Thomas Cromwell 1-3

I

The Black Book

LONDON, JANUARY–APRIL 1536

When he hears the shout of ‘Fire!’ he turns over and swims back into his dream. He supposes the conflagration is a dream; it’s the sort he has.

Then he wakes to Christophe bellowing in his ear. ‘Get up! The queen is on fire.’

He is out of bed. The cold slices into him. Christophe yells, ‘Quick, quick! She is totally incinderated.’

Moments later, when he arrives on the queen’s floor, he finds the smell of singed cloth heavy in the air, and Anne surrounded by gibbering women, but unhurt, in a chair, wrapped in black silk, with a chalice of warmed wine in her hands. The cup jiggles, spills a little; Henry is tearful, hugging her, and his heir who is inside her. ‘If only I had been with you, sweetheart. If only I had spent the night. I could have put you out of danger in an instant.’

On and on he goes. Thank the Lord God who watches over us. Thank the God who protects England. If only I. With a blanket, a quilt, stifling them. I, in an instant, beating out the flames.

Anne takes a gulp of her wine. ‘It is over. I am not harmed. Please, my lord husband. Peace. Let me drink this.’

He sees, in a flash, how Henry irritates her; his solicitude, his doting, his clinging. And in the depth of a January night she can’t disguise the irritation. She looks grey, her sleep broken. She turns to him, Cromwell, and speaks in French. ‘There is a prophecy that a queen of England will be burned. I did not think it meant in her own bed. It was an unattended candle. Or so one assumes.’

‘By whom unattended?’

Anne shudders. She looks away.

‘We had better take order,’ he says to the king, ‘that water be kept to hand, and one woman be appointed on every rota to check that all lights are extinguished about the queen. I cannot think why it is not the custom.’

All these things are written down in the Black Book, which comes from King Edward’s time. It orders the household: orders everything, in fact, except the king’s privy chamber, whose workings are not transparent.

‘If only I had been with her,’ says Henry. ‘But, you see, our hopes being what they are…’

The King of England cannot afford carnal relations with the woman carrying his child. The risk of miscarriage is too great. And for company he looks elsewhere too. Tonight you can see how Anne’s body stiffens as she pulls away from her husband’s hands, but in daylight hours, their position is reversed. He has watched Anne as she tries to draw the king into conversation. His abruptness, all too often. His turned shoulder. As if to deny his need of her. And yet his eyes follow her…

He is irritated; these are women’s things. And the fact that the queen’s body, wrapped only in a damask nightgown, seems too narrow for that of a woman who will give birth in spring; that is a woman’s thing too. The king says, ‘The fire did not come very near her. It is the corner of the arras that is burned up. It is Absalom hanging in the tree. It is a very good piece and I would like you to…’

‘I’ll get someone over from Brussels,’ he says.

The fire has not touched King David’s son. He hangs from the branches, strung up by his long hair: his eyes are wild and his mouth opens in a scream.

It is hours yet till daylight. The rooms of the palace seem hushed, as if they are waiting for an explanation. Guards patrol through the dark hours; where were they? Should not some woman have been with the queen, sleeping on a pallet at the foot of her bed? He says to Lady Rochford, ‘I know the queen has enemies, but how were they allowed to come so near her?’

Jane Rochford is on her high horse; she thinks he is attempting to blame her. ‘Look, Master Secretary. Shall I be plain with you?’

‘I wish you would.’

‘First, this is a household matter. It is not within your remit. Second, she was in no danger. Third, I do not know who lit the candle. Four, if I did I would not tell you.’

He waits.

‘Five: no one else will tell you either.’

He waits.

‘If, as it may happen, some person visits the queen after the lights are out, then it is an event over which we should draw a veil.’

‘Some person.’ He digests this. ‘Some person for the purposes of arson, or for purposes of something else?’

‘For the usual purposes of bedchambers,’ she says. ‘Not that I say there is such a person. I would not have any knowledge of it. The queen knows how to keep her secrets.’

‘Jane,’ he says, ‘if the time comes when you wish to disburden your conscience, do not go to a priest, come to me. The priest will give you a penance, but I will give you a reward.’

What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

Tidying up after Katherine’s death, he had been moved to explore some legends of her early life. Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals. Katherine had always said that, between the death of Arthur and her marriage to the young Prince Henry, she had been miserably neglected, wretchedly poor: eaten yesterday’s fish, and so on. One had blamed the old king for it, but when you look at the books, you see he was generous enough. Katherine’s household were cheating her. Her plate and jewels were leaking on to the market; in that she must have been complicit? She was lavish, he sees, and generous; regal, in other words, with no idea of living within her means.

You wonder what else you have always believed, believed without foundation. His father Walter had laid out money for him, or so Gardiner said: compensation, for the stab wound he inflicted, the injured family paid off. What if, he thinks, Walter didn’t hate me? What if he was just exasperated with me, and showed it by kicking me around the brewery yard? What if I deserved it? Because I was always crowing, ‘Item, I have a better head for drink than you; Item, I have a better head for everything. Item, I am prince of Putney and can wallop anybody from Wimbledon, let them come from Mortlake and I will mince them. Item, I am already one inch taller than you, look at the door where I have put a notch, go on, go on, father, go and stand against the wall.’

He writes:

Anthony’s teeth.

Question: What happened to them?

Anthony’s testimony, in answer to me, Thomas Cromwell:

They were knocked out by his brutal father.

To Richard Cromwell: He was in a fortress besieged by the Pope. Abroad somewhere. Some year. Some Pope. The fortress was undermined and a charge planted. As he was standing in an unlucky spot, his teeth were blown clear out of his head.

To Thomas Wriothesley: When he was a sailor off Iceland his captain traded them for provisions with a man who could carve chessmen out of teeth. Did not understand the nature of the bargain until men in furs came to knock them out.

To Richard Riche: He lost them in a dispute with a man who impugned the powers of Parliament.

To Christophe: Somebody put a spell on him and they all fell out. Christophe says, ‘I was told as a child about diabolists in England. There is a witch in every street.

Practically.’

To Thurston: He had an enemy was a cook. And this enemy painted a batch of stone to look like hazelnuts, and invited him to a handful.

To Gregory: They were sucked out of his head by a great worm that crawled out of the ground and ate his wife. This was in Yorkshire, last year.

He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, ‘Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?’

‘Send a commission against it, sir,’ the boy says. ‘It must be put down. Bishop Rowland Lee would go up against it. Or Fitz.’

He gives his son a long look. ‘You do know it’s Arthur Cobbler’s tales?’

Gregory gives him a long look back. ‘Yes, I do know.’ He sounds regretful. ‘But it makes people so happy when I believe them. Mr Wriothesley, especially. Though now he has grown so grave. He used to amuse himself by holding my head under a water spout. But now he turns his eyes up to Heaven and says “the King’s Majesty”. Though he used to call him, His High Horridness. And imitate how he walks.’ Gregory plants his fists on his hips and stamps across the room.

He raises a hand to cover his smile.

The day of the tournament comes. He is at Greenwich but excuses himself from the spectators’ stand. The king had been at him that morning, as they sat side by side in his closet at early Mass: ‘How much does the lordship of Ripon bring in? To the Archbishop of York?’

‘A little over two hundred and sixty pounds, sir.’

‘And what does Southwell bring in?’

‘Scant one hundred and fifty pounds, sir.’

‘Do you say so? I thought that it would be more.’

Henry is taking the closest interest in the finances of the bishops. Some people say, and he would not demur, that we should put the bishops on a fixed stipend and take the profits of their sees for the treasury. He has worked out that the money raised could pay for a standing army.

But this is not the time to put it to Henry. The king falls to his knees and prays to whatever saint guards knights in the lists. ‘Majesty,’ he says, ‘if you run against my son Gregory, will you forbear to unhorse him? If you can help it?’

But the king says, ‘I would not mind if little Gregory unhorsed me. Though it is unlikely, I would take it in good part. And we cannot help what we do, really. Once you are thundering down at a man, you cannot check.’ He stops himself and says kindly, ‘It is quite a rare event, you know, to bring your opponent down. It is not the sole aim of the contest. If you are concerned about what showing he will make, you need not be. He is very able. He would not be a combatant otherwise. One cannot break a lance on a timid opponent, he must run at full pace against you. Besides, no one ever does badly. It is not allowed. You know how the heralds put it. As it might be, “Gregory Cromwell has jousted well, Henry Norris has jousted very well, but our Sovereign Lord the king has jousted best of all.”’

‘And have you, sir?’ He smiles to take any sting from the words.

‘I know you councillors think I should take to the spectators’ bench. And I will, I promise, it has not escaped me that a man of my age is past his best. But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.’

But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other…

The king says, ‘You turn your boy out beautifully, and your nephew Richard too. No nobleman could do more. They are a credit to your house.’

Gregory has done well. Gregory has done very well. Gregory has done best of all. ‘I don’t want him to be Achilles,’ he says, ‘I only want him not to be flattened.’

There is a correspondence between the score sheet and the human body, in that the paper has divisions marked off, for the head and the torso. A touch on the breastplate is recorded, but not fractured ribs. A touch on the helm is recorded, but not a cracked skull. You can pick up the score sheets afterwards and read back a record of the day, but the marks on paper do not tell you about the pain of a broken ankle or the efforts of a suffocating man not to vomit inside his helmet. As the combatants will always tell you, you really needed to see it, you had to be there.

Gregory was disappointed when his father had excused himself from watching. He pleaded a prior engagement with his papers. The Vatican is offering Henry three months to return to obedience, or the bull of excommunication against him will be printed and distributed through Europe, and every Christian hand will be against him. The Emperor’s fleet is set for Algiers, with forty thousand armed men. The abbot of Fountains has been systematically robbing his own treasury, and entertains six whores, though presumably he needs a rest between. And the parliamentary session opens in a fortnight.

He had met an old knight once, in Venice, one of those men who had made a career of riding to tournaments all over Europe. The man had described his life to him, crossing frontiers with his band of esquires and his string of horses, always on the move from one prize to the next, till age and the accumulation of injuries put him out of the game. On his own now, he tried to pick up a living teaching young lords, enduring mockery and time-wasting; in my day, he had said, the young were taught manners, but now I find myself fettling horses and polishing breastplates for some little tosspot I wouldn’t have let clean my boots in the old days; for look at me now, reduced to drinking with, what are you, an Englishman?

The knight was a Portuguese, but he spoke dog-Latin and a kind of German, interspersed with technicalities which are much the same in all languages. In the old days each tournament was a testing-ground. There was no display of idle luxury. Women, instead of simpering at you from gilded pavilions, were kept for afterwards. In those days the scoring was complex and the judges had no mercy on any infringement of the rules, so you could shatter all your lances but lose on points, you could flatten your opposer and come out not with a bag of gold but with a fine or a blot on your record. A breach of rules would trail you through Europe, so some infringements committed, let’s say, in Lisbon, would catch up with you in Ferrara; a man’s reputation would go before him, and in the end, he said, given a bad season, a run of ill-luck, reputation’s all you’ve got; so don’t you push your luck, he said, when fortune’s star is shining, because the next minute, it isn’t. Come to that, don’t pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up?

One drink in, the old knight talked as if everybody had followed his trade. You should set your squires, he said, at each end of the barrier, to make your horse swerve wide if he tries to cut the corner, or else you may catch your foot, easy done if there’s no end-guard, bloody painful: have you ever done that? Some fools collect their boys in the middle, where the atteint will occur; but what’s the use? Indeed, he agreed, what use at all: and wondered at that delicate word, atteint, for the brutal shock of contact. These spring-loaded shields, the old man said, have you seen them, they jump apart when they’re hit? Babies’ tricks. The old-time judges didn’t need a device like that to tell them when a man had got a touch – no, they used their eyes, they had eyes in those days. Look, he said: there are three ways to fail. Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.

You have to get your helmet on tightly so that you have a good line of sight. You keep your body square-on, and when you are about to strike, then and only then turn your head so that you have a full view of your opposer, and watch the iron tip of your lance straight on to your target. Some people veer away in the second before the clash. It is natural, but forget what is natural. Practise till you break your instinct. Given a chance you will always swerve. Your body wants to preserve itself and your instinct will try to avoid crashing your armoured warhorse and your armoured self into another man and horse coming at full gallop the other way. Some men don’t swerve, but instead they close their eyes at the moment of impact. These men are of two kinds: the ones who know they do it and can’t help it, and the ones who don’t know they do it. Get your boys to watch you when you practise. Be neither of these kinds of men.

So how shall I improve, he said to the old knight, how shall I succeed? These were his instructions: you must sit easily in your saddle, as if you were riding out to take the air. Hold your reins loosely, but have your horse collected. In the combat à plaisance, with its fluttering flags, its garlands, its rebated swords and lances tipped with buffering coronals, ride as if you were out to kill. In the combat à l’outrance, kill as if it were a sport. Now look, the knight said, and slapped the table, here’s what I’ve seen, more times than I care to count: your man braces himself for the atteint, and at that final moment, the urgency of desire undoes him: he tightens his muscles, he pulls in his lance-arm against his body, the tip tilts up, and he’s off the mark; if you avoid one fault, avoid that. Carry your lance a little loose, so when you tense your frame and draw in your arm your point comes exactly on the target. But remember this above all: defeat your instinct. Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

The next day he saw the knight again. He, Tommaso, was coming back from drinking with his friend Karl Heinz, and when they spotted the old man he was lying with his head on terra firma, his feet in the water; in Venice at dusk, it can so easily be the other way around. They pulled him on to the bank and turned him over. I know this man, he said. His friend said, who owns him? Nobody owns him, but he curses in German, therefore let us take him to the German House, for I myself am staying not at the Tuscan House but with a man who runs a foundry. Karl Heinz said, you are dealing in arms? and he said, no, altar cloths. Karl Heinz said, you are as likely to shit rubies as learn an Englishman’s secrets.

As they were talking they were hauling the old man upright, and Karl Heinz said, they have cut his purse, look. A wonder they did not kill him. In a boat they took him to the Fondaco where the German merchants stay, and which was just then rebuilding after the fire. You can bed him down in the warehouse among the crates, he said. Find something to cover him, and give him food and drink when he wakes. He will live. He is an old man but tough. Here is money.

A whimsical Englishman, Karl Heinz said. He said, I myself have benefited from strangers who were angels in disguise.

There is a guard on the water gate, not set by the merchants but by the state, as the Venetians wish to know all that goes on within the houses of the nations. So more coins are passed, to the guard. They pull the old man out of the boat; he is half-awake now, flailing his arms and speaking something, perhaps Portuguese. They are dragging him in, under the portico, when Karl Heinz says, ‘Thomas, have you seen our paintings? Here,’ he says, ‘you, guard, give us the benefit of holding up your torch, or must we pay you for that too?’

Light flares against the wall. Out of the brick blossoms a flow of silk, red silk or pooled blood. He sees a white curve, a slender moon, a sickle cut; as the light washes over the wall, he sees a woman’s face, the curve of her cheek edged with gold. She is a goddess. ‘Hold up the torch,’ he says. On her blown and tangled hair there is a gilded crown. Behind her are the planets and stars. ‘Who did you hire for this?’ he asks.

Karl Heinz says, ‘Giorgione is painting it for us, his friend Tiziano is painting the Rialto front, the Senate is paying their fees. But by God, they will milk it from us in commissions. Do you like her?’

The light touches her white flesh. It falters away from her, patching her with dark. The watchman lowers his torch and says, what, you think I am standing here all night for your pleasure in the gnawing cold? Which is an exaggeration, to get more money, but it is true that mist creeps over the bridges and walkways, and a chill wind has got up from the sea.

Parting from Karl Heinz, the moon herself a stone in the waters of the canal, he sees an expensive whore out late, her servants supporting her elbows, teetering over the cobbles on her high chopines. Her laughter rings on the air, and the fringed end of her yellow scarf snakes away from her white throat and into the mist. He watches her; she does not notice him. Then she is gone. Somewhere a door opens for her and somewhere a door is closed. Like the woman on the wall, she melts and is lost in the dark. The square is empty again; and he himself only a black shape against the brickwork, a fragment cut out of the night. If I ever need to vanish, he says, this is where I shall do it.

But that was long ago and in another country. Now Rafe Sadler is here with a message: he must return suddenly to Greenwich, to this raw morning, the rain just holding off. Where is Karl Heinz today? Dead probably. Since the night he saw the goddess growing on the wall, he has intended to commission one himself, though other purposes – making money and drafting legislation – have taken up his time.

‘Rafe?’

Rafe stands in the doorway and does not speak. He looks up at the young man’s face. His hand lets go his quill and ink splashes the paper. He stands up at once, wrapping his furred robe about him as if it will buffer him from what is to come. He says, ‘Gregory?’ and Rafe shakes his head.

