Thomas Cromwell 1-3

Next day, early, he says to William Fitzwilliam, ‘Come with me to the Tower to talk to Norris.’

Fitz says, ‘No, you go. I cannot do it a second time. I have known him all my years. The first time nearly killed me.’

Gentle Norris: chief bottom-wiper to the king, spinner of silk threads, spider of spiders, black centre of the vast dripping web of court patronage: what a spry and amiable man he is, past forty but wearing it lightly. Norris is a man always in equipoise, a living illustration of the art of sprezzatura. No one has ever seen him ruffled. He has the air of a man who has not so much achieved success, as become resigned to it. He is as courteous to a dairy maid as to a duke; at least, for as long he has an audience. A master of the tournament ground, he breaks a lance with an air of apology, and when he counts the coin of the realm he washes his hands afterwards, in spring water scented with rose petals.

Nevertheless, Harry has grown rich, as those about the king cannot help but grow rich, however modestly they strive; when Harry snaps up some perquisite, it is as if he, your obedient servant, were sweeping away from your sight something distasteful. And when he volunteers for some lucrative office, it is as if he is doing it out of a sense of duty, and to save lesser men the trouble.

But look at Gentle Norris now! It is a sad thing to see a strong man weep. He says so, as he sits down, and enquires after his keeping, whether he is being served with the food he likes and how he has slept. His manner is benign and easy. ‘During the days of Christmas last, Master Norris, you impersonated a Moor, and William Brereton showed himself half-naked in the guise of a hunter or wild man of the woods, going towards the queen’s chamber.’

‘For God’s sake, Cromwell,’ Norris sniffs. ‘Are you in earnest? You are asking me in all seriousness about what we did when we were costumed for a masque?’

‘I counselled him, William Brereton, against exposing his person. Your retort was that the queen had seen it many a time.’

Norris reddens: as he did on the date in question. ‘You mistake me on purpose. You know I meant that she is a married woman and so a man’s…a man’s gear is no strange sight to her.’

‘You know what you meant. I only know what you said. You must admit that such a remark would not strike the king’s ear as innocent. On the same occasion as we were standing in conversation we saw Francis Weston, disguised. And you remarked he was going to the queen.’

‘At least he wasn’t naked,’ Norris says. ‘In a dragon suit, wasn’t he?’

‘He was not naked when we saw him, I agree. But what did you say next? You spoke to me of the queen’s attraction to him. You were jealous, Harry. And you didn’t deny it. Tell me what you know against Weston. It will be easier for you thereafter.’

Norris has pulled himself together and blown his nose. ‘All you are alleging is some loose words capable of many interpretations. If you are seeking proofs of adultery, Cromwell, you will have to do better than this.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. By the nature of the thing, there is seldom a witness to the act. But we consider circumstances and opportunities and expressed desires, we consider weighty probabilities, and we consider confessions.’

‘You will have no confession from me or Brereton either.’

‘I wonder.’

‘You will not put gentlemen to the torture, the king would not permit it.’

‘There don’t have to be formal arrangements.’ He is on his feet, he slams his hand down on the table. ‘I could put my thumbs in your eyes, and then you would sing “Green Grows the Holly” if I asked you to.’ He sits down, resumes his former easy tone. ‘Put yourself in my place. People will say I have tortured you anyway. They will say I have tortured Mark, they are already putting the word about. Though not a gossamer thread of him is snapped, I swear. I have Mark’s free confession. He has given me names. Some of them surprised me. But I have mastered myself.’

‘You are lying.’ Norris looks away. ‘You are trying to trick us into betraying, each man the other.’

‘The king knows what to think. He does not ask for eyewitnesses. He knows your treason and the queen’s.’

‘Ask yourself,’ Norris says, ‘how likely is it, that I should so forget my honour, as to betray the king who has been so good to me and to place in such terrible danger a lady I revere? My family has served the King of England time out of mind. My great-grandfather served King Henry VI, that saintly man, God rest his soul. My grandfather served King Edward, and would have served his son if he had lived to reign, and after he was driven out of the realm by the scorpion Richard Plantagenet, he served Henry Tudor in exile, and served him still when he was crowned king. I have been at the side of Henry since I was a boy. I love him like a brother. Do you have a brother, Cromwell?’

‘None living.’ He looks at Norris, exasperated. He seems to think that with eloquence, with sincerity, with frankness, he can change what is happening. The whole court has seen him slobbering over the queen. How could he expect to go shopping with his eyes, and finger the goods no doubt, and not have an account to settle at the end of it?

He gets up, he walks away, he turns, he shakes his head: he sighs. ‘Ah, for God’s sake, Harry Norris. Have I to write it on the wall for you? The king must be rid of her. She cannot give him a son and he is out of love with her. He loves another lady and he cannot come at her unless Anne is removed. Now, is that simple enough for your simple tastes? Anne will not go quietly, she warned me of it once; she said, if ever Henry puts me aside, it will be war. So if she will not go, she must be pushed, and I must push her, who else? Do you recognise the situation? Will you take your mind back? In a like case, my old master Wolsey could not gratify the king, and then what? He was disgraced and driven to his death. Now I mean to learn from him, and I mean the king to be gratified in every respect. He is now a miserable cuckold, but he will forget it when he is a bridegroom again, and it will not be long.’

‘I suppose the Seymours have the wedding feast ready.’

He grins. ‘And Tom Seymour is having his hair curled. And on that wedding day, the king will be happy, I will be happy, all England will be happy, except Norris, for I fear he will be dead. I see no help for it, unless you confess and throw yourself on the king’s mercy. He has promised mercy. And he keeps his promises. Mostly.’

‘I rode with him from Greenwich,’ Norris says, ‘away from the tournament, all that long ride. Every stride he badgered me, what have you done, confess. I will tell you what I told him, that I am an innocent man. And what is worse,’ and now he is losing his composure, he is irate, ‘what is worse is that you and he both know it. Tell me this, why is it me? Why not Wyatt? Everyone suspects him with Anne, and has he ever directly denied it? Wyatt knew her before. He knew her in Kent. He knew her from her girlhood.’

‘And so what of it? He knew her when she was a simple maid. What if he did meddle with her? It may be shameful but it is no treason. It is not like meddling with the king’s wife, the Queen of England.’

‘I am not ashamed of any dealings I have had with Anne.’

‘Are you ashamed of your thoughts about her, perhaps? You told Fitzwilliam as much.’

‘Did I?’ Norris says bleakly. ‘Is that what he took away, from what I said to him? That I am ashamed? And if I am, Cromwell, even if I am…you cannot make my thoughts a crime.’

He holds out his palms. ‘If thoughts are intentions, if intentions are malign…if you did not have her unlawfully, and you say you did not, did you intend to have her lawfully, after the king’s death? It is getting on six years since your wife died, why have you not married again?’

‘Why haven’t you?’

He nods. ‘A good question. I ask myself. But I have not promised myself to a young woman, and then broken my promise, as you have. Mary Shelton has lost her honour to you –’

Norris laughs. ‘To me? To the king, rather.’

‘But the king was not in a position to marry her, and you were, and she had your pledge, and yet you dallied. Did you think the king would die, so you could marry Anne? Or did you expect her to dishonour her marriage vows during the king’s life, and become your concubine? It is one or the other.’

‘If I say either, you will damn me. You will damn me if I say nothing at all, taking my silence for agreement.’

‘Francis Weston thinks you are guilty.’

‘That Francis thinks anything, is news to me. Why would he…?’ Norris breaks off. ‘What, is he here? In the Tower?’

‘He is in ward.’

Norris shakes his head. ‘He is a boy. How can you do this to his people? I admit he is a careless, headstrong boy, he is known to be no favourite of mine, it is known we have cut across each other –’

‘Ah, rivals in love.’ He puts his hand to his heart.

‘By no means.’ Ah, Harry is ruffled now: he has flushed darkly, he is trembling with rage and fear.

‘And what do you think to brother George?’ he asks him. ‘You may have been surprised to encounter rivalry from that quarter. I hope you were surprised. Though the morals of you gentlemen astonish me.’

‘You do not trap me that way. Any man you name, I will say nothing against him and nothing for him. I have no opinion on George Boleyn.’

‘What, no opinion on incest? If you take it so quietly and without objection, I am forced to conjecture there may be truth in it.’

‘And if I were to say, I think there might be guilt in that case, you would say to me, “Why, Norris! Incest! How can you believe such an abomination? Is it a ploy to lead me away from your own guilt?”’

He looks at Norris with admiration. ‘Not for nothing have you known me twenty years, Harry.’

‘Oh, I have studied you,’ Norris says. ‘As I studied your master Wolsey before you.’

‘That was politic in you. Such a great servant of the state.’

‘And such a great traitor at the end.’

‘I must take your mind back. I do not ask you to remember the manifold favours you received at the cardinal’s hands. I only ask you to recall an entertainment, a certain interlude played at court. It was a play in which the late cardinal was set upon by demons and carried down to Hell.’

He sees Norris’s eyes move, as the scene rises before him: the firelight, the heat, the baying spectators. Himself and Boleyn grasping the victim’s hands, Brereton and Weston laying hold of him by his feet. The four of them tossing the scarlet figure, tumbling him and kicking him. Four men, who for a joke turned the cardinal into a beast; who took away his wit, his kindness and his grace, and made him a howling animal, grovelling on the boards and scrabbling with his paws.

It was not truly the cardinal, of course. It was the jester Sexton in a scarlet robe. But the audience catcalled as if it had been real, they yelled and shook their fists, they swore and mocked. Behind a screen the four devils pulled off their masks and their hairy jerkins, cursing and laughing. They saw Thomas Cromwell leaning against the panelling, silent, wrapped in a robe of mourning black.

Now, Norris gapes at him: ‘And that is why? It was a play. It was an entertainment, as you said yourself. The cardinal was dead, he could not know. And while he was alive, was I not good to him in his trouble? Did I not, when he was exiled from court, ride after him, and come to him on Putney Heath with a token from the king’s own hand?’

He nods. ‘I concede that others behaved worse. But you see, none of you behaved like Christians. You behaved like savages instead, falling on his estates and possessions.’

He sees he need not continue. The indignation on Norris’s face is replaced by a look of blank terror. At least, he thinks, the fellow has the wit to see what this is about: not one year’s grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down. He says, ‘Life pays you out, Norris. Don’t you find? And,’ he adds gently, ‘it is not all about the cardinal, either. I would not want you to think I am without motives of my own.’

Norris raises his face. ‘What has Mark Smeaton done to you?’

‘Mark?’ He laughs. ‘I don’t like the way he looks at me.’

Would Norris understand if he spelled it out? He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.

A silence falls. He sits, he waits, his eyes on the dying man. He is already thinking what he will do with Norris’s offices, his Crown grants. He will try to oblige the humble applicants, like the man with fourteen children, who wants the keeping of a park at Windsor and a post in the administration of the castle. Norris’s offices in Wales can be parcelled out to young Richmond, and that will bring the posts in effect back to the king and under his own supervision. And Rafe could have the Norris estate at Greenwich, he could house Helen and the children there when he has to be at court. And Edward Seymour has mentioned he would like Norris’s house in Kew.

Harry Norris says, ‘I assume you will not just lead us out to execution. There will be a process, a trial? Yes? I hope it will be quick. I suppose it will. The cardinal used to say, Cromwell will do in a week what will take another man a year, it is not worth your while to block him or oppose him. If you reach out to grip him he will not be there, he will have ridden twenty miles while you are pulling your boots on.’ He looks up. ‘If you intend to kill me in public, and mount a show, be quick. Or I may die of grief alone in this room.’

He shakes his head. ‘You’ll live.’ He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

Norris touches his ribs. ‘The pain is here. I felt it last night. I sat up, breathless. I durst not lie down again.’

‘When he was brought down, the cardinal said the same. The pain was like a whetstone, he said. A whetstone, and the knife was drawn across it. And it ground away, till he was dead.’

He rises, picks up his papers: inclining his head, takes his leave. Henry Norris: left forepaw.

William Brereton. Gentleman of Cheshire. Servant in Wales to the young Duke of Richmond, and a bad servant too. A turbulent, arrogant, hard-as-nails man, from a turbulent line.

‘Let’s go back,’ he says, ‘let’s go back to the cardinal’s time, because I do remember someone of your household killed a man during a bowls match.’

‘The game can get very heated,’ Brereton says. ‘You know yourself. You play, I hear.’

‘And the cardinal thought, it is time for a reckoning; and your family were fined because they impeded the investigation. I ask myself, has anything changed since then? You think you can do anything because you are the Duke of Richmond’s servant, and because Norfolk favours you –’

‘The king himself favours me.’

He raises his eyebrows. ‘Does he? Then you should complain to him. Because you are ill-lodged, are you not? Sadly for you, the king is not here, so you must make do with me and my long memory. But let us not cast back for instances. Look, for instance, at the case of the Flintshire gentleman, John ap Eyton. That is so recent you have not forgot it.’

‘So that is why I am here,’ Brereton says.

‘Not entirely, but leave aside now your adultery with the queen and concentrate on Eyton. The facts of the case are known to you. There is a quarrel, blows exchanged, one of your household ends up dead, but the man Eyton is tried in due form before a London jury, and is acquitted. Now, having no respect for either law or justice, you swear revenge. You have the Welshman abducted. Your servants hang him out of hand, all this – do not interrupt me, man – all this with your permission and contrivance. I give this as one instance. You think this is only one man and he doesn’t matter, but you see he does. You think a year or more has passed and no one remembers, but I remember. You believe the law should be what you would like it to be, and it is on that principle that you conduct yourself in your holdings on the marches of Wales, where the king’s justice and the king’s name are brought into contempt every day. The place is a stronghold of thieves.’

‘You say I am a thief?’

‘I say you consort with them. But your schemes end here.’

‘You are judge and jury and hangman, is that it?’

‘It is better justice than Eyton had.’

And Brereton says, ‘I concede that.’

What a fall this is. Only days ago, he was petitioning Master Secretary for spoils, when the abbey lands in Cheshire should be given out. Now no doubt the words run through his head, the words he used to Master Secretary when he complained of his high-handed ways: I must tutor you in realities, he had said coldly. We are not creatures of some lawyers’ conclave at Gray’s Inn. In my own country, my family upholds the law, and the law is what we care to uphold.

Now he, Master Secretary, asks, ‘Do you think Weston has had to do with the queen?’

‘Perhaps,’ Brereton looks as if he hardly cares, one way or the other. ‘I barely know him. He is young and foolish and good-looking, isn’t he, and women regard these things? And she may be a queen but she is only a woman, who knows what she might be persuaded to?’

‘You think women more foolish than men?’

‘In general, yes. And weaker. In matters of love.’

‘I note your opinion.’

‘What about Wyatt, Cromwell? Where is he in this?’

‘You are in no place,’ he says, ‘to put questions to me.’ William Brereton; left hindpaw.

George Boleyn is well past thirty, but he still has the sheen we admire in the young, the sparkle and the clear gaze. It is hard to associate his pleasant person with the kind of bestial appetite of which his wife accuses him, and for a moment he looks at George and wonders if he can be guilty of any offences, except a certain pride and elation. With the graces of his person and mind, he could have floated and hovered above the court and its sordid machinations, a man of refinement moving in his own sphere: commissioning translations of the ancient poets, and causing them to be published in exquisite editions. He could have ridden pretty white horses that curvet and bow in front of ladies. Unfortunately, he liked to quarrel and brag, intrigue and snub. As we find him now, in his light circular room in the Martin Tower, we find him pacing, hungry for conflict, we ask ourselves, does he know why he is here? Or is that surprise still to come?

