingertips, hallowed by desire, becomes just the ordinary substance of a city wife, a fading woman with no particular looks. He says to himself, I never think of Anselma now; she is just the woman in the tapestry, the woman in the weave.

He reaches for his pen. I have got over Liz, he says to himself. Surely? He hesitates, the quill in his hand, weighted by ink. He holds the pages down flat, and strikes out the name of her first husband. He thinks, I’ve meant to do that for years.

It is late. Upstairs he closes the shutter, where the moon gapes in hollow-eyed, like a drunk lost in the street. Christophe, folding garments, says, ‘Is there loups? In this kingdom?’

‘I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.’

Sunday: in rose-tinted light they set out from Austin Friars, his men in their new livery of grey marbled cloth collecting the party from the city house where the nun has been held. It would be convenient, he thinks, if I had Master Secretary’s barge, instead of making ad hoc arrangements when we have to cross the river. He has already heard Mass; Cranmer insists they all hear another. He watches the girl and sees her tears flow. Alice is right; she is at the end of her invention.

By nine o’clock she is unwinding the threads she has spent years ravelling up. She confesses in style, so hard and fast that Riche can hardly keep track, and she appeals to them as men of the world, as people with their way to make: ‘You know how it is. You mention something and people are at you, what do you mean, what do you mean? You say you’ve had a vision and they won’t leave you alone.’

‘You can’t disappoint people?’ he says; she agrees, that’s it, you can’t. Once you start you have to keep going. If you try to go back they’ll slaughter you.

She confesses that her visions are inventions. She never spoke to heavenly persons. Or raised the dead; that was all a fraud. She never had a hand in miracles. The letter from Mary Magdalene, Father Bocking wrote it, and a monk put gilding on the letters, in a minute she’ll think of his name. The angels came out of her own invention, she seemed to see them but she knows now that they were just flashes of light against the wall. The voices she heard were not their voices, they were not distinct voices at all, just the sounds of her sisters singing in the chapel, or a woman in the road crying because she has been beaten and robbed, or perhaps the meaningless clatter of dishes from the kitchen; and those groans and cries, that seemed to come from the throats of the damned, it was someone above scraping a trestle across the floor, it was the whimper of a lost dog. ‘I know now, sirs, that those saints were not real. Not in the way you are real.’

Something has broken inside her, and he wonders what that thing is.

She says, ‘Is there any chance I could go home again to Kent?’

‘I’ll see what can be arranged.’

Hugh Latimer is sitting with them, and he gives him a hard look, as if he’s making false promises. No, really, he says. Leave it with me.

Cranmer tells her gently, ‘Before you can go anywhere, it will be necessary for you to make public acknowledgement of your imposture. Public confession.’

‘She’s not shy of crowds, are you?’ These many years she’s been on the road, a travelling show, and will be again, though now the nature of the show has changed; he means to display her, repentant, at Paul’s Cross, and perhaps outside London too. He feels that she will take to the role of fraud, with the same relish with which she took to her role as saint.

He says to Riche, Niccolò tells us unarmed prophets always fail. He smiles and says, I mention this, Ricardo, because I know you like to have it by the book.

Cranmer leans forward and says to the Maid, these men about you, Edward Bocking and the rest, which of them were your lovers?

She is shocked: perhaps because the question has come from him, the sweetest of her interrogators. She just stares at him, as if one of them were stupid.

He says, murmuring, she may think lovers is not the word.

Enough. To Audley, to Latimer, to Riche, he says, ‘I shall begin bringing in her followers, and her leaders. She has ruined many, if we care to press for their ruin. Fisher certainly, Margaret Pole perhaps, Gertrude and her husband for sure. Lady Mary the king’s daughter, quite possibly. Thomas More no, Katherine no, but a fat haul of Franciscans.’

The court rises, if court is what you call it. Jo stands up. She has been sewing – or rather, unsewing, teasing out the pomegranate border from a crewel-work panel – these remnants of Katherine, of the dusty kingdom of Granada, linger in England still. She folds her work, dropping her scissors into her pocket, pinching up her sleeve and feeding her needle into the fabric for later use. She walks up to the prisoner and puts a hand on her arm. ‘We must say adieu.’

‘William Hawkhurst,’ the girl says, ‘I remember the name now. The monk who gilded the letter from Mary Magdalene.’

Richard Riche makes a note.

‘Do not say any more today,’ Jo advises.

‘Will you come with me, mistress? Where I am going?’ ‘Nobody will come with you,’ Jo says. ‘I do not think you have the sense of it, Dame Eliza. You are going to the Tower, and I am going home to my dinner.’

This summer of 1533 has been a summer of cloudless days, of strawberry feasts in London gardens, the drone of fumbling bees, warm evenings to stroll under rose arbours and hear from the allées the sound of young gentlemen quarrelling over their bowls. The grain harvest is abundant even in the north. The trees are bowed under the weight of ripening fruit. As if he has decreed that the heat must continue, the king’s court burns bright through the autumn. Monseigneur the queen’s father shines like the sun, and around him spins a smaller but still blazing noonday planet, his son George Rochford. But it is Brandon who leads the dancing, galloping through the halls towing his new bride, whose age is fourteen. She is an heiress, and was betrothed to his son, but Charles thought an experienced man like him could turn her to better use.

The Seymours have put their family scandal behind them, and their fortunes are mending. Jane Seymour says to him, looking at her feet, ‘Master Cromwell, my brother Edward smiled last week.’

‘That was rash of him, what made him do so?’

‘He heard his wife is sick. The wife he used to have. The one that my father, you know.’

‘Is she likely to die?’