Gregory is intact. He did not run a course.

The tournament is interrupted.

It is the king, Rafe says. It is Henry, he is dead.

Ah, he says.

He dries the ink with dust from the box of bone. Blood everywhere, no doubt, he says.

He keeps at hand a gift he was given once, a Turkish dagger made of iron, the sheath engraved with a pattern of sunflowers. Until now he had always thought of it as an ornament, a curio. He tucks it away amongst his garments.

He will recall, later, how difficult it was to get through the doorway, to turn his steps to the tilting ground. He feels weak, the backwash of the weakness that had made him drop the pen when he thought that Gregory was hurt. He says to himself, it is not Gregory; but his body is dazed, slow to catch up with the news, as if he himself had received a killing blow. Whether, now, to go forward to try to seize command, or to seize this moment, perhaps the last moment, to quit the scene: to make good an escape, before the ports are blocked, and to go where? Perhaps to Germany? Is there any principality, state, in which he would be safe from the reach of Emperor or Pope, or the new ruler of England, whoever that may be?

He has never backed off; or once, perhaps, from Walter when he was seven years old: but Walter came on. Since then: forward, forward, en avant! So his hesitation is not long, but afterwards he will have no recollection of how he arrived in a lofty and gilded tent, embroidered with the arms and devices of England, and standing over the corpse of King Henry VIII. Rafe says, the contests had not begun, he was running at the ring, the point of his lance scooped the eye of the circle. Then the horse stumbled under him, man and rider down, horse rolling with a scream and Henry beneath it. Now Gentle Norris is on his knees by the bier, praying, tears cascading down his cheeks. There is a blur of light on plate armour, helms hiding faces, iron jaws, frog mouths, the slits of visors. Someone says, the beast went down as if its leg were broke, no one was near the king, no one to blame. He seems to hear the appalling noise of it, the horse’s roar of terror as it pitches, the screams from the spectators, the grating clatter of steel and hooves on steel as one huge animal entangles with another, warhorse and king collapsing together, metal driven into flesh, hoof into bone.

‘Fetch a mirror,’ he says, ‘to hold to his lips. Fetch a feather to see if it stirs.’

The king has been manhandled out of his armour, but is still laced in his tournament jacket of wadded black, as if in mourning for himself. There is no evident blood, so he asks, where was he hurt? Someone says, he knocked his head; but that is all the sense he can glean from the wailing and babbling that fills the tent. Feathers, mirrors, they intimate it has been done; tongues clam-our like bell tongues, their eyes are like pebbles in their heads, one shocked and vacant face turns to another, oaths are uttered and prayers, and they move slowly, slowly; no one wants to carry the corpse inside, it is too much to take on oneself, it will be seen, it will be reported. It is a mistake to think that when the king dies his councillors shout, ‘Long live the king.’ Often the fact of the death is hidden for days. As this must be hidden…Henry is waxen, and he sees the shocking tenderness of human flesh evicted from steel. He is lying on his back, all his magnificent height stretched on a piece of ocean-blue cloth. His limbs are straight. He looks uninjured. He touches his face. It is still warm. Fate has not spoiled him or mangled. He is intact, a present for the gods. They are taking him back as he was sent.

He opens his mouth and shouts. What do they mean, leaving the king lying here, untouched by Christian hand, as if he were already excommunicate? If this were any other fallen man they would be enticing his senses with rose petals and myrrh. They would be pulling his hair and tweaking his ears, burning a paper under his nose, wrenching open his jaw to trickle in holy water, blowing a horn next to his head. All this should be done and – he looks up and sees Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, running at him like a demon. Uncle Norfolk: uncle to the queen, premier nobleman of England. ‘By God, Cromwell!’ he snarls. And his import is clear. By God, I’ve got you now; by God, your presumptuous guts will be drawn: by God, before the day is over your head will be spiked.

Perhaps. But in the next seconds he, Cromwell, seems to body out and fill all the space around the fallen man. He sees himself, as if he were watching from the canvas above: his girth expands, even his height. So that he occupies more ground. So that he takes up more space, breathes more air, is planted and solid when Norfolk careers into him, twitching, trembling. So he is a fortress on a rock, serene, and Thomas Howard just bounces back from his walls, wincing, flinching, and blethering God knows what about God knows who. ‘MY LORD NORFOLK!’ he roars at him. ‘My lord Norfolk, where is the queen?’

Norfolk is panting hard. ‘On the floor. I told her. I myself. My place to do it. My place, am her uncle. Fallen in a fit. Fell down. Dwarf trying to pull her up. Kicked it away. Oh God Almighty!’

Now who governs, for Anne’s unborn child? When Henry purposed to go to France, he said he would leave Anne as regent, but that was more than a year ago, and besides he never did go, and so we don’t know if he would have done it; Anne had said to him, Cremuel, if I am regent, watch yourself, I will have your obedience or I will have your head. Anne as regent would have made short work of Katherine, of Mary: Katherine is passed beyond her reach, but Mary there for the killing. Uncle Norfolk, lurched down by the corpse for a quick prayer, has stumbled up again: ‘No, no, no,’ he is saying. ‘No woman with a big belly. Such cannot rule. Anne cannot rule. Me, me, me.’

Gregory is pushing through the crowd. He has had the sense to fetch Fitzwilliam, Master Treasurer. ‘The Princess Mary,’ he says to Fitz. ‘How to get her. I must have her. Or the realm is done for.’

Fitzwilliam is one of Henry’s old friends, a man of his own age: too capable by nature, thank God, to panic and gibber. ‘Her keepers are Boleyns,’ Fitz says. ‘I don’t know if they’ll yield her.’

Yes, and what a fool I was, he thinks, not to get among them and suborn them and advance-bribe them for an occasion such as this; I said I would send my ring for Katherine’s deliverance, but for the princess I made no such arrangement. Let Mary remain in the hands of the Boleyns, and she is dead. Let her fall into the hands of the papists, they will set her up as queen, and I am dead. There will be civil war.

Courtiers are now pouring into the tent, all inventing how Henry died, all exclaiming, denying, lamenting; the noise rises, and he grips Fitz’s arm: ‘If this news gets up-country before we do, we will never see Mary alive.’ Her guardians will not hang her up from the staircase, they will not stab her, but they will make sure she meets with an accident, a broken neck on the road. Then if Anne’s unborn child is a girl, Elizabeth is queen, as we have no other.

Fitzwilliam says, ‘Wait now, let me think. Where is Richmond?’ The king’s bastard, sixteen years old. He is a commodity, he is to be reckoned with, he is to be secured. Richmond is Norfolk’s son-in-law. Norfolk must know where he is, Norfolk is best placed to lay hands on him, bargain with him, lock him up or turn him loose: but he, Cromwell, does not fear a bastard boy, and besides, the young man favours him, in all their dealings he has buttered him like a parsnip.

Norfolk is now buzzing from side to side, a maddened wasp, and as if he were a wasp the onlookers shrink from him, eddying away, then swaying back. The duke buzzes into him; he, Cromwell, bats the duke away. He stares down at Henry. He thinks he has seen, but it might be fantasy, a twitch of an eyelid. It is enough. He stands over Henry, like a figure on a tomb: a broad, mute, ugly guardian. He waits: then he sees that flicker again, he thinks he does. His heart lurches. He puts his hand on the king’s chest, slapping it down, like a merchant closing a deal. Says calmly, ‘The king is breathing.’

There is an unholy roar. It is something between a moan and a cheer and a wail of panic, a shout to God, a riposte to the devil.

Beneath the jacket, within the horsehair padding, a fibrillation, a quiver of life: his hand heavy and flat on the regal breast, he feels he is raising Lazarus. It is as if his palm, magnetised, is drawing life back into his prince. The king’s respiration, though shallow, seems steady. He, Cromwell, has seen the future; he has seen England without Henry; he prays aloud, ‘Long live the king.’

‘Fetch the surgeons,’ he says. ‘Fetch Butts. Fetch any man with skill. If he dies again, they will not be blamed. My word on that. Get me Richard Cromwell my nephew. Fetch a stool for my lord Norfolk, he has had a shock.’ He is tempted to add, throw a bucket of water on Gentle Norris: whose prayers, he has time to notice, are of a marked papist character.

The tent is now so crowded that it seems to have been picked up by its moorings, to be carried on men’s heads. He takes a last look at Henry before his still form disappears under the ministrations of doctors and priests. He hears a long, retching gasp; but one has heard the same from corpses.

‘Breathe,’ Norfolk shouts. ‘Let the king breathe!’ And as if in obedience, the fallen man takes a deep, sucking, scraping breath. And then he swears. And then he tries to sit up.

And it is over.

But not entirely: not until he has studied the Boleyn expressions around. They look numb, bemused. Their faces are pinched in the bitter cold. Their great hour has passed, before they realised it has arrived. How have they all got here so fast? Where have they come from? he asks Fitz. Only then he realises that the light is fading. What felt like ten minutes has been two hours: two hours since Rafe stood in the doorway, and he dropped his pen on the page.

He says to Fitzwilliam, ‘Of course, it never happened. Or if it did, it was an incident of no importance.’

For Chapuys and the other ambassadors, he will stick by his original version: the king fell, hit his head, and was unconscious for ten minutes. No, at no time did we think he was dead. After ten minutes he sat up. And now he is perfectly well.

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

Fitzwilliam is amused. ‘A man’s thoughts at such a time hardly bear scrutiny. I recall thinking, should we not send for the Lord Chancellor? But I don’t know what I thought he was to do.’

‘My thought,’ he confesses, ‘was, somebody get the Archbishop of Canterbury. I think I believed a king couldn’t die without his supervision. Imagine trying to bustle Cranmer across the Thames. He would make you join him in a gospel reading first.’

What does the Black Book say? Nothing to the purpose. No one has made a plan for a king struck down between one moment and the next, one second mounted tall and riding full tilt, next second mashed into the ground. No one dares. No one dares think about it. Where protocol fails, it is war to the knife. He remembers Fitzwilliam beside him; Gregory in the crowd; Rafe by his side, and then Richard his nephew. Was it Richard who helped lever the king upright as he tried to sit, while the doctors cried, ‘No, no, lie him down!’ Henry had clasped his hands to his chest, as if to squeeze his own heart. He had struggled to rise, he had made inarticulate noises, that sounded like words but were not, as if the Holy Ghost had descended upon him and he was speaking in tongues. He had thought, panic darting through him, what if he never makes sense again? What does the Black Book say if a king is rendered simple? Outside he remembers the roaring of Henry’s fallen horse, struggling to rise; but surely that cannot be what he heard, surely they had slaughtered it?

Then Henry himself was roaring. That night, the king rips the bandage from his head. The bruising, the swelling, is God’s verdict on the day. He is determined to show himself to his court, to counter any rumours that he is mauled or dead. Anne approaches him, supported by her father, ‘Monseigneur’. The earl is really supporting her, not pretending to. She looks white and frail; now her pregnancy shows. ‘My lord,’ she says, ‘I pray, the whole of England prays, that you will never joust again.’

Henry beckons her to approach. Beckons her till her face is close to his own. His voice low and vehement: ‘Why not geld me while you are at it? That would suit you, would it not, madam?’

Faces open in shock. The Boleyns have the sense to draw Anne backwards, backwards and away, Mistress Shelton and Jane Rochford flapping and tut-tutting, the whole Howard, Boleyn clan closing around her. Jane Seymour, alone of the ladies, does not move. She stands and looks at Henry and the king’s eyes fly straight to her, a space opens around her and for a moment she stands in the vacancy, like a dancer left behind when the line moves on.

Later he is with Henry in his bedchamber, the king collapsed in a velvet chair. Henry says, when I was a boy, I was walking with my father in a gallery at Richmond, one night in summer about eleven of the clock, he had my arm in his and we were deep in talk or he was: and suddenly there was a great crashing and a splintering, the whole building gave a deep groan, and the floor fell away at our feet. I will remember it all my life, standing on the brink, and the world vanished from beneath us. But for a moment I did not know what I heard, whether it was the timbers splintering or our bones. Both of us by God’s grace still stood on solid ground, and yet I had seen myself plummeting, down and down through the floor below till I hit the earth and smelled it, damp like the grave. Well…when I fell today, that was how it was. I heard voices. Very distant. I could not make out the words. I felt myself borne through the air. I did not see God. Or angels.

‘I hope you were not disappointed when you woke. Only to see Thomas Cromwell.’

‘You were never more welcome,’ Henry says. ‘Your own mother on the day you were born was no gladder to see you than I was today.’

The grooms of the chamber are here, going soft-footed about their usual duties, sprinkling the king’s sheets with holy water. ‘Steady,’ Henry says crossly. ‘Do you want me to take a chill? A drowning is not more efficacious than a drop.’ He turns and says, low-voiced, ‘Crumb, you know this never happened?’

He nods. What records are already made, he is in the process of expunging. Afterwards it will be known that on such a date, the king’s horse stumbled. But God’s hand plucked him from the ground and set him back laughing on his throne. Another item of note, for The Book Called Henry: knock him down and he bounces.

But the queen has a point. You’ve seen these jousters from the old king’s time, limping about the court, the wincing and addle-pated survivors of the lists; men who’ve taken a blow on the head once too often, men who walk crooked, bent like a dog-leg brick. And all your skill counts for nothing when your day of reckoning comes. Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.

That night he says to Richard Cromwell, ‘It was a bad moment for me. How many men can say, as I must, “I am a man whose only friend is the King of England”? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away and I have nothing.’

Richard sees the helpless truth of it. Says, ‘Yes.’ What else can he say?

Later he voices the same thought, in a cautious and modified form, to Fitzwilliam. Fitzwilliam looks at him: thoughtful, not without sympathy. ‘I don’t know, Crumb. You are not without support, you know.’

‘Forgive me,’ he says sceptically, ‘but in what way does this support manifest?’

‘I mean that you would have support, should you need it against the Boleyns.’

‘Why should I? The queen and I are perfect friends.’

‘That’s not what you tell Chapuys.’

He inclines his head. Interesting, the people who talk to Chapuys; interesting too, what the ambassador chooses to pass on, from one party to another.

‘Did you hear them?’ Fitz says. His tone is disgusted. ‘Outside the tent, when we thought the king was dead? Shouting “Boleyn, Boleyn!” Calling out their own name. Like cuckoos.’

He waits. Of course he heard them; what is the real question here? Fitz is close to the king. He was brought up at court with Henry since they were small boys, though his family is good gentry, not noble. He has been to war. Has had a crossbow bolt in him. Has been abroad on embassies, knows France, knows Calais, the English enclave there and its politics. He is of that select company, the Garter knights. He writes a good letter, to the point, neither abrupt nor circumlocutory, nor larded with flattery, nor cursory in expressions of regard. The cardinal liked him, and he is affable to Thomas Cromwell when they dine daily in the guard chamber. He is always affable: and now more so? ‘What would have happened, Crumb, if the king had not come back to life? I shall never forget Howard pitching in, “Me, me, me!”’

‘It is not a spectacle we will erase from our minds. As for…’ he hesitates, ‘well, if the worst had been, the king’s body dies but the body politic continues. It might be possible to convene a ruling council, made up from the law officers, and from those chief councillors that are now…’

‘…amongst whom, yourself…’

‘Myself, granted.’ Myself in several capacities, he thinks: who more trusted, who closer, and not just Master Secretary but a law officer, Master of the Rolls? ‘If Parliament were willing, we might bring together a body who would have ruled as regent till the queen was delivered, and perhaps with her permission during a minority…’

‘But you know Anne would give no such permission,’ Fitz says.

‘No, she would have all to rule herself. Though she would have to fight Uncle Norfolk. Between the two of them I do not know who I would back. The lady, I think.’

‘God help the realm,’ Fitzwilliam says, ‘and all the men in it. Of the two, I would sooner have Thomas Howard. At least if it came to it, one could challenge him to come outside and fight. Let the lady be regent and the Boleyns would walk on our backs. We would be their living carpet. She would have “AB” sewn into our skins.’ He rubs his chin. ‘But so she will anyway. If she gives Harry a son.’

He is aware that Fitz is watching him. ‘On the topic of sons,’ he says, ‘have I thanked you in proper form? Let me know if there is anything I can do for you. Gregory has thrived under your guidance.’

‘The pleasure is mine. Send him back to me soon.’

I will, he thinks, and with the lease on a little abbey or two, when my new laws are passed. His desk is piled high with business for the new session of Parliament. Before many years are out he would like Gregory to have a seat beside him in the Commons. He must see all aspects of how the realm is governed. A term in Parliament is an exercise in frustration, it is a lesson in patience: whichever way you like to look at it. They commune of war, peace, strife, contention, debate, murmur, grudges, riches, poverty, truth, falsehood, justice, equity, oppression, treason, murder and the edification and continuance of the commonwealth; then do as their predecessors have done – that is, as well as they might – and leave off where they began.