‘You are perhaps not much to blame,’ he says, as he takes his seat: he, Thomas Cromwell. ‘Join me at this table,’ he directs. ‘One hears of prisoners wearing a path through stone, but I do not believe it can really happen. It would take three hundred years perhaps.’

Boleyn says, ‘You are accusing me of some sort of collusion, concealment, concealing misconduct on my sister’s part, but this charge will not stand, because there was no misconduct.’

‘No, my lord, that is not the charge.’

‘Then what?’

‘That is not what you are accused of. Sir Francis Bryan, who is a man of great imaginative capacities –’

‘Bryan!’ Boleyn looks horrified. ‘But you know he is an enemy of mine.’ His words tumble over each other. ‘What has he said, how can you credit anything he says?’

‘Sir Francis has explained it all to me. And I begin to see it. How a man may hardly know his sister, and meet her as a grown woman. She is like himself, yet not. She is familiar, yet piques his interest. One day his brotherly embrace is a little longer than usual. The business progresses from there. Perhaps neither party feels they are doing anything wrong, till some frontier is crossed. But I myself am far too lacking in imagination to imagine what that frontier could be.’ He pauses. ‘Did it begin before her marriage, or after?’

Boleyn begins to tremble. It is shock; he can hardly speak. ‘I refuse to answer this.’

‘My lord, I am accustomed to dealing with those who refuse to answer.’

‘Are you threatening me with the rack?’

‘Well, now, I didn’t rack Thomas More, did I? I sat in a room with him. A room here at the Tower, such as the one you occupy. I listened to the murmurs within his silence. Construction can be put on silence. It will be.’

George says: ‘Henry killed his father’s councillors. He killed the Duke of Buckingham. He destroyed the cardinal and harried him to his death, and struck the head off one of Europe’s great scholars. Now he plans to kill his wife and her family and Norris who has been his closest friend. What makes you think it will be different with you, that are not the equal of any of these men?’

He says, ‘It ill becomes anyone of your family to evoke the cardinal’s name. Or Thomas More’s, for that matter. Your lady sister burned for vengeance. She would say to me, what, Thomas More, is he not dead yet?’

‘Who began this slander against me? It is not Francis Bryan, surely. Is it my wife? Yes. I should have known.’

‘You make the assumption. I do not confirm it. You must have a guilty conscience towards her, if you think she has such cause to hate you.’

‘And will you believe something so monstrous?’ George begs. ‘On the word of one woman?’

‘There are other women who have been recipients of your gallantry. I will not bring them before a court if I can help it, I can do that much to protect them. You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you.’

‘So am I to be put on trial for gallantry? Yes, they are jealous of me, you are all jealous, I have had some success with women.’

‘You still call it success? You must think again.’

‘I never heard it was a crime. To spend time with a willing lover.’

‘You had better not say that in your defence. If one of your lovers is your sister…the court will find it, what shall we say…pert and bold. Lacking in gravity. What would save you now – I mean, what might preserve your life – would be a full statement of all you know about your sister’s dealings with other men. Some suggest there are liaisons which would put yours in the shade, unnatural though it may be.’

‘You are a Christian man, and you ask me this? To give evidence to kill my sister?’

He opens his hands. ‘I ask nothing. I only point out what some would see as the way forward. I do not know whether the king would incline to mercy. He might let you live abroad, or he might grant you mercy as to the manner of your death. Or not. The traitor’s penalty, as you know, is fearful and public; he dies in great pain and humiliation. I see you do know, you have witnessed it.’

Boleyn folds into himself: narrowing himself, arms across his body, as if to protect his guts from the butcher’s knife, and he slumps to a stool; he thinks, you should have done that before, I told you to sit, you see how without touching you I have made you sit? He tells him softly, ‘You profess the gospel, my lord, and that you are saved. But your actions do not suggest you are saved.’

‘You may take your thumbprints off my soul,’ George says. ‘I discuss these matters with my chaplains.’

‘Yes, so they tell me. I think you have become too assured of forgiveness, believing you have years ahead of you to sin and yet though God sees all he must be patient, like a waiting man: and you will notice him at last, and answer his suit, if only he will wait till you are old. Is that your case?’

‘I will speak to my confessor about that.’

‘I am your confessor now. Did you say, in the hearing of others, that the king was impotent?’

George sneers at him. ‘He can do it when the weather is set fair.’

‘In doing so, you called into question the parentage of the Princess Elizabeth. You will readily see this is treason, as she is the heir to England.’

‘Faute de mieux, as far as you’re concerned.’

‘The king now believes he could not have a son from this marriage, as it was not lawful. He believes there were hidden impediments and that your sister was not frank about her past. He means to make a new marriage, which will be clean.’

‘I marvel you explain yourself,’ George says. ‘You never did so before.’

‘I do so for one reason – so that you can realise your situation and entertain no false hope. These chaplains you speak of, I will send them to you. They are fit company for you now.’

‘God grants sons to every beggar,’ George says. ‘He grants them to the illicit union, as well as the blessed, to the whore as well as the queen. I wonder that the king can be so simple.’

‘It is a holy simplicity,’ he says. ‘He is an anointed sovereign, and so very close to God.’

Boleyn scrutinises his expression, for levity or scorn: but he knows his face says nothing, he can rely on his face for that. You could look back through Boleyn’s career, and say, ‘There he went wrong, and there.’ He was too proud, too singular, unwilling to bridle his whims or turn himself to use. He needs to learn to bend with the breeze, like his father; but the time he has to learn anything is running out fast. There is a time to stand on your dignity, but there is a time to abandon it in the interests of your safety. There is a time to smirk behind the hand of cards you have drawn, and there is a time to throw down your purse on the table and say, ‘Thomas Cromwell, you win.’

George Boleyn, right forepaw.

By the time he gets to Francis Weston (right hindpaw) he has been approached by the young man’s family and offered a great deal of money. Politely, he has refused them; in their circumstances he would do just the same, except that it is hard to imagine Gregory or any member of his household to be such a fool as this young man has been.

The Weston family go further: they approach the king himself. They will make an offering, they will make a benevolence, they will make a large and unconditional donation to the king’s treasury. He discusses it with Fitzwilliam: ‘I cannot advise His Majesty. It is possible that lesser charges can be brought. It depends how much His Majesty thinks his honour is touched.’

But the king is not disposed to be lenient. Fitzwilliam says grimly, ‘If I were Weston’s people, I would pay the money anyway. To ensure favour. Afterwards.’

That is the very approach he has settled on himself, thinking of the Boleyn family (those who survive) and the Howards. He will shake the ancestral oaks and gold coins will drop each season.

Even before he comes to the room where Weston is held, the young man knows what to expect; he knows who is gaoled with him; he knows or has a good idea of the charges; his gaolers must have babbled, because he, Cromwell, has cut off communication between the four men. A talkative gaoler can be useful; he can nudge a prisoner towards cooperation, towards acceptance, towards despair. Weston must guess his family’s initiative has failed. You look at Cromwell and you think, if bribery won’t do it, nothing else will. It’s useless to protest or disclaim or contradict. Abasement might just do it, it’s worth a try. ‘I taunted you, sir,’ Francis says. ‘I belittled you. I am sorry I ever did so. You are the king’s servant and it was proper for me to respect that.’

‘Well, that is a handsome apology,’ he says. ‘Though you should beg forgiveness of the king and of Jesus Christ.’

Francis says, ‘You know I am not long married.’

‘And your wife left at home in the country. For obvious reasons.’

‘Can I write to her? I have a son. He is not yet a year.’ A silence. ‘I wish my soul to be prayed for after I am dead.’

He would have thought God could make his own decisions, but Weston believes the creator may be pushed and coaxed and maybe bribed a little. As if following his thought, Weston says, ‘I am in debt, Master Secretary. To the tune of a thousand pounds. I am sorry for it now.’

‘No one expects a gallant young gentleman like yourself to be thrifty.’ His tone is kindly, and Weston looks up. ‘Of course, these debts are more than you could reasonably pay, and even set against the assets you will have when your father dies, they are a heavy burden. So your extravagance gives people to think, what expectations had young Weston?’

For a moment, the young man looks at him with a dumb, rebellious expression, as if he does not see why this should be brought against him: what have his debts to do with anything? He does not see where it is leading. Then he does. He, Cromwell, puts out a hand to grab his clothes, to stop him slumping forward in shock. ‘A jury will easily grasp the point. We know the queen gave you money. How could you live as you did? It is easy to see. A thousand pounds is nothing to you, if you hoped to marry her once you had contrived the king’s death.’

When he is sure that Weston can sit upright, he opens his fist and eases his grip. Mechanically, the boy reaches up and straightens his clothes, straightens the little ruff of his shirt collar.

‘Your wife will be taken care of,’ he tells him. ‘Have no unease on that score. The king never extends animosity to widows. She will be cared for better, I dare say, than you ever cared for her.’

Weston looks up. ‘I cannot fault your reasoning. I see how it will weigh when it is given in evidence. I have been a fool and you have stood by and seen it all. I know how I have undone myself. I cannot fault your conduct either, because I would have injured you if I could. And I know I have not lived a good…I have not lived…you see, I thought I should have another twenty years or more to live as I have, and then when I am old, forty-five or fifty, I should give to hospitals and endow a chantry, and God would see I was sorry.’

He nods. ‘Well, Francis,’ he says. ‘We know not the hour, do we?’

‘But Master Secretary, you know that whatever wrong I have done, I am not guilty in this matter of the queen. I see by your face you know it, and all the people will know it too when I am brought out to die, and the king will know it and think about it in his private hours. I shall be remembered, therefore. As the innocent are remembered.’

It would be cruel to disturb that belief; he looks to his death to give him greater fame than his life has done. All the years that stretched before him, and no reason to believe that he meant to make any better use of them than he made of the first twenty-five; he himself says not. Brought up under the wing of his sovereign, a courtier since he was a child, from a family of courtiers: never a moment’s doubt about his place in the world, never a moment’s anxiety, never a moment’s thankfulness for the great privilege of having been born Francis Weston, born in the eye of fortune, born to serve a great king and a great nation: he will leave nothing but his debt, and a tarnished name, and a son: and anyone can father a son, he says to himself: until he remembers why we are here and what all this is about. He says, ‘Your wife has written for you to the king. Asking for mercy. You have a great many friends.’

‘Much good they will do me.’

‘I do not think you realise that at this juncture, many men would find themselves alone. It should cheer you. You should not be bitter, Francis. Fortune is fickle, every young adventurer knows that. Resign yourself. Regard Norris. No bitterness there.’

‘Perhaps,’ the young man blurts, ‘perhaps Norris thinks he has no reason for bitterness. Perhaps his regrets are honest ones, and necessary. Perhaps he deserves to die, as I do not.’

‘He is well paid out, you think, for meddling with the queen.’

‘He is always in her company. It is not to discuss the gospel.’

He is, perhaps, on the verge of a denunciation. Norris had begun on some admission to William Fitzwilliam, but he bit it back. Perhaps the facts will come out now? He waits: sees the boy’s head sink into his hands; then, impelled by something, he does not know what, he stands up, says, ‘Francis, excuse me,’ and walks out of the room.

Outside Wriothesley is waiting, with gentlemen of his household. They are leaning against the wall, sharing some joke. They stir at the sight of him, look expectant. ‘Are we finished?’ Wriothesley says. ‘He has confessed?’

He shakes his head. ‘Each man will give a good account of himself, but he will not absolve his fellows. Also, they will all say “I am innocent,” but they do not say, “She is innocent.” They are not able. It may be she is, but none of them will give his word on it.’

It is just as Wyatt once told him: ‘The worst of it is,’ he had said, ‘her hinting to me, her boasting almost, that she says no to me, but yes to others.’

‘Well, you have no confessions,’ Wriothesley says. ‘Do you want us to get them?’

He gives Call-Me a look that knocks him back, so he steps on the foot of Richard Riche. ‘What, Wriothesley, do you think I am too soft to the young?’

Riche rubs his foot. ‘Shall we draw up specimen charges?’

‘The more the merrier. Forgive me, I need a moment…’

Riche assumes he has gone out to piss. He does not know what caused him to break off from Weston and walk out. Perhaps it was when the boy said ‘forty-five or fifty’. As if, past mid-life, there is a second childhood, a new phase of innocence. It touched him, perhaps, the simplicity of it. Or perhaps he just needed air. Let us say you are in a chamber, the windows sealed, you are conscious of the proximity of other bodies, of the declining light. In the room you put cases, you play games, you move your personnel around each other: notional bodies, hard as ivory, black as ebony, pushed on their paths across the squares. Then you say, I can’t endure this any more, I must breathe: you burst out of the room and into a wild garden where the guilty are hanging from trees, no longer ivory, no longer ebony, but flesh; and their wild lamenting tongues proclaim their guilt as they die. In this matter, cause has been preceded by effect. What you dreamed has enacted itself. You reach for a blade but the blood is already shed. The lambs have butchered and eaten themselves. They have brought knives to the table, carved themselves, and picked their own bones clean.

May is blossoming even in the city streets. He takes flowers in to the ladies in the Tower. Christophe has to carry the bouquets. The boy is filling out and looks like a bull garlanded for sacrifice. He wonders what they did with their sacrifices, the pagans and the Jews of the Old Testament; surely they would not waste fresh meat, but give it to the poor?

Anne is housed in the suite of rooms that were redecorated for her coronation. He himself had overseen the work, and watched as goddesses, with their soft and brilliant dark eyes, blossomed on the walls. They bask in sunlit groves, under cypress trees; a white doe peeps through foliage, while the hunters head off in another direction, and hounds lollop ahead of them, making their hound music.

Lady Kingston rises to greet him, and he says, ‘Sit down, dear madam…’ Where is Anne? Not here in her presence chamber.

‘She is praying,’ one of the Boleyn aunts says. ‘So we left her to it.’

‘She has been a while,’ the other aunt says. ‘Are we sure she hasn’t got a man in there?’

The aunts giggle; he does not join them; Lady Kingston gives them a hard look.

The queen emerges from the little oratory; she has heard his voice. Sunlight strikes her face. It is true what Lady Rochford says, she has begun to line. If you did not know she was a woman who had held a king’s heart in her hand, you would take her for a very ordinary person. He supposes there will always be a strained levity in her, a practised coyness. She will be one of those women who at fifty thinks she is still in the game: one of those tired old experts in innuendo, women who simper like maids and put their hand on your arm, who exchange glances with other women when a prospect like Tom Seymour heaves into view.

But of course, she will never be fifty. He wonders if this is the last time he will see her, before the courtroom. She sits down, in shadow, in the midst of the women. The Tower always feels damp from the river and even these new, bright rooms feel clammy. He asks if she would like furs brought in, and she says, ‘Yes. Ermine. Also, I do not want these women. I should like women of my own choosing, not yours.’

‘Lady Kingston attends you because –’

‘Because she is your spy.’

‘– because she is your hostess.’

‘Am I then her guest? A guest is free to leave.’

‘I thought you would like to have Mistress Orchard,’ he says, ‘as she is your old nurse. And I didn’t think you would object to your aunts.’