‘Oh, very likely. Then he will get a new one. But he will keep her at his house in Elvetham, and never let her come within a mile of Wolf Hall. And when my father visits Elvetham, she will be locked in the linen room till he has gone again.’

Jane’s sister Lizzie is at court with her husband, the Governor of Jersey, who is some connection of the new queen’s. Lizzie comes packaged into her velvet and lace, her outlines as firm as her sister’s are indefinite and blurred, her eyes bold and hazel and eloquent. Jane whispers in her wake; her eyes are the colour of water, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too small for hook or net.

It is Jane Rochford – whose mind, in his view, is underoccupied – who sees him watching the sisters. ‘Lizzie Seymour must have a lover,’ she says, ‘it cannot be her husband who puts that glow in her cheeks, he is an old man. He was old when he was in the Scots wars.’ The two sisters are just a little alike, she points out; they have the same habit of dipping their head and drawing in their underlip. ‘Otherwise,’ she says, smirking, ‘you would think their mother had been up to the same tricks as her husband. She was a beauty in her day, you know, Margery Wentworth. And nobody knows what goes on down in Wiltshire.’

‘I’m surprised you don’t, Lady Rochford. You seem to know everyone’s business.’

‘You and me, we keep our eyes open.’ She lowers her head, and says, as if directing the words inward, to her own body, ‘I could keep my eyes open, if you like, in places you cannot go.’

Dear God, what does she want? It can’t be money, surely? The question comes out colder than he means: ‘Upon what possible inducement?’

She lifts her eyes to his. ‘I should like your friendship.’

‘No conditions attach to that.’

‘I thought I might help you. Because your ally Lady Carey has gone down to Hever now to see her daughter. She is no longer wanted since Anne is back on duty in the bedchamber. Poor Mary.’ She laughs. ‘God dealt her a good enough hand but she never knew how to play it. Tell me, what will you do if the queen does not have another child?’

‘There is no reason to fear it. Her mother had a child a year. Boleyn used to complain it kept him poor.’

‘Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife?

And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.’

‘It’s the same in the gospels. The stony ground gets the blame.’

The stony places, the thorny unprofitable waste. Jane Rochford is childless after seven years of marriage. ‘I believe my husband wishes I would die.’ She says it lightly. He does not know how to answer. He has not asked for her confidence. ‘If I do die,’ she says, in the same bright tone, ‘have my body opened. I ask you this in friendship. I am afraid of poison. My husband and his sister are closeted together for hours, and Anne knows all manner of poisons. She has boasted that she will give Mary a breakfast she will not recover from.’ He waits. ‘Mary the king’s daughter, I mean. Though I am sure if it pleased Anne she would not scruple to make away with her own sister.’ She glances up again. ‘In your heart, if you are honest, you would like to know the things I know.’

She is lonely, he thinks, and breeding a savage heart, like Leontina in her cage. She imagines everything is about her, every glance or secret conversation. She is afraid the other women pity her, and she hates to be pitied. He says, ‘What do you know of my heart?’

‘I know where you have disposed it.’

‘It is more than I know myself.’

‘That is not uncommon among men. I can tell you who you love. Why do you not ask for her, if you want her? The Seymours are not rich. They will sell you Jane, and be glad of the bargain.’

‘You are mistaken in the nature of my interest. I have young gentlemen in my house, I have wards, their marriages are my business.’

‘Oh, fal la la,’ she says. ‘Sing another song. Tell it to infants in the nursery. Tell it to the House of Commons, you do most usually lie to them. But do not think you can deceive me.’

‘For a lady who offers friendship, you have rough manners.’

‘Get used to them, if you want my information. You go into Anne’s rooms now, and what do you see? The queen at her priedieu. The queen sewing a smock for a beggar woman, wearing pearls the size of chickpeas.’

It is hard not to smile. The portrait is exact. Anne has Cranmer entranced. He thinks her the pattern of pious womanhood.

‘So do you imagine that is what is really going on? Do you imagine she has given up communing with nimble young gentlemen? Riddles and verses and songs in praise of her, do you suppose she has given them up?’

‘She has the king to praise her.’

‘Not a good word will she hear from that quarter till her belly is big again.’

‘And what will hinder that?’

‘Nothing. If he is up to it.’

‘Be careful.’ He smiles.

‘I never knew it was treason to say what passes in a prince’s bed. All Europe talked about Katherine, what body part was put where, was she penetrated, and if she was did she know?’ She sniggers. ‘Harry’s leg pains him at night. He is afraid the queen will kick him in the throes of her passion.’ She puts her hand before her mouth, but the words creep out, narrow between her fingers. ‘But if she lies still under him he says, what, madam, are you so little interested in making my heir?’

‘I do not see what she is to do.’

‘She says she gets no pleasure with him. And he – as he fought seven years to get her, he can hardly admit it has staled so soon. It was stale before they came from Calais, that is what I think.’

It’s possible; maybe they were battle-weary, exhausted. Yet he gives her such magnificent presents. And they quarrel so much. Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?

‘So,’ she goes on, ‘between the kicking and the sore leg, and his lack of prowess, and her lack of desire, it will be a wonder if we ever have a Prince of Wales. Oh, he is good man enough, if he had a new woman each week. If he craves novelty, who is to say she does not? Her own brother is in her service.’

He turns to look at her. ‘God help you, Lady Rochford,’ he says.

‘To fetch his friends her way, I mean. What did you think I meant?’ A little, grating laugh.

‘Do you know what you mean yourself? You have been at court long enough, you know what games are played. It is no matter if any lady receives verses and compliments, even though she is married. She knows her husband writes verses elsewhere.’

‘Oh, she knows that. At least, I know. There is not a minx within thirty miles who has not had a set of Rochford’s verses. But if you think the gallantry stops at the bedchamber’s door, you are more innocent than I took you for. You may be in love with Seymour’s daughter, but you need not emulate her in having the wit of a sheep.’