After the king’s accident, everything is the same, yet nothing is the same. He is still on the wrong side of the Boleyns, of Mary’s supporters, the Duke of Norfolk, the Duke of Suffolk, and the absent Bishop of Winchester; not to mention the King of France, the Emperor, and the Bishop of Rome, otherwise known as the Pope. But the contest – every contest – is sharper now.

On the day of Katherine’s funeral, he finds himself downcast. How close we hug our enemies! They are our familiars, our other selves. When she was sitting on a silk cushion at the Alhambra, a seven-year-old working her first embroidery, he was scrubbing roots in the kitchen at Lambeth Palace, under the eye of his uncle John, the cook.

So often in council he has taken Katherine’s part, as if he were one of her appointed lawyers. ‘You make this argument, my lords,’ he has said, ‘but the dowager princess will allege…’ And ‘Katherine will refute you, thus.’ Not because he favours her cause but because it saves time; as her opponent, he enters into her concerns, he judges her stratagems, he reaches every point before she does. It has long been a puzzle to Charles Brandon: ‘Whose side is this fellow on?’ he would demand.

But even now Katherine’s cause is not considered settled, in Rome. Once the Vatican lawyers have started a case, they don’t stop just because one of the parties is dead. Possibly, when all of us are dead, from some Vatican oubliette a skeleton secretary will rattle along, to consult his fellow skeletons on a point of canon law. They will chatter their teeth at each other; their absent eyes will turn down in the sockets, to see that their parchments have turned to dust motes in the light. Who took Katherine’s virginity, her first husband or her second? For all eternity we will never know.

He says to Rafe, ‘Who can understand the lives of women?’

‘Or their deaths,’ Rafe says.

He glances up. ‘Not you! You don’t think she was poisoned, do you?’

‘It is rumoured,’ Rafe says gravely, ‘that the poison was introduced to her in some strong Welsh beer. A brew which, it seems, she had taken a delight in, these last few months.’

He catches Rafe’s eye, and snorts with suppressed laughter. The dowager princess, swigging strong Welsh beer. ‘From a leather tankard,’ Rafe says. ‘And think of her slapping it down on the table. And roaring “Fill it up.”’

He hears running feet approaching. What now? A bang at the door, and his little Welsh boy appears, out of breath. ‘Master, you are to go at once to the king. Fitzwilliam’s people have come for you. I think somebody is dead.’

‘What, somebody else?’ he says. He picks up his sheaf of papers, throws them into a chest, turns the key on them and gives it to Rafe. From now on he leaves no secret unattended, no fresh ink exposed to the air. ‘Who have I to raise this time?’

You know what it’s like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man’s leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.

Later that day, 29 January, he will be on his way to Greenwich, shocked, apprehensive, at the news Fitzwilliam’s men had brought. People will tell him, ‘I was there, I was there when Anne broke off her talk, I was there when she put down her book, her sewing, her lute, I was there when she broke off her merriment at the thought of Katherine lowered into the ground. I saw her face change. I saw her ladies close about her. I saw them sweep her to her chamber and bolt the door, and I saw the trail of blood left on the ground as she walked.’

We need not believe that. Not the trail of blood. They saw it in their minds perhaps. He will ask, what time did the queen’s pains begin? But no one seemed able to tell him, despite their close knowledge of the incident. They have concentrated on the blood trail and left out the facts. It will take all day for the bad news to leak from the queen’s bedside. Sometimes women do bleed but the child clings on and grows. Not this time. Katherine is too fresh in her tomb to lie quiet. She has reached out and shaken Anne’s child free, so it is brought untimely into the world and no bigger than a rat.

At evening, outside the queen’s suite, the dwarf sits on the flags, rocking and moaning. She is pretending to be in labour, someone says: unnecessarily. ‘Can you not remove her?’ he asks the women.

Jane Rochford says, ‘It was a boy, Mr Secretary. She had carried it under four months, as we judge.’

Early October, then. We were still on progress. ‘You will have a note of the itinerary,’ Lady Rochford murmurs. ‘Where was she then?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘I should think you would like to know. Oh, I know that plans were changed, sometimes on the instant. That sometimes she was with the king, sometimes not, that sometimes Norris was with her, and sometimes others of the gentlemen. But you are right, Master Secretary. It is of no moment. The doctors can be sure of very little. We cannot say when it was conceived. Who was here and who was there.’

‘Perhaps we should leave it like that,’ he says.

‘So. Now that she has lost another chance, poor lady…what world will be?’

The dwarf scrambles to her feet. Watching him, holding his gaze, she pulls her skirts up. He is not quick enough to look away. She has shaved herself or someone has shaved her, and her parts are bald, like the parts of an old woman or a little child.

Later, before the king, holding Mary Shelton’s hand, Jane Rochford is unsure of everything. ‘The child had the appearance of a male,’ she says, ‘and of about fifteen weeks’ gestation.’

‘What do you mean, the appearance of?’ the king demands. ‘Could you not tell? Oh, get away, woman, you have never given birth, what do you know? It should have been matrons at her bedside, what did you want there? Could not you Boleyns give way to someone more useful, must you be there in a crowd whenever disaster strikes?’

Lady Rochford’s voice shakes, but she sticks to her point. ‘Your Majesty may interview the doctors.’

‘I have.’

‘I only repeat their words.’

Mary Shelton bursts into tears. Henry looks at her and says humbly, ‘Mistress Shelton, forgive me. Sweetheart, I did not mean to make you cry.’

Henry is in pain. His leg has been bound up by the surgeons, the leg he injured in the joust over ten years ago; it is prone to ulcerate, and it seems that the recent fall has opened a channel into his flesh. All his bravado has melted away; it is like the days when he dreamed of his brother Arthur, the days he was run ragged by the dead. It is the second child she has lost, he says that night, in private: though who knows, there could have been others, the women keep these things to themselves till their bellies show, we do not know how many of my heirs have bled away. What does God want of me now? What must I do to please him? I see he will not give me male children.

He, Cromwell, stands back while Thomas Cranmer, pale and smooth, takes charge of the king’s bereavement. We much misconstrue our creator, the archbishop says, if we blame him for every accident of fallen nature.

I thought he regarded every sparrow that falls, the king says, truculent as a child. Then why does he not regard England?

Cranmer will have some reason. He hardly listens. He thinks of the women about Anne: wise as serpents, mild as doves. Already a certain line is being spun, about the day’s events; it is spun in the queen’s chamber. Anne Boleyn is not to blame for this misfortune. It is her uncle Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, who is at fault. When the king took his tumble, it was Norfolk who burst in on the queen, shouting that Henry was dead, and giving her such a shock that the unborn heart stopped.

And further: it is Henry’s fault. It is because of the way he has been behaving, mooning over old Seymour’s daughter, dropping letters in her place in chapel and sending her sweetmeats from his table. When the queen saw he loved another, she was struck to the quick. The sorrow she has taken has made her viscera revolt and reject the tender child.

Just be clear, Henry says coldly, when he stands at the foot of the lady’s bed and hears this reading of events. Just be clear on this, madam. If any woman is to blame, it is the one I am looking at. I will speak to you when you are better. And now fare you well, because I am going to Whitehall to prepare for the Parliament, and you had better stay in bed till you are restored. Which I myself, I doubt I will ever be.

Then Anne shouts after him – or so Lady Rochford says – ‘Stay, stay my lord, I will soon give you another child, and all the quicker now Katherine is dead…’

‘I do not see how that will speed the business.’ Henry limps away. Then in his own rooms the privy chamber gentlemen move carefully about him, as if he were made of glass, making their preparations for departure. Henry is repenting now of his hasty pronouncement, because if the queen stays behind all the women must stay behind, and he will not be able to feast his eyes on his little bun-face, Jane. Further reasoning follows him, conveyed by Anne in a note perhaps: this lost foetus, conceived when Katherine was alive, is inferior to the conception that will follow, at some unknown date, but soon. For even if the child had lived and grown up, there would have been some who still doubted his claim; whereas now Henry is a widower, no one in Christendom can dispute that his marriage to Anne is licit, and any son they beget is heir to England.

‘Well, what do you make of that chain of reasoning?’ Henry demands. Leg stout with bandages, he heaves himself into a chair in his private rooms. ‘No, do not confer, I want an answer from each of you, each Thomas alone.’ He grimaces, though he means to smile. ‘Do you know the confusion you cause among the French? They have made of you one composite counsellor, and in dispatches they call you Dr Chramuel.’

They exchange glances, he and Cranmer: the pork butcher and the angel. But the king does not wait for their advice, joint or several; he talks on, like a man sticking a dagger into himself to prove how much it hurts. ‘If a king cannot have a son, if he cannot do that, it matters not what else he can do. The victories, the spoils of victory, the just laws he makes, the famous courts he holds, these are as nothing.’

It is true. To maintain the stability of the realm: this is the compact a king makes with his people. If he cannot have a son of his own, he must find an heir, name him before his country falls into doubt and confusion, faction and conspiracy. And who can Henry name, that will not be laughed at? The king says, ‘When I remember what I did for the present queen, how I raised her from a gentleman’s daughter…I cannot think now why I did it.’ He looks at them as if to say, do you know, Dr Chramuel? ‘It seems to me,’ he is groping, perplexed, for the right phrases, ‘it seems to me I was somehow dishonestly led into this marriage.’

He, Cromwell, eyes the other half of himself, as if through a mirror: Cranmer looks thrown. ‘How, dishonestly?’ the archbishop asks.

‘I feel sure I was not in my clear mind then. Not as I am now.’

‘But sir,’ Cranmer says. ‘Majesty. Saving Your Grace, your mind cannot be clear. You have suffered a great loss.’

Two, in fact, he thinks: today your son was born dead, and your first wife buried. No wonder you tremble.

‘It seems to me I was seduced,’ Henry says, ‘that is to say, I was practised upon, perhaps by charms, perhaps by spells. Women do use such things. And if that were so, then the marriage would be null, would it not?’

Cranmer holds out his hands, like a man trying to send back the tide. He sees his queen vanishing into thin air: his queen who has done so much for true religion. ‘Sir, sir…Majesty…’

‘Oh, peace!’ Henry says: as if it were Cranmer who had started it. ‘Cromwell, when you were soldiering, did you ever hear of anything that would heal a leg like mine? I have knocked it again now and the surgeons say the foul humours must come out. They fear that the rot has got as far as the bone. But do not tell anybody. I would not like word to spread abroad. Will you send a page to find Thomas Vicary? I think he must bleed me. I need some relief. Give you good night.’ He adds, almost under his breath, ‘For I suppose even this day must end.’

Dr Chramuel goes out. In an antechamber, one of him turns to the other. ‘He will be different tomorrow,’ the archbishop says.

‘Yes. A man in pain will say anything.’

‘We should not heed it.’

‘No.’

They are like two men crossing thin ice; leaning into each other, taking tiny, timid steps. As if that will do you any good, when it begins to crack on every side.

Cranmer says uncertainly, ‘Grief for the child sways him. Would he wait so long for Anne, to throw her over so quickly? They will soon be perfect friends.’

‘Besides,’ he says. ‘He is not a man to admit he was wrong. He may have his doubts about his marriage. But God help anyone else who raises them.’

‘We must calm these doubts,’ Cranmer says. ‘Between us we must do it.’

‘He would like to be the Emperor’s friend. Now that Katherine is not there to cause ill-feeling between them. And so we must face the fact that the present queen is…’ He hesitates to say, superfluous; he hesitates to say, an obstacle to peace.

‘She is in his way,’ Cranmer says bluntly. ‘But he will not sacrifice her? Surely he will not. Not to please Emperor Charles or any man. They need not think it. Rome need not think it. He will never revert.’

‘No. Have some faith in our good master to maintain the church.’

Cranmer hears the words he has left unspoken: the king does not need Anne, to help him do that.

Although, he says to Cranmer. It is hard to remember the king, before Anne; hard to imagine him without her. She hovers around him. She reads over his shoulder. She gets into his dreams. Even when she’s lying next to him it’s not close enough for her. ‘I tell you what we’ll do,’ he says. He squeezes Cranmer’s arm. ‘Let’s give a dinner, shall we, and invite the Duke of Norfolk?’

Cranmer shrinks. ‘Norfolk? Why would we?’

‘For reconciliation,’ he says breezily. ‘I fear that on the day of the king’s accident, I may have, um, slighted his pretensions. In a tent. When he raced in. Well-founded pretensions,’ he adds reverently. ‘For is he not our senior peer? No, I pity the duke from the bottom of my heart.’

‘What did you do, Cromwell?’ The archbishop is pale. ‘What did you do in that tent? Did you lay violent hands upon him, as I hear you did recently with the Duke of Suffolk?’

‘What, Brandon? I was only moving him.’

‘When he was not of a mind to be moved.’

‘It was for his own good. If I had left him there in the king’s presence, Charles would have talked himself into the Tower. He was slandering the queen, you see.’ And any slander, any doubt, he thinks, must come from Henry, out of his own mouth, and not from mine, or any other man’s. ‘Please, please,’ he says, ‘let us have a dinner. You must give it at Lambeth, Norfolk will not come to me, he will think I plan to put a sleeping draught in the claret and convey him on board ship to be sold into slavery. He will like to come to you. I will supply the venison. We will have jellies in the shape of the duke’s major castles. It will be no cost to you. And no trouble to your cooks.’

Cranmer laughs. At last, he laughs. It has been a hard-fought campaign, to get him even to smile. ‘As you wish, Thomas. We shall have a dinner.’

The archbishop sets his hands on his upper arms, kisses him right and left. The kiss of peace. He does not feel soothed, or assuaged, as he returns to his own rooms through the palace unnaturally quiet: no music from distant rooms, perhaps the murmur of prayer. He tries to imagine the lost child, the manikin, its limbs budding, its face old and wise.

Few men have seen such a thing. Certainly he has not. In Italy, once, he stood holding up a light for a surgeon, while in a sealed room draped in shadows he sliced a dead man apart to see what made him work. It was a fearful night, the stench of bowel and blood clogging the throat, and the artists who had jostled and bribed for a place tried to elbow him away: but he stood firm, for he had guaranteed to do so, he had said he would hold the light. And so he was among the elect of that company, the luminaries, who saw muscle stripped from bone. But he has never seen inside a woman, still less a gravid corpse; no surgeon, even for money, would perform that work for an audience.

He thinks of Katherine, embalmed and entombed. Her spirit cut free, and gone to seek out her first husband: wandering now, calling his name. Will Arthur be shocked to see her, she such a stout old woman, and he still a skinny child?

King Arthur of blessed memory could not have a son. And what happened after Arthur? We don’t know. But we know his glory vanished from the world.

He thinks of Anne’s chosen motto, painted up with her coat of arms: ‘The Most Happy’.

He had said to Jane Rochford, ‘How is my lady the queen?’

Rochford had said, ‘Sitting up, lamenting.’

He had meant, has she lost much blood?

Katherine was not without sin, but now her sins are taken off her. They are all heaped upon Anne: the shadow who flits after her, the woman draped in night. The old queen dwells in the radiance of God’s presence, her dead infants swaddled at her feet, but Anne dwells in this sinful world below, stewed in her childbed sweat, in her soiled sheet. But her hands and feet are cold and her heart is like a stone.

So here’s the Duke of Norfolk, expecting to be fed. Dressed in his best, or at least what’s good enough for Lambeth Palace, he looks like a piece of rope chewed by a dog, or a piece of gristle left on the side of a trencher. Bright fierce eyes under unruly brows. Hair an iron stubble. His person is meagre, sinewy, and he smells of horses and leather and the armourer’s shop, and mysteriously of furnaces or perhaps of cooling ash: dust-dry, pungent. He fears no one alive except Henry Tudor, who could at a whim take his dukedom away, but he fears the dead. They say that at any of his houses at close of day you can hear him slamming the shutters and shooting the bolts, in case the late Cardinal Wolsey is blowing through a window or slithering up a stair. If Wolsey wanted Norfolk he would lie quiet inside a table top, breathing along the grain of the wood; he would ooze through a keyhole, or flop down a chimney with a soft flurry like a soot-stained dove.