‘They have grudges against me, both of them. All I see and hear is sniggering and tutting.’

‘Jesus! Do you expect applause?’

This is the trouble with the Boleyns: they hate their own kin. ‘You will not speak in that way to me,’ Anne says, ‘when I am released.’

‘I apologise. I spoke without thinking.’

‘I do not know what the king means by holding me here. I suppose he does it to test me. It is some stratagem he has devised, yes?’

She does not really think that, so he does not answer.

‘I should like to see my brother,’ Anne says.

One aunt, Lady Shelton, looks up from her needlework. ‘That is a foolish demand, in the circumstances.’

‘Where is my father?’ Anne says. ‘I do not understand why he does not come to my aid.’

‘He is lucky to be at liberty,’ Lady Shelton says. ‘Expect no help there. Thomas Boleyn always looked after himself first, and I know it, for I am his sister.’

Anne ignores her. ‘And my bishops, where are they? I have nourished them, I have protected them, I have furthered the cause of religion, so why do they not go to the king for me?’

The other Boleyn aunt laughs. ‘You expect bishops to intervene, to make excuses for your adultery?’

It is evident that, in this court, Anne has already been tried. He says to her, ‘Help the king. Unless he is merciful your cause is lost, you can do nothing for yourself. But you may do something for your daughter Elizabeth. The more humbly you hold yourself, the more penitent you show yourself, the more patiently you bear with the process, the less bitterness will His Majesty feel when your name is raised hereafter.’

‘Ah, the process,’ Anne says, with a flash of her old sharpness. ‘And what is this process to be?’

‘The confessions of the gentlemen are now being compiled.’

‘The what?’ Anne says.

‘You heard,’ Lady Shelton says. ‘They will not lie for you.’

‘There may be other arrests, other charges, though by speaking out now, by being open with us, you could shorten the pain for all concerned. The gentlemen will come to trial together. For yourself and my lord your brother, since you are ennobled, you will be judged by your peers.’

‘They have no witnesses. They can make any accusation, and I can say no to it.’

‘That is true,’ he concedes. ‘Though it is not true about the witnesses. When you were at liberty, madam, your ladies were intimidated by you, forced to lie for you, but now they are emboldened.’

‘I am sure they are.’ She holds his gaze; her tone is scornful. ‘In the way Seymour is emboldened. Tell her from me, God sees her tricks.’

He stands to take his leave. She unnerves him, the wild distress she is keeping in check, holding back but only just. There seems no point in prolonging the business, but he says, ‘If the king begins a process to nullify your marriage, I may return, to take statements from you.’

‘What?’ she says. ‘That too? Is it necessary? Murder will not be enough?’

He bows and turns away. ‘No!’ She fetches him back. She is on her feet, detaining him, timidly touching his arm; as if it is not her release she wants, so much as his good opinion. ‘You do not believe these stories against me? I know in your heart you do not. Cremuel?’

It is a long moment. He feels himself on the edge of something unwelcome: superfluous knowledge, useless information. He turns, hesitates, and reaches out, tentative…

But then she raises her hands and clasps them at her breast, in the gesture Lady Rochford had showed him. Ah, Queen Esther, he thinks. She is not innocent; she can only mimic innocence. His hand drops to his side. He turns away. He knows her for a woman without remorse. He believes she would commit any sin or crime. He believes she is her father’s daughter, that never since childhood has she taken any action, coaxed or coerced, that might damage her own interests. But in one gesture, she has damaged them now.

She has seen his face change. She steps back, puts her hands around her throat: like a strangler she closes them around her own flesh. ‘I have only a little neck,’ she says. ‘It will be the work of a moment.’

Kingston hurries out to meet him; he wants to talk. ‘She keeps doing that. Her hands around her neck. And laughing.’ His honest gaoler’s face is dismayed. ‘I cannot see that it is any occasion for laughter. And there are other foolish sayings, which my wife has reported. She says, it will not stop raining till I am released. Or start raining. Or something.’

He casts a glance at the window and he sees only a summer shower. In a moment the sun will scorch the moisture from the stones. ‘My wife tells her,’ Kingston says, ‘to leave off such foolish talk. She said to me, Master Kingston, shall I have justice? I said to her, madam, the poorest subject of the king has justice. But she just laughs,’ Kingston says. ‘And she orders her dinner. And she eats it with a good appetite. And she says verses. My wife cannot follow them. The queen says they are verses of Wyatt’s. And she says, Oh, Wyatt, Thomas Wyatt, when shall I see you here with me?’

At Whitehall he hears Wyatt’s voice and walks towards it, attendants wheeling after him; he has more attendants than ever he did, some of them people he has never seen before. Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Charles Brandon big as a house: he is blocking Wyatt’s path, and they are yelling at one another. ‘What are you doing?’ he shouts, and Wyatt breaks off and says over his shoulder, ‘Making peace.’

He laughs. Brandon stumps away, grinning behind his vast beard. Wyatt says, ‘I have begged him, set aside your old enmity for me, or it will kill me, do you want that?’ He looks after the duke with disgust. ‘I suspect he does. This is his chance. He went to Henry long ago, blustering that he had suspicions of me with Anne.’

‘Yes, but if you recall, Henry kicked him back to the east country.’

‘Henry will listen now. He will find him easy to believe.’

He takes Wyatt by the arm. If he can move Charles Brandon, he can move anybody. ‘I am not going to dispute in a public place. I sent for you to come to my house, you fool, not to go raging about in public view and making people say, What, Wyatt, is he still at large?’

Wyatt puts a hand over his. He takes in a deep breath, trying to calm himself. ‘My father told me, get to the king, and stay with him day and night.’

‘That is not possible. The king is seeing no one. You must come to me at the Rolls House, but then –’

‘If I go to your house people will say I am arrested.’

He drops his voice. ‘No friend of mine will suffer.’

‘They are strange and sudden friends you have this month. Papist friends, Lady Mary’s people, Chapuys. You make common cause with them now, but what about afterwards? What will happen if they abandon you before you abandon them?’

‘Ah,’ he says equably, ‘so you think the whole house of Cromwell will come down? Trust me, will you? Well, you have no choice, really, have you?’

From Cromwell’s house, to the Tower: Richard Cromwell as escort, and the whole thing done so lightly, in such a spirit of friendliness, that you would think they were going out for a day’s hunting. ‘Beg the constable to do all honour to Master Wyatt,’ he tells Richard. And to Wyatt, ‘It is the only place you are safe. Once you are in the Tower no one can question you without my permission.’

Wyatt says, ‘If I go in I shall not come out. They want me sacrificed, your new friends.’

‘They will not want to pay the price,’ he says easily. ‘You know me, Wyatt. I know how much everyone has, I know what they can afford. And not only in cash. I have your enemies weighed and assessed. I know what they will pay and what they will baulk at, and believe me, the grief they will expend if they cross me in this matter, it will bankrupt them of tears.’

When Wyatt and Richard have gone on their way, he says to Call-Me-Risley, frowning: ‘Wyatt once said I was the cleverest man in England.’

‘He didn’t flatter,’ Call-Me says. ‘I learn much daily, from mere proximity.’

‘No, it is him. Wyatt. He leaves us all behind. He writes himself and then he disclaims himself. He jots a verse on some scrap of paper, and slips it to you, when you are at supper or praying in the chapel. Then he slides a paper to some other person, and it is the same verse, but a word is different. Then that person says to you, did you see what Wyatt wrote? You say yes, but you are talking of different things. Another time you trap him and say, Wyatt, did you really do what you describe in this verse? He smiles and tells you, it is the story of some imaginary gentleman, no one we know; or he will say, this is not my story I write, it is yours, though you do not know it. He will say, this woman I describe here, the brunette, she is really a woman with fair hair, in disguise. He will declare, you must believe everything and nothing of what you read. You point to the page, you tax him: what about this line, is this true? He says, it is poet’s truth. Besides, he claims, I am not free to write as I like. It is not the king, but metre that constrains me. And I would be plainer, he says, if I could: but I must keep to the rhyme.’

‘Someone should take his verses to the printer,’ Wriothesley says. ‘That would fix them.’

‘He would not consent to that. They are private communications.’

‘If I were Wyatt,’ Call-Me says, ‘I would have made sure no one misconstrued me. I would have stayed away from Caesar’s wife.’

‘That is the wise course.’ He smiles. ‘But it is not for him. It is for people like you and me.’

When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man’s subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill, sharpened, can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels. Angels are messengers. They are creatures with a mind and a will. We do not know for a fact that their plumage is like the plumage of falcons, crows, peacocks. They hardly visit men nowadays. Though in Rome he knew a man, a turnspit in the papal kitchens, who had come face to face with an angel in a passage dripping with chill, in a sunken store room of the Vatican where cardinals never tread; and people bought him drinks to make him talk about it. He said the angel’s substance was heavy and smooth as marble, its expression distant and pitiless; its wings were carved from glass.

When the indictments come to his hand, he sees at once that, though the script is a clerk’s, the king has been at work. He can hear the king’s voice in every line: his outrage, jealousy, fear. It is not enough to say that she incited Norris to adultery with her in October 1533, nor Brereton in November the same year; Henry must imagine the ‘base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts’. It is not enough to cite her conduct with Francis Weston, in May 1534, or to allege that she lay down for Mark Smeaton, a man of low degree, in April last year; it is necessary to speak of the lovers’ burning resentment of each other, of the queen’s furious jealousy of any other woman they look at. It is not enough to say that she sinned with her own brother: one must imagine the kisses, presents, jewels that passed between them, and how they looked when she was ‘alluring him with her tongue in the said George’s mouth, and the said George’s tongue in hers’. It is more like a conversation with Lady Rochford, or any other scandal-loving woman, than it is like a document one carries into court; but all the same, it has its merits, it makes a story, and it puts into the heads of those who will hear it certain pictures that will not easily be got out again. He says, ‘You must add at every point, and to every offence, “and several days before and after”. Or a similar phrase, that makes it clear the offences are numerous, perhaps more numerous than even the parties themselves recollect. For in that way,’ he says, ‘if there is specific denial of one date, one place, it will not be enough to injure the whole.’

And look what Anne has said! According to this paper, she has confessed, ‘she would never love the king in her heart’.

Never has. Does not now. And never could.

He frowns over the documents and then gives them out to be picked over. Objections are raised. Is Wyatt to be added? No, by no means. If he must be tried, he thinks, if the king goes so far, then he will be pulled away from this contaminated crew, and we will start again with a blank sheet; with this trial, with these defendants, there is no way but one, no exit, no direction except the scaffold.

And if there are discrepancies, visible to those who keep accounts of where the court resides on this day or that? He says, Brereton once told me he could be in two places at once. Come to think of it, so did Weston. Anne’s lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them, peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls.

His new allies, the Courtenays and the Pole family, profess themselves unsurprised by the charges against Anne. The woman is a heretic and so is her brother. Heretics, it is well known, have no natural limits, no constraints, fear neither the law of the land nor the law of God. They see what they want and they take it. And those who (foolishly) have tolerated heretics, out of laziness or pity, then discover at last what their true nature is.

Henry Tudor will learn harsh lessons from this, the old families say. Perhaps Rome will stretch out a hand to him in his trouble? Perhaps, if he creeps on his knees, then after Anne is dead the Pope will forgive him, and take him back?

And I? he asks. Oh, well, you, Cromwell…his new masters look at him with various expressions of bemusement or disgust. ‘I shall be your prodigal son,’ he says, smiling. ‘I shall be the sheep that was lost.’

At Whitehall, little huddles of men, muttering, drawn into tight circles, their elbows pointing backwards as hands caress the daggers at their waist. And among lawyers a subfusc agitation, conferences in corners.

Rafe asks him, could the king’s freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed?

Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.

When he, Cromwell, arrives to see Thomas Wyatt in prison, the constable Kingston is anxious to assure him that his word has been obeyed, that Wyatt has been treated with all honour.

‘And the queen, how is she?’

‘Restless,’ Kingston says. He looks uneasy. ‘I am used to all sorts of prisoners, but I have never had one like this. One moment she says, I know I must die. Next moment, much contrary to that. She thinks the king will come in his barge and take her away. She thinks a mistake has been made, that there is a misapprehension. She thinks the King of France will intervene for her.’ The gaoler shakes his head.

He finds Thomas Wyatt playing dice against himself: the kind of time-wasting pursuit old Sir Henry Wyatt reprehends. ‘Who’s winning?’ he asks.

Wyatt looks up. ‘That trolling idiot, my worst self, plays that canting fool, my best self. You can guess who wins. Still, there is always the possibility it will come up different.’

‘Are you comfortable?’

‘In body or spirit?’

‘I only answer for bodies.’

‘Nothing makes you falter,’ Wyatt says. He says it with a reluctant admiration that is close to dread. But he, Cromwell, thinks, I did falter but no one knows it, reports have not gone abroad. Wyatt did not see me walk away from Weston’s interrogation. Wyatt did not see me when Anne laid her hand on my arm and asked me what I believed in my heart.

He rests his eyes on the prisoner, he takes his seat. He says softly, ‘I think I have been training all my years for this. I have served an apprenticeship to myself.’ His whole career has been an education in hypocrisy. Eyes that once skewered him now kindle with simulated regard. Hands that would like to knock his hat off now reach out to take his hand, sometimes in a crushing grip. He has spun his enemies to face him, to join him: as in a dance. He means to spin them away again, so they look down the long cold vista of their years: so they feel the wind, the wind of exposed places, that cuts to the bone: so they bed down in ruins, and wake up cold. He says to Wyatt, ‘Any information you give me I will note, but I give you my word that I will destroy it once this thing is accomplished.’

‘Accomplished?’ Wyatt is querying his choice of word.

‘The king is informed his wife has betrayed him with various men, one her brother, one his closest friend, another a servant she says she hardly knows. The glass of truth has shattered, he says. So, yes, it would be an accomplishment to pick up the pieces.’

‘But you say he is informed, how is he informed? No one admits anything, except Mark. What if he is lying?’

‘When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.’

‘But what is the evidence?’ Wyatt persists.

He smiles. ‘The truth comes to Henry’s door, wearing a cloak and hood. He lets it in because he has a shrewd idea of what lies beneath, it is not a stranger who comes calling. Thomas, I think he has always known. He knows if she was not false to him in body she was so in words, and if not in deeds then in dreams. He thinks she never esteemed or loved him, when he laid the world at her feet. He thinks he never pleased or satisfied her and that when he lay next to her she imagined someone else.’

‘That is common,’ Wyatt said. ‘Is it not usual? That is how marriage works. I never knew it was an offence in the eyes of the law. God help us. Half England will be in gaol.’

‘You understand that there are the charges that are written down in an indictment. And then there are the other charges, those we don’t commit to paper.’

‘If feeling is a crime, then I admit…’

‘Admit nothing. Norris admitted. He admitted he loved her. If what someone wants from you is an admission, it is never in your interest to give it.’

‘What does Henry want? I am honestly perplexed. I cannot see my way through it.’

‘He changes his mind, day to day. He would like to rework the past. He would like never to have seen Anne. He would like to have seen her, but to have seen through her. Mostly he wishes her dead.’

‘Wishing is not doing it.’

‘It is, if you are Henry.’

‘As I understand the law, a queen’s adultery is no treason.’