He smiles. ‘Sheep are maligned in that way. Shepherds say they can recognise each other. They answer to their names. They make friends for life.’

‘And I will tell you who is in and out of everyone’s bedchamber, it is that sneaking little boy Mark. He is the go-between for them all. My husband pays him in pearl buttons and comfit boxes and feathers for his hat.’

‘Why, is Lord Rochford short of ready money?’

‘You see an opportunity for usury?’

‘How not?’ At least, he thinks, there is one point on which we concur: pointless dislike of Mark. In Wolsey’s house he had duties, teaching the choir children. Here he does nothing but stand about, wherever the court is, in greater or lesser proximity to the queen’s apartments. ‘Well, I can see no harm in the boy,’ he says.

‘He sticks like a burr to his betters. He does not know his place. He is a jumped-up nobody, taking his chance because the times are disordered.’

‘I suppose you could say the same of me, Lady Rochford. And I am sure you do.’

Thomas Wyatt brings him baskets of cobnuts and filberts, bushels of Kentish apples, jolting up himself to Austin Friars on the carrier’s cart. ‘The venison follows,’ he says, jumping down. ‘I come with the fresh fruit, not the carcases.’ His hair smells of apples, his clothes are dusty from the road. ‘Now you will have words with me,’ he says, ‘for risking a doublet worth –’

‘The carrier’s yearly earnings.’

Wyatt looks chastened. ‘I forget you are my father.’

‘I have rebuked you, so now we can fall to idle boyish talk.’ Standing in a wash of chary autumn sun, he holds an apple in his hand. He pares it with a thin blade, and the peel whispers away from the flesh and lies among his papers, like the shadow of an apple, green on white paper and black ink. ‘Did you see Lady Carey when you were in the country?’

‘Mary Boleyn in the country. What dew-fresh pleasures spring to mind. I expect she’s rutting in some hayloft.’

‘Just that I want to keep hold of her, for the next time her sister is hors de combat.’

Wyatt sits down amid the files, an apple in his hand. ‘Cromwell, suppose you’d been away from England for seven years? If you’d been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?’

This summer, Wyatt vowed, he would stay down in Kent. He would read and write on wet days, hunt when it is fine. But the fall comes, and the nights deepen, and Anne draws him back and back. His heart is true, he believes: and if she is false, it is difficult to pick where the falsehood lies. You cannot joke with Anne these days. You cannot laugh. You must think her perfect, or she will find some way to punish you.

‘My old father talks about King Edward’s days. He says, you see now why it’s not good for the king to marry a subject, an Englishwoman?’

The trouble is, though Anne has remade the court, there are still people who knew her before, in the days when she came from France, when she set herself to seduce Harry Percy. They compete to tell stories of how she is not worthy. Or not human. How she is a snake. Or a swan. Una candida cerva. One single white doe, concealed in leaves of silver-grey; shivering, she hides in the trees, waiting for the lover who will turn her back from animal to goddess. ‘Send me back to Italy,’ Wyatt says. Her dark, her lustrous, her slanting eyes: she haunts me. She comes to me in my solitary bed at night.

‘Solitary? I don’t think so.’

Wyatt laughs. ‘You’re right. I take it where I can.’

‘You drink too much. Water your wine.’

‘It could have been different.’

‘Everything could.’

‘You never think about the past.’

‘I never talk about it.’

Wyatt pleads, ‘Send me away somewhere.’

‘I will. When the king needs an ambassador.’

‘Is it true that the Medici have offered for the Princess Mary’s hand?’

‘Not Princess Mary, you mean the Lady Mary. I have asked the king to think about it. But they are not grand enough for him. You know, if Gregory showed any interest in banking, I would look for a bride for him in Florence. It would be pleasant to have an Italian girl in the house.’

‘Send me back there. Deploy me where I can be useful, to you or the king, as here I am useless and worse than useless to myself, and necessary to no one’s pleasure.’

He says, ‘Oh, by the bleached bones of Becket. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

Norfolk has his own view of the queen’s friends. He rattles a little while he expresses it, his relics clinking, his grey disordered eyebrows working over wide-open eyes. These men, he says, these men who hang around with women! Norris, I thought better of him! And Henry Wyatt’s son! Writing verse. Singing. Talk-talk-talking. ‘What’s the use of talking to women?’ he asks earnestly. ‘Cromwell, you don’t talk to women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic? What would you find to say?’

I’ll speak to Norfolk, he decides when he comes back from France; ask him to incline Anne to caution. The French are meeting the Pope in Marseilles, and in default of his own attendance Henry must be represented by his most senior peer. Gardiner is already there. For me every day is like a holiday, he says to Tom Wyatt, when those two are away.

Wyatt says, ‘I think Henry may have a new interest by then.’

In the days following he follows Henry’s eyes, as they rest on various ladies of the court. Nothing in them, perhaps, except the speculative interest of any man; it’s only Cranmer who thinks that if you look twice at a woman you have to marry her. He watches the king dancing with Lizzie Seymour, his hand lingering on her waist. He sees Anne watching, her expression cold, pinched.

Next day, he lends Edward Seymour some money on very favourable terms.

In the damp autumn mornings, when it is still half-light, his household are out early, in the damp and dripping woods. You don’t get torta di funghi unless you pick the raw ingredients.

Richard Riche arrives at eight o’clock, his face astonished and alarmed. ‘They stopped me at your gate, sir, and said, where’s your bag of mushrooms? No one comes in here without mushrooms.’ Riche’s dignity is affronted. ‘I don’t think they would have asked the Lord Chancellor for mushrooms.’