When Anne Boleyn came up in the world, and she a niece of his illustrious family, the duke thought his troubles were over. Because he has troubles; the greatest nobleman has his rivals, his ill-wishers, his defamers. But he believed that, with Anne crowned in due time, he would be always at the king’s right hand. It hasn’t worked out like that, and the duke has become disaffected. The match hasn’t brought the Howards the riches and honours he expected. Anne has taken the rewards for herself, and Thomas Cromwell has taken them. The duke thinks Anne should be guided by her male kin, but she won’t be guided; in fact she has made it plain that she sees herself, and not the duke, as the head of the family now. Which is unnatural, in the duke’s view: a woman cannot be head of anything, subordination and submission is her role. Let her be a queen and a rich woman, still she should know her place, or be taught it. Howard sometimes grumbles in public: not about Henry, but about Anne Boleyn. And he has found it expedient to spend his time in his own country, harassing his duchess, who often writes to Thomas Cromwell with complaints of his treatment of her. As if he, Thomas Cromwell, could turn the duke into one of the world’s great lovers, or even into a semblance of a reasonable man.

But then when Anne’s latest pregnancy was known, the duke had come to court, flanked by his smirking retainers and soon joined by his peculiar son. Surrey is a young man with a great conceit of himself as handsome, talented and lucky. But his face is lopsided, and he does himself no favours, in having his hair cut like a bowl. Hans Holbein admits he finds him a challenge. Surrey is here tonight at Lambeth, forfeiting an evening in the brothel. His eyes roam about the room; perhaps he thinks Cranmer keeps naked girls behind the arras.

‘Well, now,’ says the duke, rubbing his hands. ‘When are you coming down to see me at Kenninghall, Thomas Cromwell? We have good hunting, by God, we have something to shoot at every season of the year. And we can get you a bedwarmer if you want one, a common woman of the type you like, we have a maidservant just now,’ the duke sucks in his breath, ‘you should see her titties.’ His knotty fingers knead the air.

‘Well, if she’s yours,’ he murmurs. ‘I wouldn’t like to deprive you.’

The duke shoots a glance at Cranmer. Perhaps one ought not to talk about women? But then, Cranmer’s not a proper archbishop, not in Norfolk’s view; he’s some petty clerk Henry found in the fens one year, who promised to do anything he asked in return for a mitre and two good meals a day.

‘By God, you look ill, Cranmer,’ the duke says with gloomy relish. ‘You look as if you can’t keep the flesh on your bones. No more can I. Look at this.’ The duke thrusts himself back from the table, elbowing a poor youth who stands ready with the wine jug. He stands up and parts his gown, thrusting out a skinny calf. ‘What do you make of that?’

That’s horrible, he agrees. It’s humiliation, surely, that wears Thomas Howard to the bone? In company his niece interrupts him and talks over him. She laughs at his holy medals and the relics he wears, some of them very sacred. At table she leans towards him, says, Come, uncle, take a crumb from my hand, you are wasting away. ‘And I am,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how you do it, Cromwell. Look at you, all fleshed out in your gown, an ogre would eat you roasted.’

‘Ah, well,’ he says, smiling, ‘that’s the risk I run.’

‘I think you drink some powder that you got in Italy. Keeps you sleek. I suppose you wouldn’t part with the secret?’

‘Eat up your jelly, my lord,’ he says patiently. ‘If I do hear of a powder I will get a sample for you. My only secret is that I sleep at night. I am at peace with my maker. And of course,’ he adds, leaning back at his ease, ‘I have no enemies.’

‘What?’ says the duke. His eyebrows shoot up into his hair. He serves himself some more of Thurston’s jelly crenellations, the scarlet and the pale, the airy stone and the bloody brick. As he swills them around his mouth he opines on several topics. Chiefly Wiltshire, the queen’s father. Who should have brought Anne up properly and with more attention to discipline. But no, he was too busy boasting about her in French, boasting about what she would become.

‘Well, she did become,’ says young Surrey. ‘Didn’t she, my lord father?’

‘I think it’s she who’s wasting me away,’ the duke says. ‘She knows all about powders. They say she keeps poisoners in her house. You know what she did to old Bishop Fisher.’

‘What did she do?’ young Surrey says.

‘Do you know nothing, boy? Fisher’s cook was paid to put a powder in the broth. It nigh killed him.’

‘That would have been no loss,’ the boy says. ‘He was a traitor.’

‘Yes,’ Norfolk says, ‘but in those days his treason stood still to be proved. This is not Italy, boy. We have courts of law. Well, the old fellow pulled around, but he was never well after. Henry had the cook boiled alive.’

‘But he never confessed,’ he says: he, Cromwell. ‘So we cannot say for sure the Boleyns did it.’

Norfolk snorts. ‘They had motive. Mary had better watch herself.’

‘I agree,’ he says. ‘Though I do not think poison is the chief danger to her.’

‘What then?’ Surrey says.

‘Bad advice, my lord.’

‘You think she should listen to you, Cromwell?’ Young Surrey now lays down his knife and begins to complain. Noblemen, he laments, are not respected as they were in the days when England was great. The present king keeps about himself a collection of men of base degree, and no good will come of it. Cranmer creeps forward in his chair, as if to intervene, but Surrey gives him a glare that says, you’re exactly who I mean, archbishop.

He nods to a boy to refill the young man’s glass. ‘You do not suit your talk to your audience, sir.’

‘Why should I?’ Surrey says.

‘Thomas Wyatt says you are studying to write verse. I am fond of poems, as I passed my youth among the Italians. If you would favour me, I would like to read some.’

‘No doubt you would,’ Surrey says. ‘But I keep them for my friends.’

When he gets home his son comes out to greet him. ‘Have you heard what the queen is doing? She has risen from her childbed and things incredible are spoken of her. They say she was seen toasting cobnuts over the fire in her chamber, tossing them about in a latten pan, ready to make poisoned sweetmeats for the Lady Mary.’

‘It would be someone else with the latten pan,’ he says, smiling. ‘A minion. Weston. That boy Mark.’

Gregory sticks stubbornly by his version: ‘It was herself. Toasting. And the king came in, and frowned to see her at the occupation, for he didn’t know what it meant, and he has suspicions of her, you see. What are you at, he asked, and Anne the queen said, oh my lord, I am but making sweetmeats to reward the poor women who stand at the gate and call out their greetings to me. The king said, is it even so, sweetheart? Then bless you. And so he was utterly misled, you see.’

‘And where did this happen, Gregory? You see, she is at Greenwich, and the king at Whitehall.’

‘No matter,’ Gregory says cheerfully. ‘In France witches can fly, latten pan and cobnuts and all. And that is where she learned it. In truth the whole Boleyn affinity are become witches, to witch up a boy for her, for the king fears he can give her none.’

His smile becomes pained. ‘Do not spread this about the household.’

Gregory says happily, ‘Too late, the household has spread it about me.’

He remembers Jane Rochford saying to him, it must be two years back: ‘The queen has boasted she will give Katherine’s daughter a breakfast she will not recover from.’

Merry at breakfast, dead by dinner. It was what they used to say about the sweating sickness, that killed his wife and daughters. And unnatural ends, when they occur, are usually swifter than that; they cut down at a stroke.

‘I am going to my rooms,’ he says. ‘I have to draw up a paper. Do not let me be interrupted. Richard may come in if he will.’

‘What about me, can I come in? For instance, if the house were on fire, you would like to hear of it?’

‘Not from you. Why would I believe you?’ He pats his son. Hurries off to his private room and shuts the door.

The meeting with Norfolk has, on the face of it, no pay-off. But. He takes his paper. At the top he writes:

THOMAS BOLEYN

This is the lady’s father. He pictures him in his mind. An upright man, still lithe, proud of his looks, who pays great attention to turning himself out, just like his son George: a man to test the ingenuity of London goldsmiths, and to swivel around his fingers jewels which he says have been given him by foreign rulers. These many years he has served Henry as a diplomat, a trade for which he is fitted by his cold emollience. He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he’s pleasuring himself.

Still, he knew how to act when the chance presented itself, how to set his family climbing, climbing, to the highest branches of the tree. It’s cold up there when the wind blows, the cutting wind of 1536.

As we know, his title of Earl of Wiltshire seems to him insufficient to indicate his special status, so he has invented for himself a French title, Monseigneur. And it gives him pleasure, to be so addressed. He lets it be known this title should be universally adopted. From whether the courtiers comply, you can tell a great deal about where they stand.

He writes:

Monseigneur: All the Boleyns. Their women. Their chaplains. Their servants.

All the Boleyn toadies in the privy chamber, that is to say,

Henry Norris

Francis Weston

William Brereton, etc.

But plain old ‘Wiltshire’, delivered in accents brisk:

The Duke of Norfolk.

Sir Nicholas Carew (of the privy chamber) who is cousin to Edward Seymour, and married to the sister of:

Sir Francis Bryan, cousin to the Boleyns, but cousin to the Seymours also, and friend of:

Mr Treasurer, William Fitzwilliam.

He looks at this list. He adds the names of two grandees:

The Marquis of Exeter, Henry Courtenay.

Henry Pole, Lord Montague.

These are the old families of England; they draw their claims from ancient lines; they smart, more than any of us, under the pretensions of the Boleyns.

He rolls up his paper. Norfolk, Carew, Fitz. Francis Bryan. The Courtenays, the Montagues, and their ilk. And Suffolk, who hates Anne. It is a set of names. You cannot take too much from it. These people are not necessarily friends of each other. They are just, to one degree and another, friends of the old dispensation and enemies of the Boleyns.

He closes his eyes. He sits, his breathing calm. In his mind, a picture appears. A lofty hall. Into which he commands a table.

The trestles are lugged up by menials.

The top is fixed in place.

Liveried officials unroll the cloth, tweaking and smoothing; like the king’s tablecloth, it is blessed, its attendants murmuring a Latin formula as they stand back to take a view and even up the edges.

So much for the table. Now for somewhere for the guests to sit.

The servants scrape over the floor a weighty chair, the Howard coat of arms carved into its back. That’s for the Duke of Norfolk, who lowers his bony bum. ‘What have you got,’ he asks plaintively, ‘to tempt my appetite, Crumb?’

Now bring up another chair, he commands the servants. Set it down at my lord Norfolk’s right hand.

This one is for Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter. Who says, ‘Cromwell, my wife insisted on coming!’

‘It does my heart good to see you, Lady Gertrude,’ he says, bowing. ‘Take your seat.’ Until this dinner, he has always tried to avoid this rash and interfering woman. But now he puts on his polite face: ‘Any friend of the Lady Mary is welcome to dine.’

‘The Princess Mary,’ Gertrude Courtenay snaps.

‘As you will, my lady,’ he sighs.

‘Now here comes Henry Pole!’ Norfolk exclaims. ‘Will he steal my dinner?’

‘There is food for all,’ he says. ‘Bring up another chair for Lord Montague. A fitting chair, for a man of royal blood.’

‘We call it a throne,’ Montague says. ‘By the way, my mother is here.’

Lady Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury. Rightful queen of England, according to some. King Henry has taken a wise course with her and all her family. He has honoured them, cherished them, kept them close. Much good it’s done him: they still think the Tudors are usurpers, though the countess is fond of Princess Mary, whose childhood governor she was: honouring her more for her royal mother, Katherine, than for her father, whom she regards as the spawn of Welsh cattle-raiders.

Now the countess, in his mind, creaks to her place. She stares around her. ‘You have a magnificent hall here, Cromwell,’ she says, peeved.

‘The rewards of vice,’ says her son Montague.

He bows again. He will swallow any insult, at this point.

‘Well,’ Norfolk says, ‘where’s my first dish?’

‘Patience, my lord,’ he says.

He takes his own place, a humble three-legged stool, down at the end of the table. He gazes up at his betters. ‘In a moment the platters will come in. But first, shall we say a grace?’

He glances up at the beams. Up there are carved and painted the faces of the dead: More, Fisher, the cardinal, Katherine the queen. Below them, the flower of living England. Let us hope the roof doesn’t fall in.

The day after he, Thomas Cromwell, has exercised his imagination in this way, he feels the need to clarify his position, in the real world; and to add to the guest list. His daydream has not got as far as the actual feast, so he does not know what dishes he is going to offer. He must cook up something good, or the magnates will storm out, pulling off the cloth and kicking his servants.

So: he now speaks to the Seymours, privately yet plainly. ‘As long as the king holds by the queen that is now, I will hold by her too. But if he rejects her, I must reconsider.’

‘So you have no interest of your own in this?’ Edward Seymour says sceptically.

‘I represent the king’s interests. That is what I am for.’

Edward knows he will get no further. ‘Still…’ he says. Anne will soon be recovered from her mishap and Henry can have her back in bed, but it is clear that the prospect has not made him lose interest in Jane. The game has changed, and Jane must be repositioned. The challenge puts a glint in Seymour eyes. Now Anne has failed again, it is possible that Henry may wish to remarry. The whole court is talking of it. It is Anne Boleyn’s former success that allows them to imagine it.

‘You Seymours should not raise your hopes,’ he says. ‘He falls out with Anne and falls in again, and then he cannot do too much for her. That is how they have always been.’

Tom Seymour says, ‘Why would one prefer a tough old hen to a plump little chick? What use is it?’

‘Soup,’ he says: but not so that Tom can hear.

The Seymours are in mourning, though not for the dowager Katherine. Anthony Oughtred is dead, the governor of Jersey, and Jane’s sister Elizabeth is left a widow.

Tom Seymour says, ‘If the king takes on Jane as his mistress, or whatever, we should look to make some great match for Bess.’

Edward says, ‘Just stick to the matter in hand, brother.’

The brisk young widow comes to court, to help the family in their campaign. He’d thought they called her Lizzie, this young woman, but it seems that was just her husband’s name for her, and to her family she’s Bess. He is glad, though he doesn’t know why. It is unreasonable of him to think other women shouldn’t have his wife’s name. Bess is no great beauty, and darker than her sister, but she has a confident vivacity that compels the eye. ‘Be kind to Jane, Master Secretary,’ Bess says. ‘She is not proud, as some people think. They wonder why she doesn’t speak to them, but it’s only because she can’t think what to say.’

‘But she will speak to me.’

‘She will listen.’

‘An attractive quality in women.’

‘An attractive quality in anyone. Wouldn’t you say? Though Jane above all women looks to men to tell her what she should do.’

‘Then does she do it?’

‘Not necessarily.’ She laughs. Her fingertips brush the back of his hand. ‘Come. She is ready for you.’

Warmed by the sun of the King of England’s desire, which maiden would not glow? Not Jane. She is in deeper black, it seems, than the rest of her family, and she volunteers that she has been praying for the soul of the late Katherine: not that she needs it, for surely, if any woman has gone straight to Heaven…

‘Jane,’ Edward Seymour says, ‘I am warning you now and I want you to listen carefully and heed what I say. When you come into the king’s presence, it must be as if no such woman as the late Katherine ever existed. If he hears her name in your mouth, he will cease his favour, upon the instant.’

‘Look,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘Cromwell here wants to know, are you truly and entirely a virgin?’

He could blush for her. ‘If you aren’t, Mistress Jane,’ he says, ‘it can be managed. But you must tell us now.’

Her pale, oblivious regard: ‘What?’

Tom Seymour: ‘Jane, even you must understand the question.’

‘Is it correct that no one has ever asked for you in marriage? No contract or understanding?’ He feels desperate. ‘Did you never like anybody, Jane?’

‘I liked William Dormer. But he married Mary Sidney.’ She looks up: one flash of those ice-blue eyes. ‘I hear they’re very miserable.’

‘The Dormers didn’t think we were good enough,’ Tom says. ‘But now look.’

He says, ‘It is to your credit, Mistress Jane, that you have formed no attachments till your family were ready to marry you. For young women often do, and then it ends badly.’ He feels that he should clarify the point. ‘Men will tell you that they are so in love with you that it is making them ill. They will say they have stopped eating and sleeping. They say that they fear unless they can have you they will die. Then, the moment you give in, they get up and walk away and lose all interest. The next week they will pass you by as if they don’t know you.’

‘Did you do this, Master Secretary?’ Jane asks.

He hesitates.

‘Well?’ Tom Seymour says. ‘We would like to know.’

‘I probably did. When I was young. I am telling you in case your brothers cannot bring themselves to tell you. It is not a pretty thing for a man to have to admit to his sister.’

‘So you see,’ Edward urges. ‘You must not give in to the king.’

Jane says, ‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘His honeyed words –’ Edward begins.

‘His what?’

The Emperor’s ambassador has been skulking indoors, and won’t come out to meet Thomas Cromwell. He would not go up to Peterborough for Katherine’s funeral because she was not being buried as a queen, and now he says he has to observe his mourning period. Finally, a meeting is arranged: the ambassador will happen to be coming back from Mass at the church of Austin Friars, while Thomas Cromwell, now in residence at the Rolls House at Chancery Lane, has called by to inspect his building work, extensions to his principal house nearby. ‘Ambassador!’ he cries: as if he were wildly surprised.