‘No, but the man who violates her, he commits treason.’

‘You think they used force?’ Wyatt says drily.

‘No, it is just the legal term. It is a pretence, that allows us to think well of any disgraced queen. But as for her, she is a traitor too, she has said so out of her own mouth. To intend the king’s death, that is treason.’

‘But again,’ Wyatt says, ‘forgive my poor understanding, I thought Anne had said, “If he dies,” or some such words. So let me put a case to you. If I say “All men must die,” is that a forecast of the king’s death?’

‘It would be well not to put cases,’ he says pleasantly. ‘Thomas More was putting cases when he tipped into treason. Now let me come to the point with you. I may need your evidence against the queen. I will accept it in writing, I do not need it aired in open court. You once told me, when you visited my house, how Anne conducts herself with men: she says, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, no.”’ Wyatt nods; he recognises those words; he looks sorry he spoke them. ‘Now you may have to transpose one word of that testimony. Yes, yes, yes, no, yes.’

Wyatt does not answer. The silence extends, settles around them: a drowsy silence, as elsewhere leaves unfurl, may blossoms on the trees, water tinkles into fountains, young people laugh in gardens. At last Wyatt speaks, his voice strained: ‘It was not testimony.’

‘What was it then?’ He leans forward. ‘You know I am not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king’s servant. So you must tell me: will you write down your thoughts, and if you are requested, will you say one word?’ He sits back. ‘And if you can reassure me on this point, I will write to your father, to reassure him in turn. To tell him you will come out of this alive.’ He pauses. ‘May I do so?’

Wyatt nods. The smallest possible gesture, a nod to the future.

‘Good. Afterwards, for your trouble, to compensate you for this detention, I will arrange for you to have a sum of money.’

‘I don’t want it.’ Wyatt turns his face away, deliberately: like a child.

‘Believe me, you do. You are still trailing debts from your time in Italy. Your creditors come to me.’

‘I’m not your brother. You’re not my keeper.’

He looks about him. ‘I am, if you think about it.’

Wyatt says, ‘I hear Henry wants an annulment too. To kill her and be divorced from her, all in one day. That is how she is, you see. Everything is ruled by extremes. She would not be his mistress, she must be queen of England; so there is breaking of faith and making of laws, so the country is set in an uproar. If he had such trouble to get her, what must it cost him to be rid? Even after she is dead, he had better make sure to nail her down.’

He says curiously, ‘Have you no tenderness left for her?’

‘She has exhausted it,’ Wyatt says shortly. ‘Or perhaps I never had any, I do not know my own mind, you know it. I dare say men have felt many things for Anne, but no one except Henry has felt tenderness. Now he thinks he’s been taken for a fool.’

He stands up. ‘I shall write some comfortable words to your father. I will explain you must stay here a little space, it is safest. But first I must…we thought Henry had dropped the annulment, but now, as you say, he revives it, so I must…’

Wyatt says, as if relishing his discomfort, ‘You’ll have to go and see Harry Percy, won’t you?’

It is now almost four years since, with Call-Me-Risley at his heels, he had confronted Harry Percy at a low inn called Mark and the Lion, and made him understand certain truths about life: the paramount truth being, that he was not, whatever he thought, married to Anne Boleyn. On that day he had slammed his hand on the table and told the young man that if he did not get himself out of the way of the king, he would be destroyed: that he, Thomas Cromwell, would let his creditors loose to destroy him, and rip away his earldom and his lands. He had slammed his hand on the table and told him that, further, if he did not forget Anne Boleyn and any claim he made on her, her uncle the Duke of Norfolk would find out where he hid and bite his bollocks off.

Since then, he has done much business with the earl, who is now a sick and broken young man, heavily in debt, his hold on his affairs slipping away from him day by day. In fact, the judgement is almost accomplished, the judgement he had invoked: except that the earl still has his bollocks, as far as anybody knows. After their talk at Mark and the Lion the earl, who had been drinking for some days, had caused his servants to sponge his clothes, wiping away trails of vomit: sour-smelling, rawly shaven, trembling and green with nausea, he had presented himself before the king’s council, and obliged him, Thomas Cromwell, by rewriting the history of his infatuation: by forswearing any claim on Anne Boleyn; by affirming that no contract of marriage had ever existed between them; that on his honour as a nobleman he had never tupped her, and that she was completely free for the king’s hands, heart and marriage bed. On which, he had taken his Bible oath, the book held by old Warham, who was archbishop before Thomas Cranmer: on which, he had received the Holy Sacrament, with Henry’s eyes boring into his back.

Now he, Cromwell, rides over to meet the earl at his country house in Stoke Newington, which lies north and east of the city on the Cambridge road. Percy’s servants take their horses, but rather than entering at once he stands back from the house to take a view of the roof and chimneys. ‘Fifty pounds spent before next winter would be a good investment,’ he says to Thomas Wriothesley. ‘Not counting the labour.’ If he had a ladder he could go up and look at the state of the leads. But that would perhaps not be consonant with his dignity. Master Secretary can do anything he likes, but the Master of the Rolls has to think of his ancient office and what is due to it. Whether, as the king’s Vicegerent in Spirituals, he is allowed to climb about on roofs…who knows? The office is too new and untried. He grins. Certainly, it would be an affront to the dignity of Master Wriothesley, if he were asked to foot the ladder. ‘I’m thinking about my investment,’ he tells Wriothesley. ‘Mine and the king’s.’

The earl owes him considerable sums, but he owes the king ten thousand pounds. After Harry Percy is dead, his earldom will be swallowed by the Crown: so he examines the earl too, to judge how sound he is. He is jaundiced, hollow-cheeked, looks older than his age, which is some thirty-four, thirty-five; and that sour smell that hangs in the air, it takes him back to Kimbolton, to the old queen shut up in her apartments: the fusty, unaired room like a gaol, and the bowl of vomit that passed him, in the hands of one of her girls. He says without much hope, ‘You haven’t been sick because of my visit?’

The earl looks at him from a sunken eye. ‘No. They say it is my liver. No, on the whole, Cromwell, you have dealt very reasonably with me, I must say. Considering –’

‘Considering what I threatened you with.’ He shakes his head, rueful. ‘Oh, my lord. Today I stand before you a poor suitor. You will never guess my errand.’

‘I think I would.’

‘I put it to you, my lord, that you are married to Anne Boleyn.’

‘No.’

‘I put it to you that in or about the year 1523, you made a secret contract of marriage with her, and that therefore her so-called marriage with the king is null.’

‘No.’ From somewhere, the earl finds a spark of his ancestral spirit, that border fire which burns in the north parts of the kingdom, and roasts any Scot in its path. ‘You made me swear, Cromwell. You came to me where I was drinking at Mark and the Lion, and you threatened me. I was dragged before the council and I was made to swear on the Bible that I had no contract with Anne. I was made to go with the king and take communion. You saw me, you heard me. How can I take it back now? Are you saying I committed perjury?’

The earl is on his feet. He remains seated. He does not mean any discourtesy; rather he thinks that, if he stands up, he might fetch the earl a slap, and he has never to his knowledge assaulted a sick man. ‘Not perjury,’ he says amicably. ‘I put it to you that on that occasion, your memory failed.’

‘I was married to Anne, but had forgotten?’

He sits back and considers his adversary. ‘You have always been a drinker, my lord, which is how, I believe, you are reduced to your present condition. On the day in question I found you, as you say, at a tavern. Is it possible that when you came before the council, you were still drunk? And therefore you were confused about what you were swearing?’

‘I was sober.’

‘Your head ached. You were nauseous. You were afraid you might be sick on the reverend shoes of Archbishop Warham. The possibility so perturbed you that you could think of nothing else. You were not attentive to the questions put to you. That was hardly your fault.’

‘But,’ the earl says, ‘I was attentive.’

‘Any councillor would understand your plight. We have all been in drink, one time or another.’

‘Upon my soul, I was attentive.’

‘Then consider another possibility. Perhaps there was some slackness in the taking of the oath. Some irregularity. The old archbishop, he was ill himself that day. I remember how his hands trembled as he held the holy book.’

‘He was palsied. It is common in age. But he was competent.’

‘If there was some defect in the procedure, your conscience should not trouble you, if you were now to repudiate your oath. Perhaps, you know, it was not even a Bible?’

‘It was bound like a Bible,’ the earl says.

‘I have a book on accountancy that is often mistaken for a Bible.’

‘Especially by you.’

He grins. The earl is not entirely addle-witted, not yet.

‘And what about the sacred host?’ Percy says. ‘I took the sacrament to seal my oath, and was that not the very body of God?’

He is silent. I could give you an argument about that, he thinks, but I will not give you an opening to call me a heretic.

‘I will not do it,’ Percy says. ‘And I cannot see why I should. All I hear is, that Henry means to kill her. Isn’t it enough for her to be dead? After she is dead what does it matter who she was contracted to?’

‘It does, in the one way. He is suspicious about the child Anne had. But he does not want to press inquiries into who is her father.’

‘Elizabeth? I have seen the thing,’ Percy says. ‘She’s his. I can tell you that much.’

‘But if she were…even if she were, he now thinks to put her out of the succession, so if he was never married to her mother – well, at a stroke the matter is clear. The way is open for the children of his next wife.’

The earl nods. ‘I see that.’

‘So if you want to help Anne, this is your last chance.’

‘How will it help her, to have her marriage annulled and her child bastardised?’

‘It might save her life. If Henry’s temper cools.’

‘You will make sure to keep it hot. You will heap on the fuel and apply the bellows, will you not?’

He shrugs. ‘It is nothing to me. I do not hate the queen, I leave that to others. So, if you had ever any regard for her –’

‘I cannot help her any more. I can only help myself. God knows the truth. You made me a liar as I stood before God. Now you want to make me a fool as I stand before men. You must find another way, Master Secretary.’

‘I will do that,’ he says easily. He stands up. ‘I am sorry you lose a chance to please the king.’ At the door, he turns back. ‘You are stubborn,’ he says, ‘because you are weak.’

Harry Percy looks up at him. ‘I am worse than weak, Cromwell. I am dying.’

‘You’ll last until the trial, won’t you? I shall put you on the panel of peers. If you are not Anne’s husband, you are clear to be her judge. The court has need of wise and experienced men like yourself.’

Harry Percy cries out after him, but he leaves the hall with long strides, and gives the gentlemen outside the door a shake of the head. ‘Well,’ Master Wriothesley says, ‘I made sure you would bounce him into sense.’

‘Sense has fled.’

‘You look gloomy, sir.’

‘Do I, Call-Me? I can’t think why.’

‘We can still free the king. My lord archbishop will see a way. Even if we have to bring Mary Boleyn into it, and say the marriage was unlawful through affinity.’

‘Our difficulty is, in the case of Mary Boleyn, the king was apprised of the facts. He may not have known if Anne was secretly married. But he always knew she was Mary’s sister.’

‘Have you ever done anything like that?’ Master Wriothesley asks thoughtfully. ‘Two sisters?’

‘Is that the kind of question that absorbs you at this time?’

‘Only one wonders. How it would be. They say Mary Boleyn was a great whore when she was at the French court. Do you think King Francis had them both?’

He looks at Wriothesley with new respect. ‘There is an angle I might explore. Now…because you have been a good boy and not struck out at Harry Percy or called him names, but waited patiently outside the door as you were bade, I’ll tell you something you will like to know. Once, when she found herself between patrons, Mary Boleyn asked me to marry her.’

Master Wriothesley gapes at him. He follows, uttering broken syllables. What? When? Why? Only when they are on horseback does he speak to the purpose. ‘God strike me. You would have been the king’s brother-in-law.’

‘But not for much longer,’ he says.

The day is breezy and fine. They make good speed back to London. In other days, in other company, he would have enjoyed the journey.

But what company would that be, he wonders, dismounting at Whitehall. Bess Seymour’s? ‘Master Wriothesley,’ he asks, ‘can you read my mind?’

‘No,’ says Call-Me. He looks baffled, and somehow affronted.

‘Do you think a bishop could read my mind?’

‘No, sir.’

He nods. ‘Just as well.’

The Imperial ambassador comes to see him, wearing his Christmas hat. ‘Especially for you, Thomas,’ he says, ‘because I know it makes you happy.’ He sits down, signals to the servant for wine. The servant is Christophe. ‘Do you use this ruffian for every purpose?’ Chapuys asks. ‘Is it not he who tortured the boy Mark?’

‘Firstly, Mark is not a boy, he is only immature. Secondly, no one tortured him.’ At least, he says, ‘not in my sight or hearing, not at my command nor suggestion, nor with my permission, expressed or implied’.

‘I feel you preparing yourself for the courtroom,’ Chapuys says. ‘A knotted rope, was it not? Tightened around the brow? So you threatened to pop out his eyes?’

He is angry. ‘This may be what they do where you were brought up. I have never heard of such a practice.’

‘So it was the rack instead?’

‘You can see him at his trial. You can judge for yourself whether he is damaged. I have seen men who have been racked. Not here. Abroad, I have seen it. They have to be carried in a chair. Mark is as nimble as in his dancing days.’

‘If you say so.’ Chapuys seems pleased to have provoked him. ‘And how is your heretic queen now?’

‘Brave as a lion. You will be sorry to learn.’

‘And proud, but she will be humbled. She is no lion, and no more than one of your London cats that sing on rooftops.’

He thinks of a black cat he used to have. Marlinspike. After some years of fighting and scavenging he ran off, as cats do, to make his career elsewhere. Chapuys says, ‘As you know, a number of ladies and gentlemen of the court have ridden up to the Princess Mary, to assure her of their services in the time which is at hand. I thought you might go yourself.’

God damn it, he thinks, I am already fully employed, and more than fully; it is no small enterprise, to bring down a queen of England. He says, ‘I trust the princess will forgive my absence at this time. It is to do her good.’

‘You have no trouble calling her “the princess” now,’ Chapuys observes. ‘She will be reinstated, of course, as Henry’s heir.’ He waits. ‘She expects, all her loyal supporters expect, the Emperor himself expects…’

‘Hope is a great virtue. But,’ he adds, ‘I hope you will warn her not to receive any persons without permission from the king. Or from me.’

‘She cannot stop them resorting to her. All her old household. They flock. It will be a new world, Thomas.’

‘The king will be eager, is eager, for a reconciliation with her. He is a good father.’

‘A pity he has not had more opportunity to show it.’

‘Eustache…’ He pauses, waves Christophe away. ‘I know you have never married, but have you no children? Do not look so startled. I am curious about your life. We must come to know each other better.’

The ambassador bristles at the change of topic. ‘I do not meddle with women. Not like you.’

‘I would not turn away a child. No one ever makes a claim on me. If they did, I would meet it.’

‘The ladies do not wish to prolong the encounter,’ Chapuys suggests.

That makes him laugh. ‘You may be right. Come, my good friend, let us have our supper.’

‘I look forward to many more such convivial evenings,’ the ambassador says, beaming. ‘Once the concubine is dead, and England is at ease.’

The men in the Tower, though they lament their likely fate, do not complain as sorely as the king does. By day he walks around like an illustration from the Book of Job. By night he glides down the river, accompanied by musicians, to visit Jane.