‘Oh, they would, Richard. But in an hour you will eat them with eggs baked in cream, and the Lord Chancellor will not. Shall we get down to work?’

Through September he has been rounding up the priests and monks who have been close to the Maid. He and Sir Purse sift the papers and conduct the interrogations. The clerics are no sooner under lock and key than they begin to deny her, and deny each other: I never believed in her, it was Father So-and-So who convinced me, I never wanted any trouble. As for their contacts with Exeter’s wife, with Katherine, with Mary – each disclaims his own involvement and rushes to implicate his brother-in-Christ. The Maid’s people have been in constant contact with the Exeter household. She herself has been at many of the chief monastic houses of the realm – Syon Abbey, the Charterhouse at Sheen, the Franciscan house at Richmond. He knows this because he has many contacts among disaffected monks. In every house there are a few, and he seeks out the most intelligent. Katherine herself has not met the nun. Why should she? She has Fisher to act as a go-between, and Gertrude, Lord Exeter’s wife.

The king says, ‘It is hard for me to believe Henry Courtenay would betray me. A Garter knight, a great man in the lists, my friend since I was a boy. Wolsey tried to part us, but I wouldn’t have it.’ He laughs. ‘Brandon, do you remember Greenwich, that Christmas, which year was it? Remember the snowball fight?’

This is the whole difficulty of dealing with them, men who are always talking about ancient pedigrees, and boyhood friendships, and things that happened when you were still trading wool on the Antwerp exchange. You put the evidence under their noses, and they start getting teary over snowball fights. ‘Look,’ Henry says, ‘it is Courtenay’s wife that is to blame. When he knows the whole of her practices he will want to be rid of her. She is fickle and weak like all her sex, easily led into scheming.’

‘So forgive her,’ he says. ‘Write her a pardon. Put these people under a debt of gratitude to you, if you want them to leave off their foolish sentiment towards Katherine.’

‘You think you can buy hearts?’ Charles Brandon says. He sounds as if he would be sad if the answer were yes.

He thinks, the heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale. ‘It is not a price in money we are offering. I have enough to put the Courtenay family on trial, all Exeter’s people. If we forbear to do it, we are offering their freedom and their lands. We are giving them a chance to recoup the honour of their name.’

Henry says, ‘His grandfather left Crookback for my father’s service.’

‘If we forgive them they will play us for fools,’ Charles says.

‘I think not, my lord. Everything they do from now on, they do under my eye.’

‘And the Poles, Lord Montague: what do you propose there?’

‘He should not assume he will be pardoned.’

‘Make him sweat, eh?’ Charles says. ‘I am not sure I like your way of dealing with noblemen.’

‘They get their deserts,’ the king says. ‘Hush, my lord, I need to think.’

A pause. Brandon’s position is too complicated for him to sustain. He wants to say, pay them out as traitors, Cromwell: but mind you butcher them respectfully. Suddenly his face clears. ‘Ah, now I remember Greenwich. The snow was knee-deep that year. Ah, we were young then, Harry. You don’t get snow any more, like you did when we were young.’

He gathers up his papers and begs to be excused. Reminiscence is setting in for the afternoon and there is work to be done. ‘Rafe, ride over to West Horsley. Tell Exeter’s wife the king thinks all women fickle and weak – though I should have thought he has plenty of evidence to the contrary. Tell her to set down in writing that she has not the wit of a flea. Tell her to claim she is exceptionally easy to mislead, even for a woman. Tell her to grovel. Advise her on the wording. You know how to do it. Nothing can be too humble for Henry.’

This is the season for humility. The word from the talks in Marseilles is that King Francis has fallen at the Pope’s feet and kissed his slippers. When the news comes, Henry bellows an obscenity and shreds the dispatch in his hands.

He collects up the pieces, lays it out on a table and reads it. ‘Francis has kept faith with you after all,’ he says. ‘Surprisingly.’ He has persuaded the Pope to suspend his bull of excommunication. England has a breathing space.

‘I wish Pope Clement in his grave,’ Henry says. ‘God knows he is a man of filthy life, and he is always ailing, so he ought to die. Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I pray that Katherine might be translated into glory. Is that wrong?’

‘If you snap your fingers, Majesty, a hundred priests will come running to tell you right from wrong.’

‘It seems I prefer to hear it from you.’ Henry broods, in a sulky twitching silence. ‘If Clement dies, who will be the next rogue in office?’

‘I’ve put my money on Alessandro Farnese.’

‘Really?’ Henry sits up. ‘One lays bets?’

‘But the odds are short. He has thrown about such bribes to the Roman mob all these years, that they will put the cardinals in terror when the time comes.’

‘Remind me how many children has he.’

‘Four I know of.’

The king is looking into the tapestry on the near wall, where white-shouldered women walk barefoot on a carpet of spring flowers. ‘I may have another child soon.’

‘The queen has spoken to you?’

‘Not yet.’ But he sees, we all do, the flare of colour in Anne’s cheeks, the silk sleekness of her person, the tone of command ringing in her voice as she hands out favours and rewards to the people around her. This last week, there are more rewards than black looks, and Stephen Vaughan’s wife, who is in the Bedchamber, says she has missed her courses. The king says, ‘She has missed her …’ and then he stops, blushing like a schoolboy. He crosses the room, flings open his arms and embraces him, shining like a star, his great hands with their blazing rings seizing hand-fuls of the black velvet of his jacket. ‘This time for sure. England is ours.’

Archaic, that cry from his heart: as if he were standing on the battlefield between the bloodied banners, the crown in a thorn bush, his enemies dead at his feet.