The bricks ready for use today were fired last summer, when the king was still on his progress through the western counties; the clay for them was dug the winter before, and the frost was breaking down the clumps while he, Cromwell, was trying to break down Thomas More. Waiting for Chapuys to appear, he has been haranguing the bricklayers’ gaffer about water penetration, which he definitely does not want. Now he takes hold of Chapuys and steers him away from the noise and dust of the sawpit. Eustache is seething with questions; you can feel them, jumping and agitating in the muscles of his arm, buzzing in the weave of his garments. ‘This Semer girl…’

It is a lightless day, still, the air frigid. ‘Today would be a good day to fish for pike,’ he says.

The ambassador struggles to master his dismay. ‘Surely your servants…if you must have this fish…’

‘Ah, Eustache, I see you do not understand the sport. Have no fear, I will teach you. What could be better for the health than to be out from dawn to dusk, hours and hours on a muddy bank, with the trees dripping above, watching your own breath on the air, alone or with one good companion?’

Various ideas are fighting inside the ambassador’s head. On the one hand, hours and hours with Cromwell: during which he might drop his guard, say anything. On the other hand, what good am I to my Imperial master if my knees seize up entirely, and I have to be carried to court in a litter? ‘Could we not fish for it in the summer?’ he asks, without much hope.

‘I could not risk your person. A summer pike would pull you in.’ He relents. ‘The lady you mean is called Seymour. As in, “Ambassador, I would like to see more of you.” Though some old folk pronounce it Semer.’

‘I make no progress in this tongue,’ the ambassador complains. ‘Anyone may say his name any way he likes, different on different days. What I hear is, the family is ancient, and the woman herself not so young.’

‘She served the dowager princess, you know. She was fond of Katherine. She lamented, in fact, what had befallen her. She is troubled about the Lady Mary, and they say she has sent her messages to be of good cheer. If the king continues his favour to her, she may be able to do Mary some good.’

‘Mm.’ The ambassador looks sceptical. ‘I have heard this, and also that she is of a very meek and pious character. But I fear there may be a scorpion lurking under the honey. I would like to see Mistress Semer, can you arrange that? Not to meet her. To glimpse her.’

‘I am surprised that you take so much interest. I should have thought you would be more interested in which French princess Henry will marry, should he dissolve his present arrangements.’

Now the ambassador is stretched tight on the ladder of terror. Better the devil you know? Better Anne Boleyn, than a new threat, a new treaty, a new alliance between France and England?

‘But surely not!’ he explodes. ‘Cremuel, you told me that this was a fairy tale! You have expressed yourself a friend of my master, you will not countenance a French match?’

‘Calmly, ambassador, calmly. I do not claim I can govern Henry. And after all, he may decide to continue with his present marriage, or if not, to live chaste.’

‘You are laughing!’ the ambassador accuses. ‘Cremuel! You are laughing behind your hand.’

And so he is. The builders skirt around them, giving them space, rough London craftsmen with tools stuck in their belts. Penitent, he says, ‘Do not get your hopes up. When the king and his woman have one of their reconciliations, it goes hard with anyone who has spoken out against her in the interim.’

‘You would maintain her? You would support her?’ The ambassador’s whole body has stiffened, as if he had really been on that riverbank all day. ‘She may be your co-religionist –’

‘What?’ He opens his eyes wide. ‘My co-religionist? Like my master the king, I am a faithful son of the holy Catholic church. Only just now we are not in communion with the Pope.’

‘Let me put it another way,’ Chapuys says. He squints up at the grey London sky, as if seeking help from above. ‘Let us say your ties to her are material, not spiritual. I understand that you have had preferment from her. I am aware of that.’

‘Do not mistake me. I owe Anne nothing. I have preferment from the king, from no one else.’

‘You have sometimes called her your dear friend. I remember occasions.’

‘I have sometimes called you my dear friend. But you’re not, are you?’

Chapuys digests the point. ‘There is nothing I wish to see more,’ he says, ‘than peace between our nations. What could better mark an ambassador’s success in his post, than a rapprochement after years of trouble? And now we have the opportunity.’

‘Now Katherine is gone.’

Chapuys does not argue with that. He just winds his cloak closer about him. ‘The king has got no good of the concubine, and will get none now. No power in Europe recognises his marriage. Even the heretics do not recognise it, though she has done her best to make friends of them. What profit can there be to you, in keeping matters as they are: the king unhappy, Parliament fretful, the nobility fractious, the whole country revolted by the woman’s pretensions?’

Slow drops of rain have begun to fall: ponderous, icy. Chapuys glances up again irritably, as if God were undermining him at this crucial point. Taking a grip on the ambassador once more, he tows him over the rough ground towards shelter. The builders have put up a canopy, and he turns them out, saying, ‘Give us a minute, boys, will you?’ Chapuys huddles by the brazier, and grows confidential. ‘I hear the king talks of witchcraft,’ he whispers. ‘He says that he was seduced into the marriage by certain charms and false practices. I see he does not confide in you. But he has spoken to his confessor. If this is so, if he entered into the match in a state of entrancement, then he might find he is not married at all, and free to take a new wife.’

He gazes over the ambassador’s shoulder. Look, he says, this is how it will be: in a year these damp and freezing spaces will be inhabited rooms. His hand sketches the line of the jettied upper storeys, the glazed bays.

Inventories for this project: lime and sand, oak timbers and special cements, spades and shovels, baskets and ropes, tackets, pin nails, roof nails, lead pipes; tiles yellow and tiles blue, window locks, latches, bolts and hinges, iron door handles in the shape of roses; gilding, painting, 2 lb. of frankincense to perfume the new rooms; 6d per day per labourer, and the cost of candles for labour by night.

‘My friend,’ Chapuys says, ‘Anne is desperate and dangerous. Strike first, before she strikes you. Remember how she brought down Wolsey.’

His past lies about him like a burnt house. He has been building, building, but it has taken him years to sweep up the mess.

At the Rolls House, he finds his son, who is packing to go away for the next phase of his education. ‘Gregory, you know St Uncumber? You say that women pray to her to be rid of useless husbands. Now, is there a saint that men can pray to if they wish to be quit of their wives?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Gregory is shocked. ‘The women pray because they have no other means. A man can consult a cleric to find why the marriage is not licit. Or he can chase her away and pay her money to stay in a separate house. As the Duke of Norfolk pays his wife.’

He nods. ‘That’s very helpful, Gregory.’

Anne Boleyn comes up to Whitehall to celebrate the feast of St Matthias with the king. She has changed, all in a season. She is light, starved, she looks as she did in her days of waiting, those futile years of negotiations before he, Thomas Cromwell, came along and cut the knot. Her flamboyant liveliness has faded to something austere, narrow, almost nun-like. But she does not have a nun’s composure. Her fingers play with the jewels at her girdle, tug at her sleeves, touch and retouch the jewels at her throat.

Lady Rochford says, ‘She thought that when she was queen, she would take comfort in going over the days of her coronation, hour by hour. But she says she has forgotten them. When she tries to remember, it’s as if it happened to someone else, and she wasn’t there. She didn’t tell me this, of course. She told brother George.’

From the queen’s rooms comes a dispatch: a prophetess has told her that she will not bear Henry a son while his daughter Mary is alive.

You have to admire it, he says to his nephew. She is on the offensive. She is like a serpent, you do not know when she will strike.

He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist. He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does. He notes, as he has these many years, the careful deployment of her flashing eyes. He wonders what it would take to make her panic.

The king sings:

‘My most desire my hand may reach,

My will is always at my hand;

Me need not long for to beseech,

Her that has power me to command.’

So he thinks. He can beseech and beseech, but it has no effect on Jane.

But the nation’s business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches. An act to dissolve the small monasteries, those houses worth under two hundred pounds a year. An act to set up a Court of Augmentations, a new body to deal with the inflow of revenue from these monasteries: Richard Riche to be its chancellor.

In March, Parliament knocks back his new poor law. It was too much for the Commons to digest, that rich men might have some duty to the poor; that if you get fat, as gentlemen of England do, on the wool trade, you have some responsibility to the men turned off the land, the labourers without labour, the sowers without a field. England needs roads, forts, harbours, bridges. Men need work. It’s a shame to see them begging their bread, when honest labour could keep the realm secure. Can we not put them together, the hands and the task?

But Parliament cannot see how it is the state’s job to create work. Are not these matters in God’s hands, and is not poverty and dereliction part of his eternal order? To everything there is a season: a time to starve and a time to thieve. If rain falls for six months solid and rots the grain in the fields, there must be providence in it; for God knows his trade. It is an outrage to the rich and enterprising, to suggest that they should pay an income tax, only to put bread in the mouths of the workshy. And if Secretary Cromwell argues that famine provokes criminality: well, are there not hangmen enough?

The king himself comes to the Commons to argue for the law. He wants to be Henry the Beloved, a father to his people, a shepherd to his flock. But the Commons sit stony-faced on their benches and stare him out. The wreckage of the measure is comprehensive. ‘It has ended up as an act for the whipping of beggars,’ Richard Riche says. ‘It is more against the poor than for them.’

‘Perhaps we can bring it in again,’ Henry says. ‘In a better year. Do not lose heart, Master Secretary.’

So: there will be better years, will there? He will keep trying; sneak it past them when they’re off their guard, start off the measure in the Lords and face down the opposition…there are ways and ways with Parliament, but there are times he wishes he could kick the members back to their own shires, because he could get on faster without them. He says, ‘If I were king, I would not take it so quietly. I would make them shake in their shoes.’

Richard Riche is Mr Speaker in this Parliament; he says nervously, ‘Don’t incense the king, sir. You know what More used to say. “If the lion knew his own strength, it were hard to rule him.”’

‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘That consoles me mightily, Sir Purse, a text from the grave from that blood-soaked hypocrite. Has he anything else to say about the situation? Because if so I’m going to get his head back off his daughter and boot it up and down Whitehall till he shuts up for good and all.’ He bursts into laughter. ‘The Commons. God rot them. Their heads are empty. They never think higher than their pockets.’

Still, if his fellows in Parliament are worried about their incomes, he is buoyant about his own. Though the lesser monastic houses are to be dissolved, they may apply for exemptions, and all these applications come to him, accompanied by a fee or a pension. The king will not keep all his new lands in his own name, but lease them out, so continual application is made to him, for this place or that, for manors, farms, pasture; each applicant offers him a little something, a one-off payment or an annuity, an annuity that will pass to Gregory in time. It’s the way business has always been done, favours, sweeteners, a timely transfer of funds to secure attention, or a promise of split proceeds: just now there is so much business, so many transactions, so many offers he can hardly, in civility, decline. No man in England works harder than he does. Say what you like about Thomas Cromwell, he offers good value for what he takes. And he’s always ready to lend: William Fitzwilliam, Sir Nicholas Carew, that ageing one-eyed reprobate Francis Bryan.

He gets Sir Francis round and gets him drunk. He, Cromwell, can trust himself; when he was young, he learned to drink with Germans. It’s over a year since Francis Bryan quarrelled with George Boleyn: over what, Francis hardly remembers, but the grudge remains, and until his legs go from under him he is able to act out the more florid bits of the row, standing up and waving his arms. Of his cousin Anne he says, ‘You like to know where you are with a woman. Is she a harlot, or a lady? Anne wants you to treat her like the Virgin Mary, but she also wants you to put your cash on the table, do the business and get out.’

Sir Francis is intermittently pious, as conspicuous sinners tend to be. Lent is here: ‘It is time for you to enter into your yearly frenzy of penitence, is it not?’

Francis pushes up the patch on his blind eye, and rubs the scar tissue; it itches, he explains. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘Wyatt’s had her.’

He, Thomas Cromwell, waits.

But then Francis puts his head down on the table, and begins to snore.

‘The Vicar of Hell,’ he says thoughtfully. He calls for boys to come in. ‘Take Sir Francis home to his own people. But wrap him up warm, we may need his testimony in the days to come.’

He wonders exactly how much you’d have to leave on the table, for Anne. She’s cost Henry his honour, his peace of mind. To him, Cromwell, she is just another trader. He admires the way she’s laid out her goods. He personally doesn’t want to buy; but there are customers enough.

Now Edward Seymour is promoted into the king’s privy chamber, a singular mark of favour. And the king says to him, ‘I think I should have young Rafe Sadler among my grooms. He is a gentleman born, and a pleasant young man to have near me, and I think it would help you, Cromwell, would it not? Only he is not for ever to be putting papers under my nose.’

Rafe’s wife Helen bursts into tears when she hears the news. ‘He will be away at court,’ she says, ‘for weeks at a time.’

He sits with her in the parlour at Brick Place, consoling her as best he can. ‘This is the best thing that has ever happened for Rafe, I know,’ she says. ‘I am a fool to weep over it. But I cannot bear to be parted from him, nor he from me. When he is late I send men to look along the road. I wish we could be under the same roof every night we live.’

‘He is a lucky man,’ he says. ‘And I don’t mean just lucky in the king’s favour. You are both of you lucky. To love so much.’

Henry used to sing a song, in his Katherine days:

‘I hurt no man, I do no wrong,

I love true where I did marry.’

Rafe says, ‘You need a steady nerve, to be always with Henry.’

‘You have a steady nerve, Rafe.’

He could give him advice. Extracts from The Book Called Henry. As a child, a young man, praised for the sweetness of his nature and his golden looks, Henry grew up believing that all the world was his friend and everybody wanted him to be happy. So any pain, any delay, frustration or stroke of ill-luck seems to him an anomaly, an outrage. Any activity he finds wearying or displeasant, he will try honestly to turn into an amusement, and if he cannot find some thread of pleasure he will avoid it; this to him seems reasonable and natural. He has councillors employed to fry their brains on his behalf, and if he is out of temper it is probably their fault; they shouldn’t block him or provoke him. He doesn’t want people who say, ‘No, but…’ He wants people who say, ‘Yes, and…’ He doesn’t like men who are pessimistic and sceptical, who turn down their mouths and cost out his brilliant projects with a scribble in the margin of their papers. So do the sums in your head where no one can see them. Do not expect consistency from him. Henry prides himself on understanding his councillors, their secret opinions and desires, but he is resolved that none of his councillors shall understand him. He is suspicious of any plan that doesn’t originate with himself, or seem to. You can argue with him but you must be careful how and when. You are better to give way on every possible point until the vital point, and to pose yourself as one in need of guidance and instruction, rather than to maintain a fixed opinion from the start and let him think you believe you know better than he does. Be sinuous in argument and allow him escapes: don’t corner him, don’t back him against the wall. Remember that his mood depends on other people, so consider who has been with him since you were with him last. Remember he wants more than to be advised of his power, he wants to be told he is right. He is never in error. It is only that other people commit errors on his behalf or deceive him with false information. Henry wants to be told that he is behaving well, in the sight of God and man. ‘Cromwell,’ he says, ‘you know what we should try? Cromwell, would it not reflect well on my honour if I…? Cromwell, would it not confound my enemies if…?’ And all these are the ideas you put to him last week. Never mind. You don’t want the credit. You just want action.

But there is no need for these lessons. All his life Rafe has been training for this. A scrap of a boy, he is no athlete, he could never exercise himself in tilt or tournament, a stray breeze would whisk him out of the saddle. But he has the heft for this. He knows how to watch. He knows how to listen. He knows how to send a message encrypted, or a message so secret that no message appears to be there; a piece of information so solid that its meaning seems to be stamped out in the earth, yet its form so fragile that it seems to be conveyed by angels. Rafe knows his master; Henry is his master. But Cromwell is his father and his friend.

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

In Henry’s new church, Lent is as raw and cold as ever it was under the Pope. Miserable, meatless days fray a man’s temper. When Henry talks about Jane, he blinks, tears spring to his eyes. ‘Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child’s. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I have to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her…and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace…she has nothing…she expects nothing…’ A tear at last sneaks from Henry’s eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard.

Notice how he speaks of Jane: so humble, so shy. Even Archbishop Cranmer must recognise the portrait, the black reverse portrait of the present queen. All the riches of the New World would not sate her; while Jane is grateful for a smile.

I am going to write Jane a letter, Henry says. I am going to send her a purse, for she will need money for herself now she is removed from the queen’s chamber.

Paper and quills are brought to his hand. He sits down and sighs and sets about it. The king’s handwriting is square, the hand he learned as a child from his mother. He has never picked up speed; the more effort he puts into it, the more the letters seem to turn back on themselves. He takes pity on him: ‘Sir, would you like to dictate it, and I will write for you?’

It would not be the first time he has written a love letter for Henry. Over their sovereign’s bent head, Cranmer looks up and meets his eyes: full of accusation.

‘Have a look,’ Henry says. He doesn’t offer it to Cranmer. ‘She’ll understand, yes, that I want her?’

He reads, trying to put himself in the place of a maiden lady. He looks up. ‘It is very delicately expressed, sir. And she is very innocent.’