For all the beauties of Nicholas Carew’s house, it is eight miles from the Thames and so not convenient for evening journeys, even in these light nights of early summer; the king wants to stay with Jane till darkness falls. So the queen-in-waiting has come up to London, to be housed by her supporters and friends. Crowds surge about from one rumoured spot to another, trying to catch a glimpse of her, necks craning, eyes popping, the curious blocking gateways and hoisting each other up on walls.

Her brothers throw out largesse to the Londoners, in the hope of winning their voices for her. The word is put about that she is an English gentlewoman, one of our own; unlike Anne Boleyn, whom many believe to be French. But the crowds are puzzled, even rancorous: ought not the king to marry a great princess, like Katherine, from a faraway land?

Bess Seymour tells him, ‘Jane is squirrelling away money in a locked chest, in case the king changes his mind.’

‘So should we all. A locked chest is a good thing to have.’

‘She keeps the key in her bosom,’ Bess says.

‘No one is likely to come at it there.’

Bess gives him a merry look, out of the tail of her eye.

By now, the news of Anne’s arrest is beginning to ripple through Europe, and though Bess does not know it, offers for Henry are coming in hour by hour. The Emperor suggests that the king might like his niece the Infanta of Portugal, who would come with 400,000 ducats; and the Portuguese Prince Dom Luis could marry the Princess Mary. Or if the king does not want the Infanta, what would he say to the dowager Duchess of Milan, a very pretty young widow, who would bring him a good sum also?

These are days of omens and portents for those who value such things and can read them. The malign stories have come out of the books and are enacting themselves. A queen is locked in a tower, accused of incest. The commonwealth, nature herself, is perturbed. Ghosts are glimpsed in doorways, standing by windows, against walls, hoping to overhear the secrets of the living. A bell rings of itself, touched by no human hand. There is a burst of speech where no one is present, a hissing in the air like the sound of a hot iron plunged into water. Sober citizens are moved to shout in church. A woman pushes through the crowd at his gate, grabbing at the bridle of his horse. Before the guards force her away, she shouts at him, ‘God help us, Cromwell, what a man the king is! How many wives does he mean to have?’

For once, Jane Seymour has a blush of colour in her cheeks; or perhaps it is reflected from her gown, the soft clear rose of quince jelly.

Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor’s office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law. George Rochford will be tried apart, as a peer; the commoners will be tried first. The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring up the bodies.’ Deliver, that is, the accused men, by name Weston, Brereton, Smeaton and Norris, to Westminster Hall for trial. Kingston fetches them by barge; it is 12 May, a Friday. They are brought in by armed guards through a fulminating crowd, shouting the odds. The gamblers believe that Weston will get off; this is his family’s campaign at work. But for the others, the odds are even that they live or die. For Mark Smeaton, who has admitted everything, no wagers are being taken; but a book is open on whether he will be hanged, beheaded, boiled or burned, or subject to some novel penalty of the king’s invention.

They do not understand the law, he says to Riche, looking down from a window at the scenes below. There is only one penalty for high treason: for a man, to be hanged, cut down alive and eviscerated, or for a woman, to be burned. The king may vary the sentence to decapitation; only poisoners are boiled alive. The court can give just the one sentence in this case, and it will be transmitted from the court to the crowds, and misunderstood, so that those who have won will be gnashing their teeth, and those who have lost will be demanding their money, and there will be fights and torn clothes and smashed heads, and blood on the ground while the accused are still safe in the courtroom, and days away from death.

They will not hear the charges till they hear them in court and, as is usual in treason trials, they will have no legal representation. But they will have a chance to speak, and represent themselves, and they can call witnesses: if anybody will stand up for them. Men have been tried for treason, these last few years, and walked free, but these men know they will not escape. They have to think of their families left behind; they want the king to be good to them and that alone should still any protest, prevent any strident pleas of innocence. The court must be allowed to work unimpeded. In return for their cooperation it is understood, more or less understood, that the king will grant them the mercy of death by the axe, which will not add to their shame; though there are murmurs among the jurors that Smeaton will hang because, being a man of low birth, he has no honour to protect.

Norfolk presides. When the prisoners are brought in, the three gentlemen draw away from Mark; they want to show him their scorn, and how they are better than he. But this brings them into proximity with each other, more than they will allow; they will not look at each other, he notices, they shuffle to create as much space as they can, so they seem to be shrinking from each other, twitching at coats and sleeves. Only Mark will declare his guilt. He has been kept in irons in case he tries to destroy himself: surely a charity, as he would bungle it. So he arrives before the court intact, as promised, no marks of injury, but unable to keep himself from tears. He pleads for mercy. The other defendants are succinct but respectful to the court: three heroes of the tilting ground who see, bearing down on them, the indefeasible opponent, the King of England himself. There are challenges they could make, but the charges, their dates and their details, go by them so fast. They can win a point, if they insist; but it only slows the inevitable, and they know it. When they go in, the guards stand with halberds reversed; but when they come out, convicted, the axe edge is turned to them. They push through the uproar, dead men: hustled through the lines of halberdiers to the river, and back to their temporary home, their anteroom, to write their last letters and make spiritual preparations. All have expressed contrition, though none but Mark has said for what.

A cool afternoon: and once the crowds have drifted off, and the court broken up, he finds himself sitting by an open window with the clerks bundling the records, and he watches it done, and then says, I will go home now. I am going to my city house, to Austin Friars, send the papers to Chancery Lane. He is the overlord of the spaces and the silences, the gaps and the erasures, what is missed or misconstrued or simply mistranslated, as the news slips from English to French and perhaps via Latin to Castilian and the Italian tongues, and through Flanders to the Emperor’s eastern territories, over the borders of the German principalities and out to Bohemia and Hungary and the snowy realms beyond, by merchantmen under sail to Greece and the Levant; to India, where they have never heard of Anne Boleyn, let alone her lovers and her brother; along the silk routes to China where they have never heard of Henry the eighth of that name, or any other Henry, and even the existence of England is to them a dark myth, a place where men have their mouths in their bellies and women can fly, or cats rule the commonwealth and men crouch at mouse holes to catch their dinner. In the hall at Austin Friars he stands for a moment before the great image of Solomon and Sheba; the tapestry belonged to the cardinal once, but the king took it, and then, after Wolsey was dead, and he, Cromwell, had risen in favour, the king had made him a gift of it, as if embarrassed, as if slipping back to its true owner something that should never have been away. The king had seen him look with longing, and more than once, at Sheba’s face, not because he covets a queen but because she takes him back to his past, to a woman whom by accident she resembles: Anselma, an Antwerp widow, whom he might have married, he often thinks, if he had not made up his mind suddenly to take himself off back to England and pick up with his own people. In those days he did things suddenly: not without calculation, not without care, but once his mind was made up he was swift to move. And he is still the same man. As his opponents will find.

‘Gregory?’ His son is still in his riding coat, dusty from the road. He hugs him. ‘Let me look at you. Why are you here?’

‘You did not say I must not come,’ Gregory explains. ‘You did not absolutely forbid it. Besides, I have learned the art of public speaking now. Do you want to hear me make a speech?’

‘Yes. But not now. You ought not to ride about the country with just one attendant or two. There are people who would hurt you, because you are known to be my son.’

‘How am I known?’ Gregory says. ‘How would they know that?’ Doors open, there are feet on the stairs, there are questioning faces crowding the hall; the news from the courtroom has preceded him. Yes, he confirms, they are all guilty, all condemned, whether they will go to Tyburn I do not know, but I will move the king to grant them the swifter end; yes, Mark too, because when he was under my roof I offered him mercy, and this is all the mercy I can deliver.

‘We heard they are all in debt, sir,’ says his clerk Thomas Avery, who does the accounts.

‘We heard there were perilous crowds, sir,’ says one of his watchmen.

Thurston the cook comes out, looking floury: ‘Thurston has heard there were pies on sale,’ says the jester Anthony. ‘And I, sir? I hear that your new comedy was very well-received. And everybody laughed except the dying.’

Gregory says, ‘But there could still be reprieves?’

‘Undoubtedly.’ He does not feel like adding anything. Someone has given him a drink of ale; he wipes his mouth.

‘I remember when we were at Wolf Hall,’ Gregory says, ‘and Weston spoke so boldly to you, and so me and Rafe, we caught him in our magic net and dropped him from a height. But we would not really have killed him.’

‘The king is wreaking his pleasure, and so many fine gentlemen will be spoiled.’ He speaks for the household to hear. ‘When your acquaintances tell you, as they will, that it is I who have condemned these men, tell them that it is the king, and a court of law, and that all proper formalities have been observed, and no one has been hurt bodily in pursuit of the truth, whatever the word is in the city. And you will not believe it, please, if ill-informed persons tell you these men are dying because I have a grudge against them. It is beyond grudge. And I could not save them if I tried.’

‘But Master Wyatt will not die?’ Thomas Avery asks. There is a murmur; Wyatt is a favourite in his household, for his open-handed ways and his courtesy.

‘I must go in now. I must read the letters from abroad. Thomas Wyatt…well, let us say I have advised him. I think we shall soon see him here among us, but bear in mind that nothing is certain, the will of the king…No. Enough.’

He breaks off, Gregory trails him. ‘Are they really guilty?’ he asks, the moment they are alone. ‘Why so many men? Would it not have stood better with the king’s honour if he named only one?’

He says wryly, ‘That would distinguish him too much, the gentleman in question.’

‘Oh, you mean that people would say, Harry Norris has a bigger cock than the king, and he knows what to do with it?’

‘What a way with words you have indeed. The king is inclined to take it patiently, and where another man would strive to be secret, he knows he cannot be, because he is not a private man. He believes, or at least he wishes to show, that the queen has been indiscriminate, that she is impulsive, that her nature is bad and she cannot control it. And now that so many men are found to have erred with her, any possible defence is stripped away, do you see? That is why they have been tried first. As they are guilty, she must be.’

Gregory nods. He seems to understand, but perhaps seeming is as far as it goes. When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. It was a triumph, in a small way, to unknot the entanglement of thighs and tongues, to take that mass of heaving flesh and smooth it on to white paper: as the body, after the climax, lies back on white linen. He has seen beautiful indictments, not a word wasted. This was not one: the phrases jostled and frotted, nudged and spilled, ugly in content and ugly in form. The design against Anne is unhallowed in its gestation, untimely in its delivery, a mass of tissue born shapeless; it waited to be licked into shape as a bear cub is licked by its mother. You nourished it, but you did not know what you fed: who would have thought of Mark confessing, or of Anne acting in every respect like an oppressed and guilty woman with a weight of sin upon her? It is as the men said today in court: we are guilty of all sorts of charges, we have all sinned, we all are riddled and rotten with offences and, even by the light of church and gospel, we may not know what they are. Word has come from the Vatican, where they are specialists in sin, that any offers of friendship, any gesture of reconciliation from King Henry, would be viewed kindly at this difficult time; because, whoever else is surprised, they are not surprised in Rome about the turn events have taken. In Rome, of course, it would be unremarkable: adultery, incest, one merely shrugs. When he was at the Vatican, in Cardinal Bainbridge’s day, he quickly saw that no one in the papal court grasped what was happening, ever; and least of all the Pope. Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything.

Though in Rome, he thinks, there is little pretence at process of law. In the prisons, when an offender is forgotten and starves, or when he is beaten to death by his gaolers, they just stuff the body into a sack then roll and kick it into the river, where it joins the Tiber’s general effluent.

He looks up. Gregory has been sitting quietly, respectful of his thoughts. But now he says, ‘When will they die?’

‘It cannot be tomorrow, they need time to settle their business. And the queen will be tried in the Tower on Monday, so it must be after that, Kingston cannot…the court will sit in public, you see, the Tower will be awash with people…’ He pictures an unseemly scramble, the condemned men having to fight to the scaffold through the incoming hordes who want to see a queen on trial.

‘But will you be there to watch?’ Gregory insists. ‘When it does occur? I could attend them at the last to offer them my prayers, but I could not do it unless you were there. I might fall down on the ground.’

He nods. It is good to be realistic in these matters. He has heard street brawlers in his youth boast of their stomach, then blench at a cut finger, and anyway being at an execution is not like being in a fight: there is fear, and fear is contagious, whereas in a scrap there is no time for fear, and not until it’s over do your legs begin to shake. ‘If I am not there, Richard will be. It is a kindly thought and though it would give you pain I feel it shows respect.’ He cannot guess the shape of the next week. ‘It depends…the annulment must go through, so it rests with the queen, on how she helps us, will she give her assent.’ He is thinking aloud: ‘It may be I am at Lambeth with Cranmer. And please, my dear son, don’t ask me why there has to be an annulment. Just know it’s what the king wants.’

He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

The queen wears scarlet and black, and instead of a hood a jaunty cap, with feathers of black and white sweeping across its brim. Remember those plumes, he tells himself; this will be the last time, or almost so. How did she look, the women will ask. He will be able to say she looked pale, but unafraid. How can it be for her, to enter that great chamber and to stand before the peers of England, all men and none of them desiring her? She is tainted now, she is dead meat, and instead of coveting her – bosom, hair, eyes – their gaze slides away. Only Uncle Norfolk glares at her fiercely: as if her head were not Medusa’s head.

In the centre of the great hall at the Tower they have built a platform with benches for the judges and peers, and there are some benches too in the side arcades, but the most part of the spectators will be standing, pushing in behind each other till the guards say ‘No more,’ and block the doorways with staves. Even then they push, and the noise rises as those who have been let through jostle in the well of the court, till Norfolk, his white baton of office in his hand, calls for silence, and from the ferocious expression on his face, the most ignorant person in that throng knows he means it.

Here is the Lord Chancellor seated by the duke, to supply him with the best legal advice in the kingdom. Here is the Earl of Worcester, whose wife, you might say, started all this; and the earl gives him a filthy look, he does not know why. Here is Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who has hated Anne since he set eyes on her and has made it plain to the king’s face. Here is the Earl of Arundel, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Rutland, the Earl of Westmorland: among them he moves softly, plain Thomas Cromwell, a greeting here and a word there, spreading reassurance: the Crown’s case is in order, no upsets are expected or will be tolerated, we shall all be home for supper and sleep safely in our own beds tonight. Lord Sandys, Lord Audley, Lord Clinton and many lords more, each pricked off on a list as they take their seats: Lord Morley, George Boleyn’s father-in-law, who reaches for his hand and says, please, Thomas Cromwell, as you love me, let not this sordid business rebound on my poor little daughter Jane.

She was not so much your poor little daughter, he thinks, when you married her off without asking her; but it is common, you cannot blame him as a father, for as the king once said to him ruefully, it is only very poor men and women who are free to choose who they love. He clasps Lord Morley’s hand in return, and wishes him courage, and bids him take his seat, for the prisoner is among us and the court prepared.

He bows to the foreign ambassadors; but where is Chapuys? Word is passed forward, he is suffering from a quartan fever: word is passed back, I am sorry to hear that, let him send to my house for anything that might make him more comfortable. Say his fever is up today, day one: its tide ebbing tomorrow, by Wednesday he is on his feet but shaky, but by Thursday night he will be down again, as it shakes him in its grip.

The Attorney General reads the indictment, and it takes some time: crimes under statute, crimes under God. As he gets to his feet to prosecute he is thinking, the king expects a verdict by mid-afternoon; and glancing across the court he sees Francis Bryan, still in his outdoor coat, ready to get on the river with word to the Seymours. Steady, Francis, he thinks, this may take some time, it may get hot in here.