He disengages himself gently, smiling. He uncrumples the memorandum he had clenched in his fist when the king seized him; because is that not how men embrace, they knead each other with big fists, as if to knock each other down? Henry squeezes his arm and says, ‘Thomas, it is like hugging a sea wall. What are you made of?’ He takes the paper. He gapes. ‘Is this what we must do this morning? This list?’

‘Not more than fifty items. We shall soon work through.’

For the rest of the day he cannot stop smiling. Who cares for Clement and his bulls? He might as well stand on Cheap and let the populace pelt him. He might as well stand under the Christmas garlands – which we dust with flour in years when there is no snow – and sing, ‘Hey nonny no, Fa-la-la, Under the trees so green-o.’

On a cold day towards the end of November the Maid and half a dozen of her principal supporters do penance at Paul’s Cross. They stand shackled and barefoot in a whipping wind. The crowd is large and boisterous, the sermon lively, telling what the Maid did on her night walks when her sisters in religion were sleeping, and what lurid tales of devils she told to keep her followers in awe. Her confession is read out, at the end of which she asks the Londoners to pray for her, and begs for the king’s mercy.

You wouldn’t know her now, for the bonny girl they had at Lambeth. She looks haggard and ten years older. Not that she has been hurt, he would not countenance that for a woman, and in fact they have all talked without duress; the hard thing has been to stop them complicating the story by rumours and fantasies, so that half England is dragged into it. The one priest who had persistently lied, he had simply locked up with an informer; the man was detained for murder, and in no time at all Father Rich had set about saving his soul and interpreting to him the Maid’s prophecies and impressing him with the names of important people he knew at court. Pitiful, really. But it has been necessary to put on this show, and next he will take it to Canterbury, so Dame Elizabeth can confess on her home ground. It is necessary to break the hold of these people who talk of the end times and threaten us with plagues and damnation. It is necessary to dispel the terror they create.

Thomas More is there, jostled among the city dignitaries; he is making towards him now, as the preachers step down and the prisoners are being led from the platform. More rubs his cold hands. He blows on them. ‘Her crime is, she was made use of.’

He thinks, why did Alice let you out without your gloves? ‘For all the testimony I have got,’ he says, ‘I still cannot understand how she arrived here, from the edge of the marshes to a public scaffold at Paul’s. For sure she made no money out of it.’

‘How will you frame the charges?’ His tone is neutral, interested, lawyer-to-lawyer.

‘The common law does not deal with women who say they can fly, or raise the dead. I shall put an act of attainder into Parliament. Treason charges for the principals. The accessories, life imprisonment, confiscation, fines. The king will be circumspect, I think. Even merciful. I am more interested in unravelling the plans of these people than in exacting penalties. I don’t want a trial with scores of defendants and hundreds of witnesses, tying the courts up for years.’

More hesitates.

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘you would have seen them off that way yourself, when you were Chancellor.’

‘You may be right. I am clear anyway.’ A pause. More says, ‘Thomas. In the name of Christ, you know that.’

‘As long as the king knows it. We must keep it firmly in his mind. A letter from you perhaps, enquiring after the princess Elizabeth.’

‘I can do that.’

‘Making it plain you accept her rights and title.’

‘That is not a difficulty. The new marriage is made and must be accepted.’

‘You don’t think you could bring yourself to praise it?’

‘Why does the king want other men to praise his wife?’

‘Suppose you were to write an open letter. To say that you have seen the light in the matter of the king’s natural jurisdiction over the church.’ He looks across to where the prisoners are being loaded into the waiting carts. ‘They are taking them back to the Tower now.’ He pauses. ‘You mustn’t stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’

‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.’

He watches him melt into the crowd of home-going aldermen. He thinks, More is too proud to retreat from his position. He is afraid to lose his credibility with the scholars in Europe. We must find some way for him to do it, that doesn’t depend on abjection. The sky has cleared now, to a flawless lapis blue. The London gardens are bright with berries. There is an obdurate winter ahead. But he feels a force ready to break, as spring breaks from the dead tree. As the word of God spreads, the people’s eyes are opened to new truths. Until now, like Helen Barre, they knew Noah and the Flood, but not St Paul. They could count over the sorrows of our Blessed Mother, and say how the damned are carried down to Hell. But they did not know the manifold miracles and sayings of Christ, nor the words and deeds of the apostles, simple men who, like the poor of London, pursued simple wordless trades. The story is much bigger than they ever thought it was. He says to his nephew Richard, you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose. They have seen their religion painted on the walls of churches, or carved in stone, but now God’s pen is poised, and he is ready to write his words in the books of their hearts.

But in these same streets Chapuys sees the stirrings of sedition, a city ready to open its gates to the Emperor. He was not at the sack of Rome but there are nights when he dreams of it as if he had been there: the black guts spilled on antique pavements, the half-dead draped in the fountains, the chiming of bells through the marsh fog, and the flames of arsonists’ torches leaping along the walls. Rome has fallen and everything within it; it was not invaders but Pope Julius himself who knocked down old St Peter’s, which had stood for twelve hundred years, the site where the Emperor Constantine himself had dug the first trench, twelve scoops of soil, one for each of the apostles; where the Christian martyrs, sewn into the skins of wild beasts, had been torn apart by dogs. Twenty-five feet he dug down to lay his new foundations, through a necropolis, through twelve centuries of fishbones and ash, his workmen’s shovels powdering the skulls of saints. In the place where martyrs had bled, ghost-white boulders stood: marble, waiting for Michelangelo.

In the street he sees a priest carrying the host, no doubt to a dying Londoner; the passers-by uncover their heads and kneel, but a boy leans out of an upper window and jeers, ‘Show us your Christ-is-Risen. Show us your Jack-in-the-Box.’ He glances up; the boy’s face, before it vanishes, is vivid with rage.