Henry takes the letter back and writes in a few reinforcing phrases.

It is the end of March. Mistress Seymour, stricken with panic, seeks an interview with Mr Secretary; it is set up by Sir Nicholas Carew, though Sir Nicholas himself is absent, not yet ready to commit himself to talks. Her widowed sister is with her. Bess gives him a searching glance; then drops her bright eyes.

‘Here is my difficulty,’ Jane says. She looks at him wildly; he thinks, maybe that’s all she means to say: here is my difficulty.

She says, ‘You can’t…His Grace, His Majesty, you can’t for one moment forget who he is, even though he demands you do. The more he says, “Jane I am your humble suitor,” the less humble you know he is. And every moment you are thinking, what if he stops talking and I have to say something? I feel as if I’m standing on a pincushion, with the pins pointing up. I keep thinking, I’ll get used to it, next time I’ll be better, but when he comes in, “Jane, Jane…” I’m like a scalded cat. Though, have you ever seen a scalded cat, Master Secretary? I have not. But I think, if after this short time I’m so frightened of him –’

‘He wants people to be frightened.’ With the words arrives the truth of them. But Jane is too intent on her own struggles to hear what he has said.

‘– if I’m frightened of him now, what will it be like to see him every day?’ She breaks off. ‘Oh. I suppose you know. You do see him, Master Secretary, most days. Still. Not the same, I suppose.’

‘No, not the same,’ he says.

He sees Bess, in sympathy, raise her eyes to her sister. ‘But Master Cromwell,’ Bess says, ‘it cannot always be acts of Parliament and dispatches to ambassadors and revenue and Wales and monks and pirates and traitorous devices and Bibles and oaths and trusts and wards and leases and the price of wool and whether we should pray for the dead. There must sometimes be other topics.’

He is struck by her overview of his situation. It is as if she has understood his life. He is taken by an impulse to clasp her hand and ask her to marry him; even if they did not get on in bed, she seems to have a gift for précis that eludes most of his clerks.

‘Well?’ Jane says. ‘Are there? Other topics?’

He can’t think. He squashes his soft hat between his hands. ‘Horses,’ he says. ‘Henry likes to know about trades and crafts, simple things. In my youth I learned to shoe a horse, he likes to know about that, the right shoe for the job, so he can confound his own smiths with secret knowledge. The archbishop, too, he is a man who will ride any horse that comes to his hand, he is a timid man but horses like him, he learned to manage them when he was young. When he is tired of God and men we speak of these matters with the king.’

‘And?’ Bess says. ‘You are together many hours.’

‘Dogs, sometimes. Hunting dogs, their breeding and virtues. Fortresses. Building them. Artillery. The range of it. Cannon foundries. Dear God.’ He runs his hand through his hair. ‘We sometimes say, we will have a day out together, ride down to Kent, to the weald, to see the ironmasters there, study their operations, and propose them new ways of casting cannon. But we never do it. Something is always in our way.’

He feels irredeemably sad. As if he has been plunged into mourning. And at the same time he feels, if someone tossed a feather bed into the room (which is unlikely) he would throw Bess on to it, and have to do with her.

‘Well, that’s that,’ Jane says, her tone resigned. ‘I could not found a cannon to save my life. I am sorry to have taken your time, Master Secretary. You had better get back to Wales.’

He knows what she means.

Next day, the king’s love letter is brought to Jane, with a heavy purse. It is a scene staged before witnesses. ‘I must return this purse,’ Jane says. (But she does not say it before she has weighed it, fondled it, in her tiny hand.) ‘I must beg the king, if he wishes to make me a present of money, to send it again when I should contract an honourable marriage.’

Given the king’s letter, she declares she had better not open it. For well she knows his heart, his gallant and ardent heart. For herself, her only possession is her womanly honour, her maidenhead. So – no, really – she had better not break the seal.

And then, before she returns it to the messenger, she holds it in her two hands: and places, on the seal, a chaste kiss.

‘She kissed it!’ Tom Seymour cries. ‘What genius possessed her? First his seal. Next,’ he sniggers, ‘his sceptre!’

In a fit of joy, he knocks his brother Edward’s hat off. He has been playing this joke for twenty years or more, and Edward has never been amused. But just this once, he fetches up a smile.

When the king gets the letter back from Jane, he listens closely to what his messenger has to tell him, and his face lights up. ‘I see I was wrong to send it. Cromwell here has spoken to me of her innocence and her virtue, and with good reason, as it appears. From this point I will do nothing that will offend her honour. In fact, I shall only speak to her in the presence of her kin.’

If Edward Seymour’s wife were to come to court, they could make a family party, with whom the king could take supper without any affront to Jane’s modesty. Perhaps Edward should have a suite in the palace? Those rooms of mine at Greenwich, he reminds Henry, that communicate directly with yours: what if I were to move out and let the Seymours move in? Henry beams at him.

He has been studying the Seymour brothers intently since the visit to Wolf Hall. He will have to work with them; Henry’s women come trailing families, he does not find his brides in the forest hiding under a leaf. Edward is grave, serious, yet he is ready to unfold his thoughts to you. Tom is close, that’s what he thinks; close and cunning, brain busily working beneath that show of bonhomie. But it’s perhaps not the best brain. Tom Seymour will give me no trouble, he thinks, and Edward I can carry with me. His mind is already moving ahead, to a time when the king indicates his pleasure. Gregory and the Emperor’s ambassador, between them, have suggested the way forward. ‘If he can annul twenty years with his true wife,’ Chapuys has said to him, ‘I am sure it is not beyond your wit to find some grounds to free him from his concubine. No one has ever believed the marriage was good in the first place, except those who are employed to say yes to him.’

He wonders, though, about the ambassador’s ‘no one’. No one in the Emperor’s court, perhaps: but all England has sworn to the marriage. It is not a light matter, he tells his nephew Richard, to undo it legally, even if the king commanded it. We shall wait a little, we will not go to anyone, let them come to us.

He asks for a document to be drawn up, showing all grants to the Boleyns since 1524. ‘Such a thing would be good to have at my hand, in case the king calls for it.’

He does not mean to take anything away. Rather, enhance their holdings. Load them with honours. Laugh at their jokes.

Though you must be careful what you laugh at. Master Sexton, the king’s jester, has jested about Anne and called her a ribald. He thought he had licence, but Henry lumbered across the hall and clouted him, banged his head on the panelling and banished him the court. They say Nicholas Carew gave the man refuge, out of pity.

Anthony is aggrieved about Sexton. One jester does not like to hear of the downfall of another; especially, Anthony says, when his only vice is foresight. Oh, he says, you have been listening to the gossip in the kitchen. But the fool says, ‘Henry kicks out the truth and Master Sexton with it. But these days it has a way of creeping under the bolted door and down the chimney. One day he will give in and invite it to stand by the hearth.’

William Fitzwilliam comes to the Rolls House and sits down with him. ‘So how does the queen, Crumb? Still perfect friends, though you dine with the Seymours?’

He smiles.

Fitzwilliam jumps up, wrenches the door open to see no one is lurking, then sits down again, and resumes. ‘Cast your mind back. This Boleyn courtship, this Boleyn marriage. How did the king look, in the eyes of grown men? Like one who only studies his own pleasures. Like a child, that is to say. To be so impassioned, to be so enslaved by a woman, who after all is made just as other women are – some said it was unmanly.’

‘Did they? Well, I am shocked. We cannot have it said of Henry that he is not a man.’

‘A man’ – and Fitzwilliam stresses the word – ‘a man should be governor of his passions. Henry shows much force of will but little wisdom. It harms him. She harms him. The harm will go on.’

It seems he will not name her, Anna Bolena, La Ana, the concubine. So, if she harms the king, would it be the act of a good Englishman to remove her? The possibility lies between them, approached but still unexplored. It is treason, of course, to speak against the present queen and her heirs; a treason from which the king alone is exempt, for he could not violate his own interest. He reminds Fitzwilliam of this: he adds, even if Henry speaks against her, do not be drawn.

‘But what do we look for in a queen?’ Fitzwilliam asks. ‘She should have all the virtues of an ordinary woman, but she must have them to a high degree. She must be more modest, more humble, more discreet and more obedient even than they: so that she sets an example. There are those who ask themselves, is Anne Boleyn any of these things?’

He looks at Master Treasurer: go on.

‘I think I can speak frankly to you, Cromwell,’ Fitz says: and (after checking at the door once again) he does. ‘A queen should be mild and pitiful. She should move the king to mercy – not drive him on to harshness.’

‘You have some particular case in mind?’

Fitz was in Wolsey’s household as a young man. No one knows what part Anne played in the fall of the cardinal; her hand was hidden in her sleeve. Wolsey knew he could hope for no mercy from her, and he received none. But Fitz seems to brush away the cardinal. He says, ‘I hold no brief for Thomas More. He was not the adept in affairs of state that he thought he was. He thought he could sway the king, he thought he could control him, he thought that Henry was still a sweet young prince he could lead by the hand. But Henry is a king and he will be obeyed.’

‘Yes, and?’

‘And I wish that with More it could have ended another way. A scholar, a man who was Lord Chancellor, to drag him out in the rain and cut off his head…’

He says, ‘You know, sometimes I forget he’s gone. There is some piece of news and I think, what will More say to this?’

Fitz glances up. ‘You don’t talk to him, do you?’

He laughs. ‘I don’t go to him for advice.’ Though I do, of course, consult the cardinal: in the privacy of my short hours of sleep.

Fitz says, ‘Thomas More scuttled his chances with Anne when he would not come to see her crowned. She would have seen him dead a year before it happened, if she could have proved treason on him.’

‘But More was a clever lawyer. Amongst the other things he was.’

‘The Princess Mary – the Lady Mary, I should say – she is no lawyer. A friendless girl.’

‘Oh, I would think that her cousin the Emperor counts as her friend. And a very good friend to have, too.’

Fitz looks irritated. ‘The Emperor is a great idol, set up in another country. Day by day, she needs a more proximate defender. She needs someone to push forward her interests. Stop this, Crumb – this dancing around the point.’

‘Mary just needs to keep breathing,’ he says. ‘I am not often accused of dancing.’

Fitzwilliam stands up. ‘Well now. A word to the wise.’

The feeling is that something is wrong in England and must be set right. It’s not the laws that are wrong or the customs. It’s something deeper.

Fitzwilliam leaves the room, then he comes back in. Says abruptly, ‘If it is old Seymour’s daughter next, there will be some jealousy among those who think their own noble house should be preferred – but after all, the Seymours are an ancient family, and he won’t have this trouble with her. I mean, men running after her like dogs after a – well…You just look at her, Seymour’s little girl, and you know that nobody’s ever pulled her skirts up.’ This time he does go; but giving him, Cromwell, a sort of mock salute, a flourish in the direction of his hat.

Sir Nicholas Carew comes to see him. The very fibres of his beard are bristling with conspiracy. He half-expects the knight to wink as he sits down.

When it comes to it, Carew is surprisingly brisk. ‘We want the concubine ousted. We know you want it too.’

‘We?’

Carew looks up at him, from beneath bristling brows; like a man who has shot off his one crossbow bolt, he must now plod over the terrain, seeking friend or foe or just a place to hide for the night. Ponderously, he clarifies. ‘My friends in this matter do comprise a good part of the ancient nobility of this nation, those of honourable lineage, and…’ He sees Cromwell’s face and hurries on. ‘I speak of those very near the throne, those in the line of old King Edward. Lord Exeter, the Courtenay family. Also Lord Montague and his brother Geoffrey Pole. Lady Margaret Pole, who as you know was governor to the Princess Mary.’

He casts up his eyes. ‘Lady Mary.’

‘If you must. We call her the princess.’

He nods. ‘We will not let that stop us discussing her.’

‘Those I have named,’ Carew says, ‘are the principal persons on whose behalf I speak, but as you will be aware, the most part of England would rejoice to see the king free of her.’

‘I don’t think the most part of England knows or cares.’ Carew means, of course, the most part of my England, the England of ancient blood. Any other country, for Sir Nicholas, does not exist.

He says, ‘I suppose Exeter’s wife Gertrude is active in this matter.’

‘She has been,’ Carew leans forward to impart something very secret, ‘in communication with Mary.’

‘I know,’ he sighs.

‘You read their letters?’

‘I read everybody’s letters.’ Including yours. ‘But look,’ he says, ‘this smells of intrigue against the king himself, does it not?’

‘In no wise. His honour is at the heart of it.’

He nods. Point taken. ‘And so? What do you require of me?’

‘We require you to join with us. We are content to have Seymour’s girl crowned. The young woman is my kin, and she is known to favour true religion. We believe she will bring Henry back to Rome.’

‘A cause close to my heart,’ he murmurs.

Sir Nicholas leans forward. ‘This is our difficulty, Cromwell. You are a Lutheran.’

He touches his jacket: round about his heart. ‘No, sir, I am a banker. Luther condemns to Hell those who lend at interest. Is it likely that I should take his part?’

Sir Nicholas laughs heartily. ‘I did not know. Where would we be, without Cromwell to lend us money?’

He asks, ‘What is to happen to Anne Boleyn?’

‘I don’t know. Convent?’

So the bargain is struck and sealed: he, Cromwell, is to assist the old families, the true faithful; and afterwards, under the new regime, they will keep his services in consideration: his zeal in this matter may cause them to forget the blasphemies of these last three years, which otherwise would invite condign punishment.

‘Just one thing, Cromwell.’ Carew stands up. ‘Don’t keep me waiting next time. It ill becomes a man of your stamp to keep a man of my stamp kicking his heels in an anteroom.’

‘Ah, was that the noise?’ Though Carew wears the padded satin of the courtier, he always imagines him in show-armour: not the kind you fight in, the kind you buy from Italy to impress your friends. Heel-kicking would be a noisy business, then: clatter, clang. He looks up. ‘I meant no slight, Sir Nicholas. From now we will make all speed. Consider me at your right hand, furnished for the fight.’

That’s the sort of bombast Carew understands.

Now Fitzwilliam is talking to Carew. Carew is talking to his wife, who is Francis Bryan’s sister. His wife is talking, or writing at least, to Mary to let her know that her prospects are improving by the hour, that La Ana may be displaced. At the very least, it’s a way of keeping Mary quiet for the while. He doesn’t want her to hear the rumours that Anne is launching fresh hostilities. She may panic, and try to escape; they say she has various absurd plans, like drugging the Boleyn women about her and spurring off by night. He has warned Chapuys, though not in so many words of course, that if Mary does escape Henry is likely to hold him responsible, and to have no regard for the protection of his diplomatic status. At the very least, he will be booted around like Sexton the jester. At worst, he may never see his native shores again.

Francis Bryan is keeping the Seymours at Wolf Hall abreast of events at court. Fitzwilliam and Carew are talking to the Marquis of Exeter, and Gertrude, his wife. Gertrude is talking over supper to the Imperial ambassador, and to the Pole family, who are as papist as they dare to be, who have teetered on the edge of treason these last four years. No one is talking to the French ambassador. But everyone is talking to him, Thomas Cromwell.

In sum, this is the question his new friends are asking: if Henry can retire one wife, and she a daughter of Spain, can he not give a pension to Boleyn’s daughter and put her away in some country house, having found defects in the marriage documents? His casting off of Katherine, after twenty years of marriage, offended all Europe. The marriage with Anne is recognised nowhere but in this realm, and has not endured three years; he could annul it, as a folly. After all, he has his own church to do so, his own archbishop.

In his head he rehearses a request. ‘Sir Nicholas? Sir William? Will you come to my humble house to dine?’

He does not really mean to ask them. Word would soon reach the queen. A coded glance is enough, a nod and a wink. But once again in his mind he sets the table.

Norfolk at the head. Montague and his sainted mother. Courtenay and his blasted wife. Sliding in behind them, our friend Monsieur Chapuys. ‘Oh, dammit,’ Norfolk sulks, ‘now must we speak French?’

‘I will translate,’ he offers. But who’s this clattering in? It’s Duke Dishpan. ‘Welcome, my lord Suffolk,’ he says. ‘Take a seat. Careful not to get crumbs in that great beard of yours.’

‘If there were a crumb.’ Norfolk is hungry.

Margaret Pole spears him with a glacial stare. ‘You have set a table. You have given us all seats. You have given us no napery.’

‘My apologies.’ He calls for a servant. ‘You wouldn’t want to get your hands dirty.’

Margaret Pole shakes out her napkin. On it is imprinted the face of the dead Katherine.

A bawling comes from without, the direction of the buttery. Francis Bryan reels in, already a bottle to the good. ‘Pastime with good company…’ He crashes to his place.

Now he, Cromwell, nods to his menials. Extra stools are fetched. ‘Squeeze them in,’ he says.