The substance of the case is the work of an hour or two, but when there are ninety-five names to be verified, of the justices and the peers, then the mere shuffling and the throat-clearing, the nose-blowing, the adjustment of robes and the settling of belt sashes – all those distracting rituals that some men need before they speak in public – with all that, it is clear the day will wear on; the queen herself is a still presence, listening intently from her chair as the list of her crimes is read out, the dizzying catalogue of times, dates, places, of men, their members, their tongues: into the mouth, out of the mouth, into divers crannies of the body, at Hampton Court and Richmond Palace, at Greenwich and Westminster, in Middlesex and in Kent; and then the loose words and taunts, the jealous quarrels and twisted intentions, the declaration, by the queen, that when her husband is dead, she will choose some one of them to be her husband, but she cannot yet say which. ‘Did you say that?’ She shakes her head. ‘You must answer aloud.’

Icy little voice: ‘No.’

It is all she will say, no, no and no: and once she answers ‘Yes,’ when she is asked if she has given money to Weston, and she hesitates and admits it; and there is a whoop from the crowd, and Norfolk stops proceedings and threatens he will have them all arrested if they do not keep silence. In any well-ordered country, Suffolk said yesterday, the trial of a noblewoman would be conducted in seemly privacy; he had rolled his eyes and said, but my lord, this is England.

Norfolk has obtained quiet, a rustling calm punctuated by coughs and whispers; he is ready for the prosecution to resume, and says, ‘Very well, go on, er – you.’ Not for the first time, he is baffled by having to speak to a common man, who is not an ostler or a carter, but a minister of the king: the Lord Chancellor leans forward and whispers, reminding him perhaps that the prosecutor is Master of the Rolls. ‘Carry on, Your Mastership,’ he says, more politely. ‘Please do proceed.’

She denies treason, there is the point: she never raises her voice, but she disdains to enlarge, to excuse, extenuate: to mitigate. And there is no one to do it for her. He remembers what Wyatt’s old father had once told him, how a dying lioness can maul you, flash out with her claw and scar you for life. But he feels no threat, no tension, nothing at all. He is a good speaker, known for eloquence, style and audibility, but today he has no interest in whether he is heard, not beyond the judges, the accused, as whatever the populace hear they will misconstrue: and so his voice seems to fade to a drowsy murmur in the room, the voice of a country priest droning through his prayers, no louder than a fly buzzing in a corner, knocking against glass; out of the corner of his eye he sees the Attorney General stifle a yawn, and he thinks, I have done what I thought I could never achieve, I have taken adultery, incest, conspiracy and treason, and I have made them routine. We do not need any false excitement. After all, it is a law court, not the Roman circus.

The verdicts drag in: it is a lengthy business; the court implores brevity, no speeches please, one word will suffice: ninety-five vote guilty, and not one nay-sayer. When Norfolk begins to read the sentence, the roar rises again, and one can feel the pressure of the people outside trying to get in, so it seems the hall gently rocks, like a boat at its mooring. ‘Her own uncle!’ someone wails, and the duke bangs his fist on his table and says he will do slaughter. That produces some quiet; the hush allows him to conclude, ‘…thy judgement is this: Thou shalt be burned here, within the Tower, or else to have thy head smitten off, as the king’s pleasure shall be further known –’

There is a yelp from one of the justices. The man is leaning forward, whispering furiously; Norfolk looks irate; the lawyers are going into a huddle, the peers crane forward to find out what is the delay. He strolls over. Norfolk says, ‘These fellows tell me I have not done it right, I cannot say burning or beheading, I have to say one, and they say it must be burning, that is how a woman suffers when she is a traitor.’

‘My lord Norfolk has his instructions from the king.’ He means to crush objection and he does. ‘The phrasing is the king’s pleasure and moreover, do not tell me what can be done and what cannot, we have never tried a queen before.’

‘We’re just making it up as we go,’ says the Lord Chancellor amiably.

‘Finish what you were saying,’ he tells Norfolk. He steps back.

‘I think I have done,’ Norfolk says, scratching his nose. ‘…head smitten off, as the king’s pleasure shall be further known of the same.’

The duke drops his voice and concludes at conversational pitch; so the queen never hears the end of her sentence. She has the gist, though. He watches her rise from her chair, still composed, and he thinks, she doesn’t believe it; why doesn’t she believe it? He looks across to where Francis Bryan was hovering, but the messenger has already gone.

Rochford’s trial has now to go forward; they must get Anne out, before her brother comes in. The solemnity of the occasion has dissipated. The more elderly members of the court have to totter out to piss, and the younger to stretch their legs and have a gossip, and collect the latest odds on an acquittal for George. The betting runs in his favour, though his face, as he is brought in, shows he is not deceived. To those who insist he will be acquitted, he, Cromwell has said, ‘If Lord Rochford can satisfy the court, he will be let go. Let us see what defence he will make.’

He has only one real fear: that Rochford is not vulnerable to the same pressure as the other men, because he is not leaving behind anyone he cares for. His wife has betrayed him, his father deserted him, and his uncle will preside over the court that tries him. He thinks George will speak with eloquence and spirit, and he is correct. When the charges are read to him, he asks that they be put one by one, clause by clause: ‘For what is your worldly time, gentlemen, against God’s assurance of eternity?’ There are smiles: admiration for his suavity. Boleyn addresses him, Cromwell, directly. ‘Put them to me one by one. The times, the places. I will confound you.’

But the contest is not even. He has his papers, and if it comes to it, he can lay them on the table and make his case without them; he has his trained memory, he has his accustomed self-possession, his courtroom voice that places no strain on his throat, his urbanity of manner that places no strain on his emotions; and if George thinks he will falter, reading out the details of caresses administered and received, then George does not know the place he comes from: the times, the manners, that have formed Master Secretary. Soon enough, Lord Rochford will begin to sound like a raw, tearful boy; he is fighting for his life, and thus unequal to a man who seems so indifferent to the outcome; let the court acquit if it will, there will be another court, or a process, more informal, that will end with George a broken corpse. He thinks, too, that soon young Boleyn will lose his temper, that he will show his contempt for Henry, and then it will all be up with him. He hands Rochford a paper: ‘Certain words are written here, which the queen is said to have spoken to you, and you in your turn passed them on. You need not read them aloud. Just tell the court, do you recognise those words?’

George smiles in disdain. Relishing the moment, he smirks: he takes a breath; he reads the words aloud. ‘The king cannot copulate with a woman, he has neither skill nor vigour.’

He has read it because he thinks the crowd will like it. And so they do, though the laughter is shocked, incredulous. But from his judges – and it is they who matter – there is an audible hiss of deprecation. George looks up. He throws out his hands. ‘These are not my words. I do not own them.’

But he owns them now. In one moment of bravado, to get the applause of the crowd, he has impugned the succession, derogated the king’s heirs: even though he was cautioned not to do it. He, Cromwell, nods. ‘We have heard that you spread rumours that the Princess Elizabeth is not the king’s child. It seems you do. You have spread them even in this court.’

George is silent.

He shrugs and turns away. It is hard on George that he cannot even mention the charges against him without becoming guilty of them. As prosecutor, he would rather it had gone unmentioned, the king’s difficulty; yet it is no more of a shame to Henry to have it declared in court than have it said in the street, and in taverns where they are singing the ballad of King Littleprick and his wife the witch. In such circumstances, the man blames the woman, as often as not. Something she has done, something she has said, the black look she gave him when he faltered, the derisive expression on her face. Henry is afraid of Anne, he thinks. But he will be potent with his new wife.

He gathers himself, gathers his papers; the judges wish to confer. The case against George is flimsy enough in all truth, but if the charges are thrown out, Henry will arraign him on some other matter, and it will go hard with his family, not just the Boleyns but the Howards too: for this reason, he thinks, Uncle Norfolk will not let him escape. And no one has denounced the charges as incredible, at this trial or the trials that preceded it. It has become a thing one can believe, that these men would plot against the king and copulate with the queen: Weston because he is reckless, Brereton because he is old in sin, Mark because he is ambitious, Henry Norris because he is familiar, he is close, he has confused his own person with the person of the king; and George Boleyn, not despite being her brother, but because he is her brother. Boleyns, it is known to all, will do what they need to do to rule; if Anne Boleyn put herself on the throne, walking on the bodies of the fallen, can she not put a Boleyn bastard there too?

He looks up at Norfolk, who gives him a nod. The verdict is in no doubt then, nor the sentence. The only surprise is Harry Percy. The earl rises from his place. He stands, his mouth open slightly, and a silence falls, not the rustling, whispering apology for a silence which the court has endured till now, but a still, expectant hush. He thinks of Gregory: do you want to hear me make a speech? Then the earl pitches forward, unleashes a groan, he crumples, and with a clatter and a thud he hits the floor. At once his prone body is swamped by guardsmen, and a great roar arises, ‘Harry Percy is dead.’

Unlikely, he thinks. They’ll bring him round. It is now mid-afternoon, warm and airless, and the evidence placed before the judges, the written statements alone, would fell a healthy man. There is a length of blue cloth laid over the new boards of the platform on which the judges sit, and he watches the guardsmen rip it up from the floor and improvise a blanket in which to carry the earl; and a memory stabs him, Italy, heat, blood, heaving and rolling and flopping a dying man on to knotted saddlecloths, cloths themselves scavenged from the dead, hauling him into the shade of the wall of – what, a church, a farmhouse? – only so that he could die, cursing, a few minutes later, trying to pack his guts back into the wound from which they were spilling, as if he wanted to leave the world tidy.

He feels sick, and he sits down by the Attorney General. The guardsmen carry the earl out, head lolling, eyes closed, feet dangling. His neighbour says, ‘There is another man the queen has ruined. I suppose we will not know them all for years.’

It is true. The trial is a provisional arrangement, a fix for getting Anne out, Jane in. The effects of it have not been tested yet, the resonances have not been felt; but he expects a quaking at the heart of the body politic, a heaving in the stomach of the commonwealth. He gets up and goes over to urge Norfolk to get the trial under way again. George Boleyn – suspended as he is between trial and conviction – looks as though he might collapse himself, and has begun to weep. ‘Help Lord Rochford to a chair,’ he says. ‘Give him something to drink.’ He is a traitor, but still an earl; he can hear his death sentence sitting down.

Next day, 16 May, he is at the Tower, with Kingston in the constable’s own lodgings. Kingston is fretting because he does not know what sort of scaffold to prepare for the queen: she lies under a dubious sentence, waiting for the king to speak. Cranmer is with her in her lodgings, come to hear her confession, and he will be able to hint to her, delicately, that her cooperation now will spare her pain. That the king still has mercy in him.

A guardsman at the door, addressing the constable: ‘There is a visitor. Not for yourself, sir. For Master Cromwell. It is a foreign gentleman.’

It is Jean de Dinteville, who was here on embassy round about the time Anne was crowned. Jean stands poised in the doorway: ‘They said I should find you here, and as time is short –’

‘My dear friend.’ They embrace. ‘I did not even know you were in London.’

‘I am straight off the boat.’

‘Yes, you look it.’

‘I am no sailor.’ The ambassador shrugs; or at least, his vast padding moves, and subsides again; on this balmy morning, he is wrapped up in bewildering layers, much as a man dresses to face November. ‘Anyway, it seemed best to come here and catch you before you are back playing bowls, which I believe you generally do when you should be receiving our representatives. I am sent to speak to you about young Weston.’

Good God, he thinks, has Sir Richard Weston managed to bribe the King of France?

‘Not a moment too soon. He is sentenced to die tomorrow. What about him?’

‘One is uneasy,’ the ambassador says, ‘if gallantry should be punished. Surely the young man is guilty of nothing more than a poem or two? Paying compliments and making jests? Perhaps the king might spare his life. One understands that for a year or two he would be advised to keep away from the court – travelling, perhaps?’

‘He has a wife and young son, Monsieur. Not that the thought of them has ever constrained his behaviour.’

‘So much the worse, if the king puts him to death. Does Henry not regard his reputation as a merciful prince?’

‘Oh yes. He talks about it a lot. Monsieur, my advice is to forget Weston. Much as my master reveres and respects yours, he will not take it kindly if King Francis were to interfere in something which is, after all, a family matter, something he feels very near his own person.’

Dinteville is amused. ‘One might well call it a family matter.’

‘I notice you do not ask mercy for Lord Rochford. He has been an ambassador, one thought the King of France would be more interested in him.’

‘Ah well,’ the ambassador says. ‘George Boleyn. One understands there is a change of regime, and what that entails. The whole French court hopes, of course, that Monseigneur will not be destroyed.’

‘Wiltshire? He has been a good servant to the French, I see you would miss him. He is in no danger at present. Of course, you cannot look for his influence to be what it was. A change of regime, as you say.’

‘May I say…’ the ambassador stops to sip wine, to nibble a wafer that Kingston’s servants have provided, ‘that we in France find this whole business incomprehensible? Surely if Henry wishes to be rid of his concubine he can do it quietly?’

The French do not understand law courts or parliaments. For them, the best actions are covert actions. ‘And if he must parade his shame to the world, surely one or two adulteries are enough? However, Cremuel,’ the ambassador runs his eye over him, ‘we can speak man to man, can we not? The great question is, can Henry do it? Because what we hear is, he prepares himself, and then his lady gives him a certain look. And his hopes collapse. That seems to us like witchcraft, as witches do commonly render men impotent. But,’ he adds, with a look of sceptical contempt, ‘I cannot imagine that any Frenchman would be so afflicted.’

‘You must understand,’ he says, ‘though Henry is at all points a man, he is a gentleman, and not a cur grunting in the gutter with…well, I say nothing of your own king’s choice of women. These last months,’ he takes a breath, ‘these last weeks particularly, have been a time of great trial and grief for my master. He now seeks happiness. Have no doubt that his new marriage will secure his realm and promote the welfare of England.’

He is talking as if he is writing; already he is casting his version into dispatches.

‘Oh, yes,’ the ambassador says, ‘the little person. One hears no great praise either of her beauty or her wit. He will not really marry her, another woman of no importance? When the Emperor offers him such lucrative matches…or so we hear. We understand everything, Cremuel. As a man and a woman, the king and the concubine may have their disputes, but there are more than the two of them in the world, this is not the Garden of Eden. When all’s said, it is the new politics she doesn’t suit. The old queen was, in some sort, the concubine’s protector, and ever since she died Henry has been plotting how he may become a respectable man again. So he must wed the first honest woman he sees, and in all truth it really does not matter whether she is the Emperor’s relative or no, because with the Boleyns gone, Cremuel is riding high, and he will be sure to pack the council with good imperialists.’ His lip curls; it might be a smile. ‘Cremuel, I wish you would say how much the Emperor Charles pays you. I have no doubt we could match it.’

He laughs. ‘Your master is seated on thorns. He knows my king has money flowing in. He is afraid that he might pay France a visit, and in arms.’

‘You know what you owe King Francis.’ The ambassador is annoyed. ‘Only our negotiations, most astute and subtle negotiations, prevent the Pope from striking your country from the list of Christian nations. We have, I think, been loyal friends to you, representing your cause better than you can yourselves.’

He nods. ‘I always enjoy hearing the French praise themselves. Will you dine with me later this week? Once this is over? And your queasiness has settled down?’

The ambassador inclines his head. His cap badge glitters and winks; it is a silver skull. ‘I shall report to my master that sadly I have tried and failed in the matter of Weston.’