He says to Cranmer, these people want a good authority, one they can properly obey. For centuries Rome has asked them to believe what only children could believe. Surely they will find it more natural to obey an English king, who will exercise his powers under Parliament and under God.

Two days after he sees More shivering at the sermon, he conveys a pardon to Lady Exeter. It comes with some blistering words from the king, directed to her husband. It is St Catherine’s Day: in honour of the saint who was threatened with martyrdom on a wheel, we all walk in circles to our destination. At least, that’s the theory. He has never seen anyone over the age of twelve actually doing it.

There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

Next day, at Hampton Court, the king’s son the Duke of Richmond marries Norfolk’s daughter Mary. Anne has arranged this marriage for the glorification of the Howards; also, to stop Henry marrying his bastard, to the boy’s advantage, to some princess abroad. She has persuaded the king to waive the magnificent dower payment he would have expected and, triumphant in all her designs, she joins the dancing, her thin face flushed, her shining hair braided with dagger-tips of diamonds. Henry cannot take his eyes off her, and nor can he.

Richmond draws to him all other eyes, gambolling like a colt, showing off his wedding finery, turning, leaping, bouncing and strutting. Look at him, the older ladies say, and you will see how his father was once: that perfect glow, skin as thin as a girl’s. ‘Master Cromwell,’ he demands, ‘tell the king my father that I want to live with my wife. He says that I am to go back to my household and Mary is to stay with the queen.’

‘He has a care for your health, my lord.’

‘I am fifteen next.’

‘It wants half a year till your birthday.’

The boy’s blithe expression vanishes; a stony look takes over his face. ‘Half a year is nothing. A man of fifteen is competent.’

‘So we hear,’ Lady Rochford says, standing idly by. ‘The king your father brought witnesses to court to say his brother could do the deed at fifteen, and more than once a night.’

‘It is also your bride’s health that we need to think of.’

‘Brandon’s wife is younger than mine, and he has her.’

‘Every time he sees her,’ Lady Rochford says, ‘if I judge by the startled expression on her face.’

Richmond is digging himself in for a long argument, entrenching himself behind precedent: it is his father’s way of arguing. ‘Did not my great-grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, give birth at thirteen years, to the prince who would be Henry Tudor?’

Bosworth, the tattered standards, the bloody field; the stained sheet of maternity. Where do we all come from, he thinks, but this same hole and corner dealing: sweetheart, yield to me. ‘I never heard it improved her health,’ he says, ‘or her temper. She had no children after.’ Suddenly he is tired of the argument; he cuts it short, his voice tired and flat. ‘Be reasonable, my lord. Once you’ve done it, you’ll want to do it all the time. For about three years. That’s the way it goes. And your father has other work in mind for you. He may send you to hold court in Dublin.’

Jane Rochford says, ‘Be easy, my lamb. There are ways that can be contrived. A man may always meet a woman, if she is willing.’

‘May I speak as your friend, Lady Rochford? You risk the king’s displeasure if you meddle in this.’

‘Oh,’ she says easily, ‘Henry will forgive anything to a pretty woman. They only seek to do what is natural.’

The boy says, ‘Why should I live like a monk?’

‘A monk? They go to it like goats. Master Cromwell here will tell you.’

‘Perhaps,’ Richmond says, ‘it is madam the queen who wants to keep us apart. She doesn’t mean the king to have a grandson in the cradle, before he has a son of his own.’

‘But do you not know?’ Jane Rochford turns to him. ‘Has it not reached your ears that La Ana is enceinte?’

She gives her the name Chapuys gives her. He sees the boy’s face open in blank dismay. Jane says, ‘I fear by summer you will have lost your place, sweetheart. Once he has a son born in wedlock, you may tup to your heart’s content. You will never reign, and your offspring will never inherit.’

It isn’t often that you see a princeling’s hopes destroyed, in the instant it takes to pinch out a candle flame: and with the same calculated movement, as if born of the neatness of habit. She has not even licked her fingers.

Richmond says, his face crumpling, ‘It may be another girl.’

‘It is almost treason to hope so,’ Lady Rochford says. ‘And if it is, she will have a third child, and a fourth. I thought she would not conceive again but I was wrong, Master Cromwell. She has proved herself now.’

Cranmer is in Canterbury, walking on a path of sand barefoot to his enthronement as primate of England. The ceremony done, he is sweeping out the priory of Christ Church, whose members gave so much encouragement to the false prophetess. It could be a long job, interviewing each monk, picking their stories apart. Rowland Lee storms into town to put some brawn into the business, and Gregory is in his train; so he sits in London reading a letter from his son, no longer nor more informative than his schoolboy letters: And now no more for lack of time.

He writes to Cranmer, be merciful to the community there, as nothing worse than misled. Spare the monk who gilded the Magdalene’s letter. I suggest they give a present in cash to the king, three hundred pounds will please him. Clean out Christ Church and the whole diocese; Warham was archbishop for thirty years, his family are entrenched, his bastard son is archdeacon, take a new broom to them. Put in people from home: your sad east Midlands clerks, formed under sober skies.

There is something beneath his desk, under his foot, the nature of which he has avoided thinking about. He pushes his chair back; it is half a shrew, a gift from Marlinspike. He picks it up and thinks of Henry Wyatt, eating vermin in his cell. He thinks of the cardinal, resplendent at Cardinal College. He throws the shrew on the fire. The corpse fizzes and shrivels, bones gone with an empty little pop. He picks up his pen and writes to Cranmer, shake out those Oxford men from your diocese, and put in Cambridge men we know.

He writes to his son, come home and spend the new year with us.