Carew and Fitzwilliam enter. They take their places without a smile or a nod. They have come ready to the feast, their knives in their hands.

He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant.

He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet.

It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate.

The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved.

Now that Rafe is in the privy chamber, he has closer acquaintance with the musician, Mark Smeaton, who has been promoted among the grooms. When Mark first showed himself at the cardinal’s door, he sloped up in patched boots and a canvas doublet that had belonged to a bigger man. The cardinal put him into worsted, but since he joined the royal household he goes in damask, perched on a fine gelding with a saddle of Spanish leather, the reins clutched in gold-fringed gloves. Where is the money coming from? Anne is recklessly generous, Rafe says. The gossip is that she has given Francis Weston a sum to keep his creditors at bay.

You can understand, Rafe says, that because now the king does not admire the queen so much, she is keen to have young men about her who hang on her words. Her rooms are busy thoroughfares, the privy chamber gentlemen constantly calling in on this errand or that, and lingering to play a game or share a song; where there is no message to carry, they invent one.

Those gentlemen who are less in the queen’s favour are keen to talk to the newcomer and give him all the gossip. And some things he doesn’t need to be told, he can see and hear for himself. Whispering and scuffling behind doors. Covert mockery of the king. Of his clothes, of his music. Hints of his shortcomings in bed. Where would those hints come from, but the queen?

There are some men who talk all the time about their horses. This is a steady mount but I used to have one speedier; that’s a fine filly you have there, but you should see this bay I have my eye on. With Henry, it’s ladies: he finds something to like in almost any female who crosses his path, and will scratch up a compliment for her, though she be plain and old and sour. With the young ones, he is enraptured twice a day: has she not the finest eyes, is not her throat white, her voice sweet, her hand shapely? Generally it’s look and don’t touch: the most he will venture, blushing slightly, ‘Don’t you think she must have pretty little duckies?’

One day Rafe hears Weston’s voice in the next room, running on, amused, in imitation of the king: ‘Has she not the wettest cunt you ever groped?’ Giggles, complicit sniggers. And ‘Hush! Cromwell’s spy is about.’

Harry Norris has been absent from court lately, spending time on his own estates. When he is on duty, Rafe says, he tries to suppress the talk, sometimes seems angry at it; but sometimes he lets himself smile. They talk about the queen and they speculate…

Go on, Rafe, he says.

Rafe doesn’t like telling this. He feels it is below him to be an eavesdropper. He thinks hard before he speaks. ‘The queen needs to conceive another child quickly to please the king, but where is it to come from, they ask. Since Henry cannot be trusted to do the business, which of them is to do him a favour?’

‘Did they come to any conclusion?’

Rafe rubs the crown of his head and makes his hair stand up. You know, he says, they would not really do it. None of them. The queen is sacred. It is too great a sin even for such lustful men as they be, and they are too much in fear of the king, surely, even though they mock him. Besides, she would not be so foolish.

‘I ask you again, did they come to any conclusion?’

‘I think it’s every man for himself.’

He laughs. ‘Sauve qui peut.’

He hopes none of this will be needed. If he acts against Anne he hopes for a cleaner way. It’s all foolish talk. But Rafe cannot unhear it, he cannot unknow it, there it is.

March weather, April weather, icy showers and splinters of sun; he meets Chapuys, indoors, this time.

‘You seem pensive, Master Secretary. Come to the fire.’

He shakes away the raindrops from his hat. ‘I have a weight on my mind.’

‘Do you know, I think you only set up these meetings with me to annoy the French ambassador?’

‘Oh yes,’ he sighs, ‘he is very jealous. In truth I would visit you more often, except that word always gets back to the queen. And she contrives to use it against me in one way or another.’

‘I could wish you a more gracious mistress.’ The ambassador’s implicit question: how is that going, the getting of a new mistress? Chapuys has floated to him, could there not be a new treaty between our sovereigns? Something that would safeguard Mary, her interests, perhaps place her back in the line of succession, after any children Henry might have with a new wife? Assuming, of course, the present queen were gone?

‘Ah, Lady Mary.’ Lately he has taken to putting his hand to his hat when her name is mentioned. He can see the ambassador is touched by this, he can see him preparing to put it in dispatches. ‘The king is willing to hold formal talks. It would please him to be united in friendship to the Emperor. So much he has said.’

‘Now you must bring him to the point.’

‘I have influence with the king but I cannot answer for him, no subject can. This is my difficulty. To succeed with him, one must anticipate his desires. But one then stands exposed, should he change his mind.’

Wolsey his master had advised, make him say what he wants, do not guess, for by guessing you may destroy yourself. But perhaps, since Wolsey’s day, the king’s unexpressed commands have become harder to ignore. He fills the room with a seething discontent, stares up into the sky when you ask him to sign a paper: as if he were expecting deliverance.

‘You fear he will turn on you,’ Chapuys says.

‘He will, I suppose. One day.’

Sometimes he wakes in the night and thinks of it. There are courtiers who have honourably retired. He can think of instances. Of course, it is the other kind that loom larger, if you are wakeful around midnight. ‘But if that day comes,’ the ambassador says, ‘what will you do?’

‘What can I do? Arm myself with patience and leave the rest to God.’ And hope the end is quick.

‘Your piety does you credit,’ Chapuys says. ‘If fortune turns against you, you will need friends. The Emperor –’

‘The Emperor would not spare a thought for me, Eustache. Or for any common man. No one raised a finger to help the cardinal.’

‘The poor cardinal. I wish I had known him better.’

‘Stop buttering me up,’ he says sharply. ‘Have done.’

Chapuys gives him a searching glance. The fire roars up. Vapours rise from his clothes. The rain patters at the window. He shivers. ‘You are ill?’ Chapuys enquires.

‘No, I am not allowed to be. If I took to my bed the queen would turn me out of it and say I am faking. If you want to cheer me up, get out that Christmas hat of yours. It was a pity you had to put it away for mourning. Easter would be none too soon to see it again.’

‘I think you are making jokes, Thomas, at the expense of my hat. I have heard that while it was in your custody it was derided, not only by your clerks but by your stable boys and dog-keepers.’

‘The reverse is true. There were many applications to try it on. I wish that we may see it at all major feasts of the church.’

‘Once again,’ Chapuys says, ‘your piety does you credit.’

He sends Gregory away to his friend Richard Southwell, to learn the art of speaking in public. It is good for him to get out of London, and to get away from the court, where the atmosphere is tense. All around him there are signs of unease, little huddles of courtiers that disperse at his approach. If he is to place all in hazard, and he thinks he is, then Gregory should not have to go through the pain and doubt, hour by hour. Let him hear the conclusion of events; he does not need to live through them. He has no time now to explain the world to the simple and the young. He has to watch the movements of cavalry and ordnance across Europe, and the ships on the seas, merchantmen and men of war: the influx of gold from the Americas to the treasury of the Emperor. Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart; sometimes these islands look very small. The word from Europe is that Mount Etna has erupted, and brought floods throughout Sicily. In Portugal there is a drought; and everywhere, envy and contention, fear of the future, fear of hunger or the fact of it, fear of God and doubt over how to placate him, and in what language. The news, when he gets it, is always a fortnight out of date: the posts are slow, the tides against him. Just as the work of fortifying Dover is coming to an end, the walls of Calais are falling down; frost has cracked the masonry and opened a fissure between Watergate and Lanterngate.

On Passion Sunday a sermon is preached in the king’s chapel by Anne’s almoner, John Skip. It appears to be an allegory; the force of it appears to be directed against him, Thomas Cromwell. He smiles broadly when those who attended explain it to him, sentence by sentence: his ill-wishers and well-wishers both. He is not a man to be knocked over by a sermon, or to feel himself persecuted by figures of speech.

Once when he was a boy he had been in a rage against his father Walter and he had rushed at him, intent to butt him in the belly with his head. But it was just before the Cornish rebels came swarming up the country, and as Putney reckoned it was in their line of march, Walter had been bashing out body armour for himself and his friends. So when he ran head-first, there was a bang, which he heard before he felt it. Walter was trying on one of his creations. ‘That’ll teach you,’ his father said, phlegmatic.

He often thinks about it, that iron belly. And he thinks he has got one, without the inconvenience and weight of metal. ‘Cromwell has plenty stomach,’ his friends say; his enemies too. They mean he has appetite, gusto, attack: first thing in the morning or last thing at night, a bloody collop of meat would not disgust him, and if you wake him in the small hours he is hungry then too.

An inventory comes in, from Tilney Abbey: vestments of red turkey satin and white lawn, wrought with beasts in gold. Two altar cloths of white Bruges satin, with drops like spots of blood, made of red velvet. And the contents of the kitchen: weights, tongs and fire forks, flesh hooks.

Winter melts into spring. Parliament is dissolved. Easter Day: lamb with ginger sauce, a blessed absence of fish. He remembers the eggs the children used to paint, giving each speckled shell a cardinal’s hat. He remembers his daughter Anne, her hot little hand cupped around the eggshell so the colour ran: ‘Look! Regardez!’ She was learning French that year. Then her amazed face; her curious tongue creeping out to lick the stain from her palm.

The Emperor is in Rome, and the word is that he has had a seven-hour meeting with the Pope; how much of that was devoted to plotting against England? Or did the Emperor speak up for his brother monarch? It is rumoured there will be an accord between the Emperor and the French: bad news for England, if so. Time to push on with negotiations. He sets up a meeting between Chapuys and Henry.

A letter is sent to him from Italy, which begins, ‘Molto magnifico signor…’ He remembers Hercules, the labourer.

Two days after Easter, the Imperial ambassador is welcomed at court by George Boleyn. At the sight of glinting George, teeth and pearl buttons flashing, the ambassador’s eye rolls like the eye of a startled horse. He has been received by George before, but he did not expect him today: rather one of his own friends, perhaps Carew. George addresses him at length in his elegant and courtly French. You will please to hear Mass with His Majesty and then, if you will do me the favour, it will be my pleasure to entertain you personally to ten o’clock dinner.

Chapuys is looking around: Cremuel, help!

He stands back, smiling, watching the operations of George. I’ll miss him, he thinks, in the days when it is all over for him: when I kick him back to Kent, to count his sheep and take a homely interest in the grain harvest.

The king himself gives Chapuys a smile, a gracious word. He, Henry, sails to his private closet above. Chapuys disposes himself amid George’s hangers-on. ‘Judica me, Deus,’ intones the priest. ‘Judge me, oh God, and separate my cause from the nation that is not holy: deliver me from the unjust and deceitful man.’

Chapuys now turns around and stabs him with a look. He grins. ‘Why art thou sad, oh my soul?’ asks the priest: in Latin of course.

As the ambassador shuffles towards the altar to receive the sacred host, the gentlemen around him, neat as practised dancers, hesitate half a pace and fall behind him. Chapuys falters; George’s friends have surrounded him. He darts a glance over his shoulder. Where am I, what should I do?

At that moment, and exactly in his line of sight, Anne the queen sweeps down from her own private galleried space: head high, velvet and sables, rubies at her throat. Chapuys hesitates. He cannot go forward, for he is afraid to cross her path. He cannot go back, because George and his minions are pressing him. Anne turns her head. A pointed smile: and to the enemy, she makes a reverence, a gracious inclination of her jewelled neck. Chapuys screws up his eyes tight, and bows to the concubine.

After all these years! All these years he has picked his path, so that never, never was he brought face to face with her, never brought to this stark choice, to this damnable politesse. But what else could he do? It will soon be reported. It will get back to the Emperor. Let us hope and pray that Charles will understand.

All this shows on the ambassador’s face. He, Cremuel, kneels and takes communion. God turns to paste on his tongue. While this process occurs, it is reverent to close the eyes; but on this singular occasion, God will forgive him for looking about. He sees George Boleyn, pink with pleasure. He sees Chapuys, white with humiliation. He sees Henry dazzle in gold as he descends, ponderous, from the gallery. The king’s tread is deliberate, his step is slow; his face is blazing with solemn triumph.

Despite the best efforts of pearly George, as they leave the chapel the ambassador breaks away. He scurries towards him, then his hand fastens with a terrier grip. ‘Cremuel! You knew this was planned. How could you so embarrass me?’

‘It is for the best, I assure you.’ He adds, sombre, thoughtful, ‘What use as a diplomat would you be, Eustache, if you did not understand the character of princes? They do not think as other men think. To commoners’ minds like ours, Henry seems perverse.’

Light dawns in the ambassador’s eye. ‘Ahh.’ He lets out a long breath. He grasps, in that single moment, why Henry has forced him to make a public reverence to a queen whom he no longer wants. Henry is tenacious of his will, he is stubborn. Now he has carried his point: his second marriage has been acknowledged. Now, if he likes, he can let it go.

Chapuys draws his garments together, as if he feels a draught from the future. He whispers, ‘Must I really dine with her brother?’

‘Oh yes. You will find him a charming host. After all,’ he raises a hand to hide his smile, ‘has he not just enjoyed a triumph? He and his whole family?’

Chapuys huddles closer. ‘I am shocked to see her. I have not seen her so close. She looks like a thin old woman. Was that Mistress Seymour, in the halcyon sleeves? She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?’

‘He thinks she’s stupid. He finds it restful.’

‘Clearly he is enamoured. There must be something about her not evident to the stranger’s eye.’ The ambassador sniggers. ‘No doubt she has a very fine enigme.’

‘No one would know,’ he says blankly. ‘She is a virgin.’

‘After so long at your court? Surely Henry is deluded.’

‘Ambassador, keep this for later. Your host is here.’

Chapuys folds his hands over his heart. He makes George, Lord Rochford, a sweeping bow. Lord Rochford does the same. Arm in arm, they mince away. It sounds as if Lord Rochford is reciting verses in praise of the spring.

‘Hm,’ says Lord Audley: ‘What a performance.’ The weak sunshine glints from the Lord Chancellor’s chain of office. ‘Come on, my boy, let’s go and gnaw a crust.’ Audley chuckles. ‘The poor ambassador. He looks like someone being carried by slavers to the Barbary coast. He does not know what country he will wake up in tomorrow.’

Nor do I, he thinks. You can rely on Audley to be jovial. He closes his eyes. Some hint, some intimation has reached him, that he has had the best of the day, though it is only ten o’clock. ‘Crumb?’ the Lord Chancellor says.

It is some time after dinner that it all begins to fall apart, and in the worst possible way. He has left Henry and the ambassador together in a window embrasure, to caress each other with words, to coo about an alliance, to make each other immodest propositions. It is the king’s change of colour he notices first. Pink and white to brick red. Then he hears Henry’s voice, high-pitched, cutting: ‘I think you presume too much, Chapuys. You say I acknowledge your master’s right to rule in Milan: but perhaps the King of France has as good a right, or better. Do not presume to know my policy, ambassador.’

Chapuys jumps back. He thinks of Jane Seymour’s question: Master Secretary, have you ever seen a scalded cat?

The ambassador speaks: something low and supplicating. Henry raps back at him, ‘You mean to say that what I took as a courtesy, from one Christian prince to the other, is really a bargaining position? You agree to bow to my wife the queen, and then you send me a bill?’

He, Cromwell, sees Chapuys hold up a placating hand. The ambassador is trying to interrupt, to limit the damage, but Henry talks over him, audible to the whole chamber, to the whole gaping assembly, and to those pressing in behind. ‘Does your master not remember what I did for him, in his early troubles? When his Spanish subjects rose up against him? I kept the seas open for him. I lent him money. And what do I get back?’

A pause. Chapuys has to send his mind scurrying back, to the years before he was in post. ‘The money?’ he suggests weakly.

‘Nothing but broken promises. Recall, if you will, how I helped him against the French. He promised me territory. Next thing I heard, he was making a treaty with Francis. Why should I trust a word he says?’

Chapuys draws himself up: as far as a little man can. ‘Game little cockerel,’ Audley says, in his ear.

But he, Cromwell, is not to be distracted. His eyes are fastened on the king. He hears Chapuys say, ‘Majesty. That is not a question to be asked, by one prince of another.’

‘Is it not?’ Henry snarls. ‘In times past, I would never have had to ask it. I take every brother prince to be honourable, as I am honourable. But sometimes, Monsieur, I suggest to you, our fond and natural assumptions must give way before bitter experience. I ask you, does your master take me for a fool?’ Henry’s voice swoops upwards; he bends at the waist, and his fingers make little paddling motions on his knees, as if he were trying to entice a child or a small dog. ‘Henry!’ he squeaks. ‘Come to Charles! Come to your kind master!’ He straightens up, almost spitting in his rage. ‘The Emperor treats me like an infant. First he whips me, then he pets me, then it is the whip again. Tell him I am not an infant. Tell him I am an emperor in my own realm, and a man, and a father. Tell him to keep out of my family business. I have put up with his interference for too long. First he seeks to tell me who I can marry. Then he wants to show me how to manage my daughter. Tell him, I shall deal with Mary as I see fit, as a father does deal with a disobedient child. No matter who her mother is.’