‘Say you came too late. The tide was against you.’

‘No, I shall say Cremuel was against me. By the way, you know what Henry has done, don’t you?’ He seems amused. ‘He sent last week for a French executioner. Not from one of our own cities, but the man who chops heads in Calais. It seems there is no Englishman whom he trusts to behead his wife. I wonder he does not take her out himself and strangle her in the street.’

He turns to Kingston. The constable is an elderly man now, and though he was in France on the king’s business fifteen years ago he has not had much use for the language since; the cardinal’s advice was, speak English and shout loud. ‘Did you get that?’ he asks. ‘Henry has sent to Calais for the headsman.’

‘By the Mass,’ Kingston says. ‘Did he do it before the trial?’

‘So monsieur the ambassador tells me.’

‘I am glad of the news,’ Kingston says, loudly and slowly. ‘My mind. Much relieved.’ He taps his head. ‘I understand he employs a…’ He makes a swishing motion.

‘Yes, a sword,’ Dinteville says in English. ‘You may expect a graceful performance.’ He touches his hat, ‘Au revoir, Master Secretary.’

They watch him go out. It is a performance in itself; his servants need to truss him in further wrappings. When he was here on his last mission, he spent the time sweltering under quilts, trying to sweat out a fever picked up from the influence of the English air, the moisture and the gnawing cold.

‘Little Jeannot,’ he says, looking after the ambassador. ‘He still fears the English summer. And the king – when he had his first audience with Henry, he could not stop shaking from terror. We had to hold him up, Norfolk and myself.’

‘Did I misunderstand,’ the constable says, ‘or did he say Weston was guilty of poems?’

‘Something like that.’ Anne, it appears, was a book left open on a desk for anyone to write on the pages, where only her husband should inscribe.

‘Anyway, there’s a matter off my mind,’ the constable says. ‘Did you ever see a woman burned? It is something I wish never to see, as I trust in God.’

When Cranmer comes to see him on the evening of 16 May, the archbishop looks ill, shadowed grooves running from nose to chin. Were they there a month ago? ‘I want all this to be over,’ he says, ‘and to get back to Kent.’

‘Did you leave Grete there?’ he says gently.

Cranmer nods. He seems hardly able to say his wife’s name. He is terrified every time the king mentions marriage, and of course these days the king mentions little else. ‘She is afraid that, with his next queen, the king will revert to Rome, and we shall be forced to part. I tell her, no, I know the king’s resolve. But whether he will change his thinking, so a priest can live openly with his wife…if I thought there was no hope of that, then I think I should have to let her go home, before there is nothing there for her. You know how it is, in a few years people die, they forget you, you forget your own language, or so I suppose.’

‘There is every hope,’ he says firmly. ‘And tell her, within a few months, in the new Parliament, I shall have wiped out all remnants of Rome from the statute books. And then, you know,’ he smiles, ‘once the assets are given out…well, once they have been directed to the pockets of Englishmen, they will not revert to the pockets of the Pope.’ He says, ‘How did you find the queen, did she make her confession to you?’

‘No. It is not yet the time. She will confess. At the last. If it comes to it.’

He is glad for Cranmer’s sake. What would be worse at this point? To hear a guilty woman admit everything, or to hear an innocent woman beg? And to be bound to silence, either way? Perhaps Anne will wait until there is no hope of a reprieve, preserving her secrets till then. He understands this. He would do the same.

‘I told her the arrangements made,’ Cranmer says, ‘for the annulment hearing. I told her it will be at Lambeth, it will be tomorrow. She said, will the king be there? I said no, madam, he sends his proctors. She said, he is busy with Seymour, and then she reproached herself, saying, I should not speak against Henry, should I? I said, it would be unwise. She said to me, may I come there to Lambeth, to speak for myself? I said no, there is no need, proctors have been appointed for you too. She seemed downcast. But then she said, tell me what the king wants me to sign. Whatever the king wants, I will agree. He may allow me to go to France, to a convent. Does he want me to say I was wed to Harry Percy? I said to her, madam, the earl denies it. And she laughed.’

He looks doubtful. Even the fullest disclosure, even a complete and detailed admission of guilt, it would not help her, not now, though it might have helped before the trial. The king doesn’t want to think about her lovers, past or present. He has wiped them out of his mind. And her too. She would not credit the extent to which Henry has erased her. He said yesterday, ‘I hope these arms of mine will soon receive Jane.’

Cranmer says, ‘She cannot imagine that the king has abandoned her. It is not yet a month since he made the Emperor’s ambassador bow to her.’

‘I think he did that for his own sake. Not for hers.’

‘I don’t know,’ Cranmer says. ‘I thought he loved her. I thought there was no estrangement between them, up until the last. I am forced to think I don’t know anything. Not about men. Not about women. Not about my faith, nor the faith of others. She said to me, “Shall I go to Heaven? Because I have done many good deeds in my time.”’

She has made the same enquiry of Kingston. Perhaps she is asking everybody.

‘She talks of works.’ Cranmer shakes his head. ‘She says nothing of faith. And I hoped she understood, as I now understand, that we are saved, not by our works, but only through Christ’s sacrifice, and through his merits, not our own.’

‘Well, I do not think you should conclude that she was a papist all this time. What would it have availed her?’

‘I am sorry for you,’ Cranmer says. ‘That you should have the responsibility of uncovering it all.’

‘I did not know what I would find, when I began. That is the only reason I could do it, because I was surprised at every turn.’ He thinks of Mark’s boasting, of the gentlemen before the court twitching away from each other, and evading each other’s eyes; he has learned things about human nature that even he never knew. ‘Gardiner in France is clamouring to know the details, but I find I do not want to write the particulars, they are so abominable.’

‘Draw a veil over it,’ Cranmer agrees. Though the king himself, he does not shrink from the details, it seems. Cranmer says, ‘He is taking it around with him, the book he has written. He showed it the other evening, at the Bishop of Carlisle’s house, you know Francis Bryan has the lease there? In the midst of Bryan’s entertainments, the king took out this text, and began to read it aloud, and press it on all the party. Grief has unhinged him.’

‘No doubt,’ he says. ‘Anyway, Gardiner will be content. I have told him he will be the gainer, when the spoils are given out. The offices, I mean, and the pensions and payments that now revert to the king.’

But Cranmer is not listening. ‘She said to me, when I die, shall I not be the king’s wife? I said, no, madam, for the king would have the marriage annulled, and I have come to seek your consent to that. She said, I consent. She said to me, but will I still be queen? And I think, under statute, she will be. I did not know what to say to her. But she looked satisfied. But it seemed so long. The time I was with her. One moment she was laughing, and then praying, and then fretting…She asked me about Lady Worcester, the child she is carrying. She said she thought the child was not stirring as it should, the lady being now in her fifth month or so, and she thinks it is because Lady Worcester has taken fright, or is sorrowing for her. I did not like to tell her that this lady had given a deposition against her.’

‘I will enquire,’ he says. ‘About my lady’s health. Though not of the earl. He glared at me. I do not know for what cause.’

A number of expressions, all of them unfathomable, chase themselves across the archbishop’s face. ‘Do you not know why? Then I see the rumour is not true. I am glad of it.’ He hesitates. ‘You really do not know? The word at court is that Lady Worcester’s child is yours.’

He is dumbfounded. ‘Mine?’

‘They say you have spent hours with her, behind closed doors.’

‘And that is proof of adultery? Well, I see that it would be. I am paid out. Lord Worcester will run me through.’

‘You do not look afraid.’

‘I am afraid, but not of Lord Worcester.’

More of the times that are coming. Anne climbing the marble steps to Heaven, her good deeds like jewels weighting wrists and neck.

Cranmer says, ‘I do not know why, but she thinks there is still hope.’

All these days he is not alone. His allies are watching him. Fitzwilliam is at his side, disturbed still by what Norris half-told him and then took back: always talking about it, taxing his brain, trying to make complete sentences from broken phrases. Nicholas Carew is mostly with Jane, but Edward Seymour flits between his sister and the privy chamber, where the atmosphere is subdued, vigilant, and the king, like the minotaur, breathes unseen in a labyrinth of rooms. He understands his new friends are protecting their investment. They watch him for any sign of wavering. They want him as deep in the matter as they can contrive, and their own hands hidden, so that if later the king expresses any regret, or questions the haste with which things were done, it is Thomas Cromwell and not they who will suffer.

Riche and Master Wriothesley keep turning up too. They say, ‘We want to give attendance on you, we want to learn, we want to see what you do.’ But they can’t see. When he was a boy, fleeing to put the Narrow Sea between himself and his father, he rolled penniless into Dover, and set himself up in the street with the three-card trick. ‘See the queen. Look well at her. Now…where is she?’

The queen was in his sleeve. The money was in his pocket. The gamblers were crying, ‘You will be whipped!’

He takes the warrants to Henry to be signed. Kingston has still received no word of how the men are to die. He promises, I will make the king concentrate his mind. He says, ‘Majesty, there is no gallows at Tower Hill, and I do not think it would be a good idea to take them to Tyburn, the crowds might be unruly.’

‘Why would they?’ Henry says. ‘The people of London do not love these men. Indeed they do not know them.’

‘No, but any excuse for disorder, and if the weather stays fine…’

The king grunts. Very well. The headsman.

Mark too? ‘After some sort, I promised him mercy if he confessed, and you know he did confess freely.’

The king says, ‘Has the Frenchman come?’

‘Yes, Jean de Dinteville. He has made representations.’

‘No,’ Henry says.

Not that Frenchman. He means the Calais executioner. He says to the king, ‘Do you think that it was in France, when the queen was at court there in her youth, do you think it was there she was first compromised?’

Henry is silent. He thinks, then speaks. ‘She was always pressing me, do you mark what I say…always pressing on me the advantage of France. I think you are right. I have been thinking about it and I do not believe it was Harry Percy took her maidenhead. He would not lie, would he? Not on his honour as a peer of England. No, I believe it was in the court of France she was first debauched.’

So he cannot tell if the Calais headsman, so expert in his art, is a mercy at all; or if this form of death, dealt to the queen, simply meets Henry’s severe sense of the fitness of things.

But he thinks, if Henry blames some Frenchman for ruining her, some foreigner unknown and perhaps dead, so much the better. ‘So it was not Wyatt?’ he says.

‘No,’ Henry says sombrely. ‘It was not Wyatt.’

He had better stay where he is, he thinks, for now. Safer so. But a message can go to him, to say he is not to be tried. He says, ‘Majesty, the queen complains of her attendants. She would like to have women from her own privy chamber.’

‘Her household is broken up. Fitzwilliam has seen to it.’

‘I doubt the ladies have all gone home.’ They are hovering, he knows, in the houses of their friends, in expectation of a new mistress.

Henry says, ‘Lady Kingston must stay, but you can change the rest. If she can find any willing to serve her.’

It is possible Anne still does not know how she has been abandoned. If Cranmer is right, she imagines her former friends are lamenting her, but really they are in a sweat of fear until her head is off. ‘Someone will do her the charity,’ he says.

Henry now looks down at the papers before him, as if he does not know what they are. ‘The death sentences. To endorse,’ he reminds him. He stands by the king while he dips his pen and sets his signature to each of the warrants: square, complex letters, lying heavy on the paper; a man’s hand, when all is said.

He is at Lambeth, in the court convened to hear the divorce proceedings, when Anne’s lovers die: this is the last day of the proceedings, it must be. His nephew Richard is there to represent him on Tower Hill and bring him the word of how it was accomplished. Rochford made an eloquent speech, appearing in command of himself. He was killed first and needed three blows of the axe; after which, the others said not much. All proclaimed themselves sinners, all said they deserved to die, but once again they did not say for what; Mark, left till last and slipping in the blood, called for God’s mercy and the prayers of the people. The executioner must have steadied himself, since after his first blunder all died cleanly.

On paper it is done. The records of the trials are his, to carry to the Rolls House, to keep or destroy or mislay, but the bodies of the dead men are a dirty, urgent problem. The corpses must be put in a cart and brought within the Tower walls: he can see them, a heap of entangled bodies without heads, heaped promiscuously as if on a bed, or as if, like corpses in war, they have already been buried and dug up. Within the fortress they are stripped of their clothes, which are the perquisite of the headsman and his assistants, and left in their shirts. There is a graveyard huddled to the walls of St Peter ad Vincula, and the commoners will be buried there, with Rochford to go alone beneath the floor of the chapel. But now the dead are without the badges of their ranks there is some confusion. One of the burial party said, fetch the queen, she knows their body parts; but others, Richard says, cried shame on him. He says, gaolers see too much, they soon lose their sense of what is fitting. ‘I saw Wyatt looking down from a grate in the Bell Tower,’ Richard says. ‘He signed to me and I wanted to give him hope, but I did not know how to signal that.’

He will be released, he says. But perhaps not until Anne is dead.

The hours to that event seem long. Richard hugs him; says, ‘If she had reigned longer she would have given us to the dogs to eat.’

‘If we had let her reign longer, we would have deserved it.’

At Lambeth, the two proctors for the queen had been present: as the king’s substitutes, Dr Bedyll and Dr Tregonwell, and Richard Sampson as his counsel. And himself, Thomas Cromwell: and the Lord Chancellor, and other councillors, including the Duke of Suffolk, whose own marital affairs have been so entangled that he has learned a certain amount of canon law, swallowing it like a child taking medicine; today Brandon had sat making faces and shifting in his chair, while the priests and lawyers sifted the circumstances. They had talked over Harry Percy, and agreed he was no use to them. ‘I cannot think why you did not get his cooperation, Cromwell,’ the duke says. Reluctantly they had talked over Mary Boleyn, and agreed she would have to furnish the impediment; though the king was as culpable as anyone, for he knew, surely, he could not be contracted to Anne if he had slept with her sister? I suppose the point was not entirely obvious, Cranmer says gently. There was affinity, that is clear, but he had a dispensation from the Pope, which he thought held good at the time. He did not know that, in so grave a matter, the Pope cannot dispense; that point was settled later.

It is all most unsatisfactory. The duke says suddenly, ‘Well, you all know she is a witch. And if she witched him into marriage…’

‘I don’t think the king means that,’ he says: he, Cromwell.

‘Oh, he does,’ says the duke. ‘I thought that was what we had come here to discuss. If she witched him into marriage it was null, is my understanding.’ The duke sits back, his arms folded.

The proctors look at each other. Sampson looks at Cranmer. No one looks at the duke. Eventually Cranmer says, ‘We don’t have to make it public. We can issue the decree but keep the grounds secret.’

A release of breath. He says, ‘I suppose it is some consolation, that we need not be laughed at in public.’

The Lord Chancellor says, ‘The truth is so rare and precious that sometimes it must be kept under lock and key.’

The Duke of Suffolk speeds to his barge, crying out that at last he is free of the Boleyns.

The end of the king’s first marriage was protracted, public and discussed throughout Europe, not only in the councils of princes but in the market square. The end of his second, if decency prevailed, would be swift, private, unspoken and obscure. Yet it is necessary to have it witnessed by the city and by men of rank. The Tower is a town. It is an armoury, a palace, a mint. Workmen of all sorts, officials come and go. But it can be policed, and foreigners evacuated. He sets Kingston to do this. Anne, he is sorry to learn, has mistaken the day of her death, rising at 2 a.m. to pray on the morning of 18 May, sending for her almoner and for Cranmer to come to her at dawn so she can purge herself of her sins. No one seems to have told her that Kingston comes without fail at dawn on the morning of an execution, to warn the dying person to be ready. She is not familiar with the protocol, and why would she be? Kingston says, see it from my point of view: five deaths in one day, and to be ready for a queen of England the next? How can she die, when the appropriate officials from the city are not here? The carpenters are still making her scaffold on Tower Green, though thankfully she cannot hear the knocking from the royal lodging.