December: in her frozen angularity, a blue light behind her cast up from the snow, Margaret Pole looks as if she has stepped from a church window, slivers of glass shaking from her gown; in fact, those splinters are diamonds. He has made her come to him, the countess, and now she looks at him from beneath her heavy lids, she looks at him down her long Plantagenet nose, and her greeting, ice-bright, flies out into the room. ‘Cromwell.’ Just that.

She comes to business. ‘The Princess Mary. Why must she quit the house in Essex?’

‘My lord Rochford wants it for his use. It’s good hunting country, you see. Mary is to join her royal sister’s household, at Hatfield. She will not need her own attendants there.’

‘I offer to support my place in her household at my own expense. You cannot prevent me from serving her.’

Try me. ‘I am only the minister of the king’s wishes, and you, I suppose, are as anxious as I am to carry them out.’

‘These are the wishes of the concubine. We do not believe, the princess and I, that they are the king’s own wishes.’

‘You must stretch your credulity, madam.’

She looks down at him from her plinth: she is Clarence’s daughter, old King Edward’s niece. In her time, men like him knelt down to speak to women like her. ‘I was in Katherine the queen’s suite on the day she was married. To the princess, I stand as a second mother.’

‘Blood of Christ, madam, you think she needs a second? The one she has will kill her.’

They stare at each other, across an abyss. ‘Lady Margaret, if I may advise you … your family’s loyalty is suspect.’

‘So you say. This is why you are parting me from Mary, as punishment. If you have matter enough to indict me, then send me to the Tower with Elizabeth Barton.’

‘That would be much against the king’s wishes. He reveres you, madam. Your ancestry, your great age.’

‘He has no evidence.’

‘In June last year, just after the queen was crowned, your son Lord Montague and your son Geoffrey Pole dined with Lady Mary. Then a scant two weeks later, Montague dined with her again. I wonder what they discussed?’

‘Do you really?’

‘No,’ he says, smiling. ‘The boy who carried in the dish of asparagus, that was my boy. The boy who sliced the apricots was mine too. They talked about the Emperor, about the invasion, how he might be brought to it. So you see, Lady Margaret, all your family owes much to my forbearance. I trust they will repay the king with future loyalty.’

He does not say, I mean to use your sons against their trouble-making brother abroad. He does not say, I have your son Geoffrey on my payroll. Geoffrey Pole is a violent, unstable man. You do not know how he will turn. He has paid him forty pounds this year to turn the Cromwell way.

The countess curls her lip. ‘The princess will not leave her home quietly.’

‘My lord of Norfolk intends to ride to Beaulieu, to tell her of the change in her circumstances. She may defy him, of course.’

He had advised the king, leave Mary in possession of her style as princess, do not diminish anything. Do not give her cousin the Emperor a reason to make war.

Henry had shouted, ‘Will you go to the queen, and suggest to her that Mary keep her title? For I tell you, Master Cromwell, I am not going to do it. And if you put her in a great passion, as you will, and she falls ill and miscarries her child, you will be responsible! And I shall not incline to mercy!’

Outside the door of the presence chamber, he leans on the wall. He rolls his eyes and says to Rafe, ‘God in Heaven, no wonder the cardinal was old before his time. If he thinks her pique will dislodge it, it cannot be stuck very fast. Last week I was his brother-in-arms, this week he is threatening me with a bloody end.’

Rafe says, ‘It is a good thing you are not like the cardinal.’

Indeed. The cardinal expected the gratitude of his prince, in which matter he was bound to be disappointed. For all his capacities he was a man whose emotions would master him and wear him out. He, Cromwell, is no longer subject to vagaries of temperament, and he is almost never tired. Obstacles will be removed, tempers will be soothed, knots unknotted. Here at the close of the year 1533, his spirit is sturdy, his will strong, his front imperturbable. The courtiers see that he can shape events, mould them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world.

By way of recreation at the end of the day, he is looking into Katherine’s land holdings and judging what he can redistribute. Sir Nicholas Carew, who does not like him and does not like Anne, is amazed to receive from him a package of grants, including two fat Surrey manors to adjoin his existing holdings in the county. He seeks an interview to express his thanks; he has to ask Richard, who keeps the Cromwell diary now, and Richard fits him in after two days. As the cardinal used to say, deference means making people wait.

When Carew comes in he is arranging his face. Chilly, self-absorbed, the complete courtier, he works at turning up the corners of his mouth. The result is a maidenly simper, incongruous above a luxuriant beard.

‘Oh, I am sure you are deserving,’ he says, shrugging it off. ‘You are a boyhood friend of His Majesty and nothing gives him greater pleasure than to reward his old friends. Your wife is in touch with the Lady Mary, is she not? They are close? Ask her,’ he says gently, ‘to give the young woman good advice. Warn her to be conformable to the king in all things. His temper is short these days and I cannot answer for the consequences of defiance.’

Deuteronomy tells us, gifts blind the eyes of the wise. Carew is not particularly wise, in his opinion, but the principle holds good; and if not exactly blinded, at least he looks dazed. ‘Call it an early Christmas present,’ he tells him, smiling. He pushes the papers across his desk.

At Austin Friars they are cleaning out store rooms and building strong rooms. They will keep the feast at Stepney. The angel’s wings are moved there; he wants to keep them, till there is another child in the house of the right size. He sees them going, shivering in their shroud of fine linen, and watches the Christmas star loaded on to a cart. Christophe asks, ‘How would one work it, that savage machine that is all over points?’

He draws off one of the canvas sleeves, shows him the gilding. ‘Jesus Maria,’ the boy says. ‘The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an engine for torture.’

Norfolk goes down to Beaulieu to tell Lady Mary she must move to the manor at Hatfield, and be an attendant to the little princess, and live under the governance of Lady Anne Shelton, aunt to the queen. What ensues, he reports back in aggrieved tones.