The king’s hand – in fact, dear God, his fist – makes crude contact with the ambassador’s shoulder. His path cleared, Henry stamps out. An imperial performance. Except that his leg drags. He shouts over his shoulder, ‘I require a profound and public apology.’

He, Cromwell, lets out his breath. The ambassador fizzes across the room, gibbering. Distraught, he seizes his arm. ‘Cremuel, I do not know for what I am to apologise. I come here in good faith, I am tricked into coming face to face with that creature, I am forced to exchange compliments with her brother through a whole dinner, and then I am attacked by Henry. He wants my master, he needs my master, he is just playing the old game, trying to sell himself dear, pretending he might send troops to King Francis to fight in Italy – where are these troops? I do not see them, I have eyes, I do not see his army.’

‘Peace, peace,’ Audley soothes. ‘We will do the apologising, Monsieur. Let him cool down. Never fear. Hold back your dispatches to your good master, do not write tonight. We will keep the talks going.’

Over Audley’s shoulder, he sees Edward Seymour, gliding through the crowd. ‘Ah, ambassador,’ he says, with a suave confidence he does not feel. ‘Here is an opportunity for you to meet –’

Edward springs forward, ‘Mon cher ami…’

Black glances from Boleyns. Edward into the breach, armed with confident French. Sweeping Chapuys aside: none too soon. A stir at the door. The king is back, erupting into the midst of the gentlemen.

‘Cromwell!’ Henry stops before him. He is breathing hard. ‘Make him understand. It is not for the Emperor to make conditions to me. It is for the Emperor to apologise, for threatening me with war.’ His face congests. ‘Cromwell, I know just what you have done. You have gone too far in this matter. What have you promised him? Whatever it is, you have no authority. You have put my honour in hazard. But what do I expect, how can a man like you understand the honour of princes? You have said, “Oh, I am sure of Henry, I have the king in my pocket.” Don’t deny it, Cromwell, I can hear you saying it. You mean to train me up, don’t you? Like one of your boys at Austin Friars? Touch my cap when you come down of a morning and say “How do you, sir?” Walk through Whitehall half a pace behind you. Carry your folios, your inkhorn and your seal. And why not a crown, eh, brought behind you in a leather bag?’ Henry is convulsing with rage. ‘I really believe, Cromwell, that you think you are king, and I am the blacksmith’s boy.’

He will never claim, later, that his heart did not turn over. He is not one to boast of a coolness no reasonable man would possess. Henry could, at any moment, gesture to his guards; he could find himself with cold metal at his ribs, and his day done.

But he steps back; he knows his face shows nothing, neither repentance nor regret nor fear. He thinks, you could never be the blacksmith’s boy. Walter would not have had you in his forge. Brawn is not the whole story. In the flames you need a cool head, when sparks are flying to the rafters you must note when they fall on you and knock the fire away with one swat of your hard palm: a man who panics is no use in a shop full of molten metal. And now, his monarch’s sweating face thrust into his, he remembers something his father told him: if you burn your hand, Tom, raise your hands and cross your wrists before you, and hold them so till you get to the water or the salve: I don’t know how it works, but it confuses the pain, and then if you utter a prayer at the same time, you might get off not too bad.

He raises his palms. He crosses his wrists. Back you go, Henry. As if confused by the gesture – as if almost relieved to be stopped – the king ceases ranting: and he backs off a pace, turning his face away and so relieving him, Cromwell, of that bloodshot stare, of the indecent closeness of the popping blue whites of the king’s eyes. He says, softly, ‘God preserve you, Majesty. And now, will you excuse me?’

So: whether he will excuse or no, he walks away. He walks into the next room. You have heard the expression, ‘My blood was boiling’? His blood is boiling. He crosses his wrists. He sits down on a chest and calls for a drink. When it is fetched he takes into his right hand the cool pewter cup, running the pads of his fingers around its curves: the wine is strong claret, he spills a drop, he blots it with his forefinger and for neatness touches it with his tongue, so it vanishes. He cannot say whether the trick has decreased the pain, as Walter said it would. But he is glad his father is with him. Someone must be.

He looks up. Chapuys’s face is hovering over him: smiling, a mask of malice. ‘My dear friend. I thought your last hour had come. Do you know, I thought you would forget yourself and hit him?’

He looks up and smiles. ‘I never forget myself. What I do, I mean to do.’

‘Though you may not mean what you say.’

He thinks, the ambassador has suffered cruelly, just for doing his job. In addition, I have injured his feelings, I have been ironical about his hat. Tomorrow I shall organise him a present, a horse, a horse of some magnificence, a horse for his own riding. I myself, before it departs my stables, will lift a hoof and check the shoe.

The king’s council meets next day. Wiltshire, or Monseigneur, is present: the Boleyns are sleek cats, lolling in their seats and preening their whiskers. Their kinsman, the Duke of Norfolk, looks ragged, unnerved; he stops him on the way in – stops him, Cromwell – ‘All right, lad?’

Was ever the Master of the Rolls so addressed, by the Earl Marshal of England? In the council chamber Norfolk scuffles the stools about, creaks down on one that suits him. ‘That’s what he does, you know.’ He flashes him a grin, a glimpse of fang. ‘You’re balanced just so, standing on your feet, then he blows the pavement from under you.’

He nods, smiling patiently. Henry comes in, sits like a great sulky baby on a chair at the head of the table. Meets no one’s eye.

Now: he hopes his colleagues know their duties. He has told them often enough. Flatter Henry. Beseech Henry. Implore him to do what you know he must do anyway. So Henry feels he has a choice. So he feels a warm regard for himself, as if he is not consulting his own interests but yours.

Majesty, the councillors say. If it please you. To look favourably, for the sake of the realm and commonweal, on the Emperor’s slavish overtures. On his whimpers and pleas.

This occupies fifteen minutes. At last, Henry says, well, if it is for the good of the commonweal, I will receive Chapuys, we will continue negotiations. I must swallow, I suppose, any personal insults I have received.

Norfolk leans forward. ‘Think of it like a draught of medicine, Henry. Bitter. But for the sake of England, do not spit.’

The subject of physicians once raised, the marriage of the Lady Mary is discussed. She continues to complain, wherever the king moves her, of bad air, insufficient food, insufficient consideration of her privacy, of dolorous limb pains, headaches and heaviness of spirit. Her doctors have advised that congress with a man would be good for her health. If a young woman’s vital spirits are bottled up, she becomes pale and thin, her appetite wanes, she begins to waste; marriage is an occupation for her, she forgets her minor ailments; her womb remains anchored and primed for use, and shows no tendency to go wandering about her body as if it had nothing better to do. In default of a man, the Lady Mary needs strenuous exercise on horseback; difficult, for someone under house arrest.

Henry clears his throat at last, and speaks. ‘The Emperor, it is no secret, has discussed Mary with his own councillors. He would like her married out of this realm, to one of his relatives, within his own domains.’ His lips tighten. ‘In no wise will I suffer her to go out of the country; or indeed to go anywhere at all, while her behaviour to me is not what it ought to be.’

He, Cromwell, says, ‘Her mother’s death is still raw with her. I have no doubt she will see her duty, over these next weeks.’

‘How pleasing to hear from you at last, Cromwell,’ says Monseigneur with a smirk. ‘You do most usually speak first, and last, and everywhere in the middle, so that we more modest councillors are obliged to speak sotto voce, if at all, and pass notes to each other. May we ask if this new reticence of yours relates, in any way, to yesterday’s events? When His Majesty, if I do recall correctly, administered a check to your ambition?’

‘Thank you for that,’ the Lord Chancellor says, flatly. ‘My lord Wiltshire.’

The king says, ‘My lords, the subject is my daughter. I am sorry to have to recall you. Though I am far from sure she should be discussed in council.’

‘Myself,’ Norfolk says, ‘I would go up-country to Mary and make her swear the oath, I would plant her hand on the gospel and hold it there flat, and if she would not take her oath to the king and to my niece’s child, I would beat her head against the wall till it were as soft as a baked apple.’

‘And thank you again,’ Audley says. ‘My lord Norfolk.’

‘Anyway,’ the king says sadly. ‘We have not so many children that we can well afford to lose one out of the kingdom. I would rather not part with her. One day she will be a good daughter to me.’

The Boleyns sit back, smiling, hearing the king say he seeks no great foreign match for Mary, she is of no importance, a bastard whom one considers only out of charity. They are well content with the triumph afforded them yesterday by the Imperial ambassador; and they are showing their good taste by not boasting about it.

As soon as the meeting ends, he, Cromwell, is mobbed by the councillors: except for the Boleyns, who waft off in the other direction. The meeting has gone well; he has got everything he wants; Henry is back on course for a treaty with the Emperor: why then does he feel so restless, stifled? He elbows his colleagues aside, though in a mannerly fashion. He wants air. Henry passes him, he stops, he turns, he says, ‘Master Secretary. Will you walk along with me?’

They walk. In silence. It is for the prince, not the minister, to introduce a topic.

He can wait.

Henry says, ‘You know, I wish we would go down to the weald one day, as we have said, to talk to the ironmasters.’

He waits.

‘I have had various drawings, mathematical drawings, and advices concerning how our ordnance can be improved, but to be truthful, I cannot make as much of it as you would.’

More humble, he thinks. A little more humble yet.

Henry says, ‘You have been in the forest and met charcoal burners. I remember you said to me once, they be very poor men.’

He waits. Henry says, ‘One must know the process from the beginning, I think, whether one is making armour or ordnance. It is no use demanding of a metal that it has certain properties, a certain temper, unless you know how it is made, and the difficulties your craftsman may encounter. Now, I have never been too proud to sit down for an hour with the gauntlet maker, who armours my right hand. We must study, I think, every pin, every rivet.’

And? Yes?

He leaves the king to stumble on.

‘And, well. And, so. You are my right hand, sir.’

He nods. Sir. How touching.

Henry says, ‘So, to Kent, to the weald: will we go? Shall I choose a week? Two, three days should do it.’

He smiles. ‘Not this summer, sir. You will be engaged otherwise. Besides, the ironmasters are like all of us. They must have a holiday. They must lie in the sun. They must pick apples.’

Henry looks at him, mild, beseeching, from the tail of his blue eye: give me a happy summer. He says, ‘I cannot live as I have lived, Cromwell.’

He is here to take instructions. Get me Jane: Jane, so kind, who sighs across the palate like sweet butter. Deliver me from bitterness, from gall.

‘I think I might go home,’ he says. ‘If you will permit. I have much to do if I am to set this affair in train, and I feel…’ His English deserts him. This sometimes happens. ‘Un peu…’ But his French deserts him too.

‘But you are not ill? You will be back soon?’

‘I shall seek a consultation with the canon lawyers,’ he says. ‘It may take some days, you know what they are. It will go no slower than I can help. I shall speak to the archbishop.’

‘And perhaps to Harry Percy,’ Henry says. ‘You know how she…the betrothal, the whatever, the relationship between them…well, I think they were as good as married, were they not? And if that won’t run…’ He rubs his beard. ‘You know that I was, before I was with the queen, I was, on occasion, with her sister, her sister Mary, which –’

‘Oh yes, sir. I remember Mary Boleyn.’

‘– and it will be seen that, having been linked with kin so near to Anne, I could not make a valid marriage to her…however, you will only use that if you have to, I do not want unnecessary…’

He nods. You don’t want history to make a liar of you. In public before your courtiers you had me state that you had never had to do with Mary Boleyn, while you sat there and nodded. You removed all impediments: Mary Boleyn, Harry Percy, you swept them aside. But now our requirements have changed, and the facts have changed behind us.

‘So fare you well,’ Henry says. ‘Be very secret. I trust in your discretion, and your skill.’

How necessary, but how sad, to hear Henry apologise. He has developed a perverse respect for Norfolk, with his grunt of ‘All right, lad?’

In an antechamber Mr Wriothesley is waiting for him. ‘So do you have instructions, sir?’

‘Well, I have hints.’

‘Do you know when they might take form?’

He smiles. Call-Me says, ‘I hear that in council the king declared he will seek to marry Lady Mary to a subject.’

Surely that’s not what the meeting concluded? In a moment, he feels like himself again: hears himself laughing and saying, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Call-Me. Who told you that? Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I think it would save time and work if all the interested parties came to the council, including foreign ambassadors. The proceedings leak out anyway, and to save them mishearing and misconstruing they might as well hear everything at first hand.’

‘I’ve got it wrong, then?’ Wriothesley says. ‘Because I thought, marrying her to a subject, to some low man, that was a plan thought up by the queen that is now?’

He shrugs. The young man gives him a glassy look. It will be some years before he understands why.

Edward Seymour seeks an interview with him. There is no doubt in his mind that the Seymours will come to his table, even if they have to sit under it and catch the crumbs.

Edward is tense, hurried, nervous. ‘Master Secretary, taking the long view –’

‘In this matter, a day would be a long view. Get your girl out of it, let Carew take her to his house down in Surrey.’

‘Do not think I wish to know your secrets,’ Edward says, picking his words. ‘Do not think I wish to pry into matters that are not for me. But for my sister’s sake I would like to have some indication –’

‘Oh, I see, you want to know if she should order her wedding clothes?’ Edward gives him an imploring look. He says soberly, ‘We are going to seek an annulment. Just now I do not know on what grounds.’

‘But they will fight,’ Edward says. ‘The Boleyns if they go down will take us with them. I have heard of serpents that, though they are dying, exude poison through their skins.’

‘Did you ever pick up a snake?’ he asks. ‘I did once, in Italy.’ He holds out his palms. ‘I am unmarked.’

‘Then we must be very secret,’ Edward says. ‘Anne must not know.’

‘Well,’ he says wryly, ‘I do not think we can keep it from her for ever.’

But she will know all the sooner, if his new friends do not stop trapping him in anterooms, blocking his path and bowing to him; if they do not stop this whispering and eyebrow raising and digging each other with their elbows.

He says to Edward, I must go home and shut the door and consult with myself. The queen is plotting something, I know not what, something devious, something dark, perhaps so dark that she herself does not know what it is, and as yet is only dreaming of it: but I must be quick, I must dream it for her, I shall dream it into being.

According to Lady Rochford, Anne complains that since she rose from childbed Henry is always watching her; and not in the way he used to.

For a long time he has noticed Harry Norris watching the queen; and from some eminence, perched like a carved falcon over a doorway, he has seen himself watching Harry Norris.

For now, Anne seems oblivious to the wings that hover over her, to the eye that studies her path as she jinks and swerves. She chatters about her child Elizabeth, holding up on her fingers a tiny cap, a pretty ribboned cap, just come from the embroiderer.

Henry looks at her flatly as if to say, why are you showing me this, what is it to me?

Anne strokes the scrap of silk. He feels a needle point of pity, an instant of compunction. He studies the fine silk braid that edges the queen’s sleeve. Some woman with the skills of his dead wife made that braid. He is looking very closely at the queen, he feels he knows her as a mother knows her child, or a child its mother. He knows every stitch in her bodice. He notes the rise and fall of her every breath. What is in your heart, madam? That is the last door to be opened. Now he stands on the threshold and the key is in his hand and he is almost afraid to fit it into the lock. Because what if it doesn’t, what if it doesn’t fit and he has to fumble there, with Henry’s eyes on him, hear the impatient click of the royal tongue, as surely his master Wolsey once heard it?

Well, then. There was an occasion – in Bruges, was it? – when he had broken down a door. He wasn’t in the habit of breaking doors, but he had a client who wanted results and wanted them today. Locks can be picked, but that’s for the adept with time to spare. You don’t need skill and you don’t need time if you’ve got a shoulder and a boot. He thinks, I wasn’t thirty then. I was a youth. Absently his right hand rubs his left shoulder, his forearm, as if remembering the bruises. He imagines himself entering Anne, not as a lover but as a lawyer, and rolled in his fist his papers, his writs; he imagines himself entering the heart of the queen. In its chambers he hears the click of his own boot heels.

At home, he takes from his chest the Book of Hours that belonged to his wife. It was given to her by her first husband Tom Williams, who was a good enough fellow, but not a man of substance like himself. Whenever he thinks of Tom Williams now it is as a blank, a faceless waiting man dressed in the Cromwell livery, holding his coat or perhaps his horse. Now that he can handle, at his whim, the finest texts in the king’s library, the prayer book seems a poor thing; where is the gold leaf? Yet the essence of Elizabeth is in this book, his poor wife with her white cap, her blunt manner, her sideways smile and busy crafts-woman’s fingers. Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.’