Still, the constable is sorry for her misapprehension; especially since her mistake ran on, late into the morning. The situation is a great strain on both himself and his wife. Instead of being glad of another dawn, he reports, Anne had cried, and said she was sorry not to die that day: she wished she were past her pain. She knew about the French executioner and, ‘I told her,’ Kingston says, ‘it shall be no pain, it is so subtle.’ But once again, Kingston says, she closed her fingers around her throat. She had taken the Eucharist, declaring on the body of God her innocence.

Which surely she would not do, Kingston says, if she were guilty?

She laments the men who are gone.

She makes jokes, saying that she will be known hereafter as Anne the Headless, Anne sans Tête.

He says to his son, ‘If you come with me to witness this, it will be almost the hardest thing you ever do. If you can go through it with a steady countenance, it will be remarked on and it will be much in your favour.’

Gregory just looks at him. He says, ‘A woman, I cannot.’

‘I will be beside you to show you that you can. You need not look. When the soul passes, we kneel, and we drop our eyes, and pray.’

The scaffold has been set up in an open place, where once they used to hold tournaments. A guard of two hundred yeomen is assembling, drawing up to lead the procession. Yesterday’s bungling, the confusion over the date, the delays, the misinformation: none of that must be repeated. He is there early, when they are putting the sawdust down, leaving his son back in Kingston’s lodgings, with the others who are collecting: the sheriffs, aldermen, London’s officers and dignitaries. He stands himself on the steps of the scaffold, testing them to see if they take his weight; one of the sawdust men says to him, it’s sound, sir, we have all run up and down, but I suppose you want to check it yourself. When he looks up the executioner is already there, talking to Christophe. The young man is well-dressed, an allowance having been made him for a gentleman’s apparel, so that he will not be easy to pick out from the other officials; this is done to save alarm to the queen, and if the clothes are spoiled, at least he is not out of pocket himself. He walks up to the executioner. ‘How will you do this?’

‘I shall surprise her, sir.’ Switching into English, the young man indicates his feet. He is wearing soft shoes, such as one might wear indoors. ‘She never sees the sword. I have put it there, in the straw. I shall distract her. She will not see from where I come.’

‘But you will show me.’

The man shrugs. ‘If you like. Are you Cremuel? They told me you are in charge of everything. In fact they joke to me, saying, if you faint because she is so ugly, there is one who will pick up the sword, his name is Cremuel and he is such a man, he can chop the head off the Hydra, which I do not understand what it is. But they say it is a lizard or serpent, and for each head that is chopped two more will grow.’

‘Not in this case,’ he says. Once the Boleyns are done, they are done.

The weapon is heavy, needing a two-handed grip. It is almost four foot in length: two inches broad, round at the tip, a double edge. ‘One practises, like this,’ the man says. He whirls like a dancer on the spot, his arms held high, his fists together as if he were gripping the sword. ‘Every day one must handle the weapon, if only to go through the motions. One may be called at any time. We do not kill so many in Calais, but one goes to other towns.’

‘It is a good trade,’ Christophe says. He wants to handle the sword, but he, Cromwell, does not want to let go of it yet.

The man says, ‘They tell me I may speak French to her and she will understand me.’

‘Yes, do so.’

‘But she will kneel, she must be informed of this. There is no block, as you see. She must kneel upright and not move. If she is steady, it will be done in a moment. If not, she will be cut to pieces.’

He hands back the weapon. ‘I can answer for her.’

The man says, ‘Between one beat of the heart and the next it is done. She knows nothing. She is in eternity.’

They walk away. Christophe says, ‘Master, he has said to me, tell the women that she should wrap her skirts about her feet when she kneels, in case she falls bad and shows off to the world what so many fine gentlemen have already seen.’

He does not reprove the boy for his coarseness. He is crude but correct. And when the moment comes, it will prove, the women do it anyway. They must have discussed it among themselves.

Francis Bryan has appeared beside him, steaming inside a leather jerkin. ‘Well, Francis?’

‘I am charged that as soon as her head is off I ride with the news to the king and Mistress Jane.’

‘Why?’ he says coldly. ‘Do they think the headsman might in some way fail?’

It is almost nine o’clock. ‘Did you eat any breakfast?’ Francis says.

‘I always eat my breakfast.’ But he wonders if the king did. ‘Henry has hardly spoken of her,’ Francis Bryan says. ‘Only to say he cannot see how the whole thing occurred. When he looks back on the last ten years, he cannot understand himself.’

They are silent. Francis says, ‘Look, they are coming.’

The solemn procession, through Coldharbour Gate: the city first, aldermen and officials, then the guard. In the midst of them the queen with her women. She wears a gown of dark damask and a short cape of ermine, a gable hood; it is the occasion, one supposes, to hide the face as much as possible, to guard the expression. That ermine cape, does he not know it? It was wrapped around Katherine, he thinks, when I saw it last. These furs, then, are Anne’s final spoils. Three years ago when she went to be crowned, she walked on a blue cloth that stretched the length of the abbey – so heavy with child that the onlookers held their breath for her; and now she must make shift over the rough ground, picking her way in her little lady’s shoes, with her body hollow and light and just as many hands around her, ready to retrieve her from any stumble and deliver her safely to death. Once or twice the queen falters, and the whole procession must slow; but she has not stumbled, she is turning and looking behind her. Cranmer had said, ‘I do not know why, but she thinks there is still hope.’ The ladies have veiled themselves, even Lady Kingston; they do not want their future lives to be associated with this morning’s work, they do not want their husbands or their suitors to look at them and think of death.

Gregory has slipped into place beside him. His son is trembling and he can feel it. He puts out a gloved hand and rests it on his arm. The Duke of Richmond acknowledges him; he stands in prominent view, with his father-in-law Norfolk. Surrey, the duke’s son, is whispering to his father, but Norfolk gazes straight ahead. How has the house of Howard come to this?

When the women strip the queen of her cape she is a tiny figure, a bundle of bones. She does not look like a powerful enemy of England, but looks can deceive. If she could have brought Katherine to this same place, she would have. If her sway had continued, the child Mary might have stood here; and he himself of course, pulling off his coat and waiting for the coarse English axe. He says to his son, ‘It will be but a moment now.’ Anne has given alms out as she walks, and the velvet bag is empty now; she slips her hand inside it and turns it inside out, a prudent housewife’s gesture, checking to see that nothing is thrown away.

One of the women stretches out a hand for the purse. Anne passes it without looking at her, then moves to the edge of the scaffold. She hesitates, looks over the heads of the crowd, then begins to speak. The crowd as one sways forward, but can only shuffle by inches towards her, every man with his head lifted, staring. The queen’s voice is very low, her words barely heard, her sentiments the usual ones on the occasion: ‘…pray for the king, for he is a good, gentle, amiable and virtuous prince…’ One must say these things, as even now the king’s messenger might come…

She pauses…But no, she has finished. There is nothing more to say and not more than a few moments left of this world. She takes in a breath. Her face expresses bewilderment. Amen, she says, amen. Her head goes down. Then she seems to draw herself together, to control the tremor that has seized her entire body from head to foot.

One of the veiled women moves to her side and speaks to her. Anne’s arm shakes as she raises it to lift off her hood. It comes easily, no fumbling; he thinks, it cannot have been pinned. Her hair is gathered in a silk net at the nape of her neck and she shakes it out, gathers up the strands, raising her hands above her head, coiling it; she holds it with one hand, and one of the women gives her a linen cap. She pulls it on. You would not think it would hold her hair, but it does; she must have rehearsed with it. But now she looks about as if for direction. She lifts the cap half off her head, puts it back. She does not know what to do, he sees she does not know if she should tie the cap’s string beneath her chin – whether it will hold without fastening or whether she has time to make a knot and how many heartbeats she has left in the world. The executioner steps out and he can see – he is very close – Anne’s eyes focus on him. The Frenchman bobs to his knees to ask pardon. It is a formality and his knees barely graze the straw. He has motioned Anne to kneel, and as she does so he steps away, as if he does not want contact even with her clothes. At arm’s length, he holds out a folded cloth to one of the women, and raises a hand to his eyes to show her what he means. He hopes it is Lady Kingston who takes the blindfold; whoever it is, she is adept, but a small sound comes from Anne as her world darkens. Her lips move in prayer. The Frenchman waves the women back. They retreat; they kneel, one of them almost sinks to the ground and is propped up by the others; despite the veils one can see their hands, their helpless bare hands, as they draw their own skirts about them, as if they were making themselves small, making themselves safe. The queen is alone now, as alone as she has ever been in her life. She says, Christ have mercy, Jesus have mercy, Christ receive my soul. She raises one arm, again her fingers go to the coif, and he thinks, put your arm down, for God’s sake put your arm down, and he could not will it more if – the executioner calls out sharply, ‘Get me the sword.’ The blinded head whips around. The man is behind Anne, she is misdirected, she does not sense him. There is a groan, one single sound from the whole crowd. Then a silence, and into that silence, a sharp sigh or a sound like a whistle through a keyhole: the body exsanguinates, and its flat little presence becomes a puddle of gore.

The Duke of Suffolk is still standing. Richmond too. All others, who have knelt, now get to their feet. The executioner has turned away, modestly, and already handed over his sword. His assistant is approaching the corpse but the four women are there first, blocking him with their bodies. One of them says fiercely, ‘We do not want men to handle her.’

He hears young Surrey say, ‘No, they have handled her enough.’ He says to Norfolk, my lord, take your son in charge, and take him away from this place. Richmond, he sees, looks ill, and he sees with approval how Gregory goes to him and bows, friendly as one young boy can be to another, saying, my lord, leave it now, come away. He does not know why Richmond did not kneel. Perhaps he believes the rumours that the queen tried to poison him, and will not offer her even that last respect. With Suffolk, it is more understandable. Brandon is a hard man and owes Anne no forgiveness. He has seen battle. Though never a bloodletting like this.

It seems Kingston did not think further than the death, to the burial. ‘I hope to God,’ he, Cromwell says to no one in particular, ‘that the constable has remembered to have the flags taken up in the chapel,’ and someone answers him, I think so, sir, for they were levered up two days ago, so her brother could go under.

The constable has not helped his reputation these last few days, though he has been kept in uncertainty by the king and, as he will admit later, he had thought all morning that a messenger might suddenly arrive from Whitehall, to stop it: even when the queen was helped up the steps, even to the moment she took off her hood. He has not thought of a coffin, but an elm chest for arrows has been hastily emptied and carried to the scene of the carnage. Yesterday it was bound for Ireland with its freight, each shaft ready to deal separate, lonely damage. Now it is an object of public gaze, a death casket, wide enough for the queen’s little body. The executioner has crossed the scaffold and lifted the severed head; in a yard of linen he swaddles it, like a newborn. He waits for someone to take the burden. The women, unassisted, lift the queen’s sodden remains into the chest. One of them steps forward, receives the head, and lays it – no other space – by the queen’s feet. Then they straighten up, each of them awash in her blood, and stiffly walk away, closing their ranks like soldiers.

That evening he is at home at Austin Friars. He has written letters into France, to Gardiner. Gardiner abroad: a crouching brute nibbling his claws, waiting for his moment to strike. It has been a triumph, to keep him away. He wonders how much longer he can do it.

He wishes Rafe were here, but either he is with the king or he has gone back to Helen in Stepney. He is used to seeing Rafe most days and he cannot get used to the new order of things. He keeps expecting to hear his voice, and to hear him and Richard, and Gregory when he is at home, scuffling in corners and trying to push each other downstairs, hiding behind doors to jump on each other, doing all those tricks that even men of twenty-five or thirty do when they think their grave elders are not nearby. Instead of Rafe, Mr Wriothesley is with him, pacing. Call-Me seems to think someone should give an account of the day, as if for a chronicler; or if not that, that he should give an account of his own feelings. ‘I stand, sir, as if upon a headland, my back to the sea, and below me a burning plain.’

‘Do you, Call-Me? Then come in from the wind,’ he says, ‘and have a cup of this wine Lord Lisle sends me from France. I do usually keep it for my own drinking.’

Call-Me takes the glass. ‘I smell burning buildings,’ he says. ‘Fallen towers. Indeed there is nothing but ash. Wreckage.’

‘But it’s useful wreckage, isn’t it?’ Wreckage can be fashioned into all sorts of things: ask any dweller on the sea shore.

‘You have not properly answered on one point,’ Wriothesley says. ‘Why did you let Wyatt go untried? Other than because he is your friend?’

‘I see you do not rate friendship highly.’ He watches Wriothesley take that in.

‘Even so,’ Call-Me says. ‘Wyatt I see poses you no threat, nor has he slighted or offended you. William Brereton, he was high-handed and offended many, he was in your way. Harry Norris, young Weston, well, there are gaps where they stood, and you can put your own friends in the privy chamber alongside Rafe. And Mark, that squib of a boy with his lute; I grant you, the place looks tidier without him. And George Rochford struck down, that sends the rest of the Boleyns scurrying away, Monseigneur will have to scuttle back to the country and sing small. The Emperor will be gratified by all that has passed. It is a pity the ambassador’s fever kept him away today. He would like to have seen it.’

No he would not, he thinks. Chapuys is squeamish. But you ought to get up from your sickbed if you need to, and see the results you have willed.

‘Now we shall have peace in England,’ Wriothesley says.

A phrase runs through his head – was it Thomas More’s? – ‘the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home’. He sees the scattered carcasses, some killed with one snap of the jaw, the rest bitten and shredded as the fox whirls and snaps in panic as the hens flap about him, as he spins around and deals death: the remnants then to be sluiced away, the mulch of scarlet feathers plastered over the floor and walls.

‘All the players gone,’ Wriothesley says. ‘All four who carried the cardinal to Hell; and also the poor fool Mark who made a ballad of their exploits.’

‘All four,’ he says. ‘All five.’

‘A gentleman asked me, if this is what Cromwell does to the cardinal’s lesser enemies, what will he do by and by to the king himself?’

He stands looking down into the darkening garden: transfixed, the question like a knife between his shoulderblades. There is only one man among all the king’s subjects to whom that question would occur, only one who would dare pose it. There is only one man who would dare question the loyalty he shows to his king, the loyalty he demonstrates daily. ‘So…’ he says at last. ‘Stephen Gardiner calls himself a gentleman.’

Perhaps, caught in the little panes which distort and cloud, Wriothesley sees a dubious image: confusion, fear, emotions that do not often mark Master Secretary’s face. Because if Gardiner thinks this, who else? Who else will think it in the months and years ahead? He says, ‘Wriothesley, surely you don’t expect me to justify my actions to you? Once you have chosen a course, you should not apologise for it. God knows, I mean nothing but good to our master the king. I am bound to obey and serve. And if you watch me closely you will see me do it.’

He turns, when he thinks it is fit for Wriothesley to see his face. His smile is implacable. He says, ‘Drink my health.’