‘Aunt to the queen?’ says Mary. ‘There is but one queen, and that is my mother.’

‘Lady Mary …’ Norfolk says, and the words make her burst into tears, and run to her room and lock herself in.

Suffolk goes up the country to Buckden, to convince Katherine to move to another house. She has heard that they mean to send her somewhere even damper than Buckden, and she says the damp will kill her, so she too shuts herself up, rattling the bolts into place and shouting at Suffolk in three languages to go away. She will go nowhere, she says, unless he is prepared to break down the door and bind her with ropes and carry her. Which Charles thinks is a little extreme.

Brandon sounds so sorry for himself when he writes back to London for instructions: a man with a bride of fourteen awaiting his attentions, to spend the holiday like this! When his letter is read out to the council, he, Cromwell, bursts out laughing. The sheer joy of it carries him into the new year.

There is a young woman walking the roads of the kingdom, saying she is the princess Mary, and that her father has turned her out to beg. She has been seen as far north as York and as far east as Lincoln, and simple people in these shires are lodging and feeding her and giving her money to see her on her way. He has people keeping an eye out for her, but they haven’t caught her yet. He doesn’t know what he would do with her if he did catch her. It is punishment enough, to take on the burden of a prophecy, and to be out unprotected on the winter roads. He pictures her, a dun-coloured, dwindling figure, tramping away towards the horizon over the flat muddy fields.

Chapter III. A Painter’s Eye. 1534

When Hans brings the finished portrait to Austin Friars he feels shy of it. He remembers when Walter would say, look me in the face, boy, when you tell me a lie.

He looks at the picture’s lower edge, and allows his gaze to creep upwards. A quill, scissors, papers, his seal in a little bag, and a heavy volume, bound in blackish green: the leather tooled in gold, the pages gilt-edged. Hans had asked to see his Bible, rejected it as too plain, too thumbed. He had scoured the house and found the finest volume he owned on the desk of Thomas Avery. It is the monk Pacioli’s work, the book on how to keep your books, sent to him by his kind friends in Venice.

He sees his painted hand, resting on the desk before him, holding a paper in a loose fist. It is uncanny, as if he had been pulled apart, to look at himself in sections, digit by digit. Hans has made his skin smooth as the skin of a courtesan, but the motion he has captured, that folding of the fingers, is as sure as that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife. He is wearing the cardinal’s turquoise.

He had a turquoise ring of his own, one time, which Liz gave to him when Gregory was born. It was a ring in the shape of a heart.

He raises his eyes, to his own face. It does not much improve on the Easter egg which Jo painted. Hans had penned him in a little space, pushing a heavy table to fasten him in. He had time to think, while Hans drew him, and his thoughts took him far off, to another country. You cannot trace those thoughts behind his eyes.

He had asked to be painted in his garden. Hans said, the very notion makes me sweat. Can we keep it simple, yes?

He wears his winter clothes. Inside them, he seems made of a more impermeable substance than most men, more compacted. He could well be wearing armour. He foresees the day when he might have to. There are men in this realm and abroad (not only in Yorkshire now) who would stab him as soon as look at him.

I doubt, he thinks, they can hack through to the heart. The king had said, what are you made of?

He smiles. There is no trace of a smile on the face of his painted self.

‘Right.’ He sweeps into the next room. ‘You can come and see it.’

They crowd in, jostling. There is a short, appraising silence. It lengthens. Alice says, ‘He has made you look rather stout, Uncle. More than he need.’

Richard says, ‘As Leonardo has demonstrated to us, a curved surface better deflects the impact of cannon balls.’

‘I don’t think you look like that,’ Helen Barre says. ‘I see that your features are true enough. But that is not the expression on your face.’

Rafe says, ‘No, Helen, he saves it for men.’

Thomas Avery says, ‘The Emperor’s man is here, can he come in and have a look?’

‘He is welcome, as always.’

Chapuys prances in. He positions himself before the painting; he skips forward; he leaps back. He is wearing marten furs over silks. ‘Dear God,’ Johane says behind her hand, ‘he looks like a dancing monkey.’

‘Oh no, I fear not,’ Eustache says. ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Your Protestant painter has missed the mark this time. For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them. You make other men think, not “what does he look like?” but “what do I look like?”’ He whisks away, then swings around, as if to catch the likeness in the act of moving. ‘Still. Looking at that, one would be loath to cross you. To that extent, I think Hans has achieved his aim.’

When Gregory comes home from Canterbury, he takes him in alone to see the painting, still in his riding coat, muddy from the road; he wants to hear his son’s opinion, before the rest of the household get to him. He says, ‘Your lady mother always said she didn’t pick me for my looks. I was surprised, when the picture came, to find I was vain. I thought of myself as I was when I left Italy, twenty years ago. Before you were born.’

Gregory stands at his shoulder. His eyes rest on the portrait. He doesn’t speak.

He is conscious that his son is taller than he is: not that it takes much. He steps sideways, though only in his mind, to see his boy with a painter’s eye: a boy with fine white skin and hazel eyes, a slender angel of the second rank in a fresco dappled with damp, in some hill town far from here. He thinks of him as a page in a forest riding across vellum, dark curls crisp under a narrow band of gold; whereas the young men about him every day, the young men of Austin Friars, are muscled like fighting dogs, hair cropped to stubble, eyes sharp as sword points. He thinks, Gregory is all he should be. He is everything I have a right to hope for: his openness, his gentleness, the reserve and consideration with which he holds back his thoughts till he has framed them. He feels such tenderness for him he thinks he might cry.

He turns to the painting. ‘I fear Mark was right.’

‘Who is Mark?’

‘A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer.’

Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’