Wolf Hall

Chapter I. Supremacy. 1534

In the convivial days between Christmas and New Year, while the court is feasting and Charles Brandon is in the fens shouting at a door, he is rereading Marsiglio of Padua. In the year 1324 Marsiglio put to us forty-two propositions. When the feast of the Epiphany is past, he ambles along to put a few of them to Henry.

Some of these propositions the king knows, some are strange to him. Some are congenial, in his present situation; some have been denounced to him as heresy. It’s a morning of brilliant, bone-chilling cold, the wind off the river like a knife in the face. We are breezing in to push our luck.

Marsiglio tells us that when Christ came into this world he came not as a ruler or a judge, but as a subject: subject to the state as he found it. He did not seek to rule, nor pass on to his disciples a mission to rule. He did not give power to one of his followers more than another; if you think he did, read again those verses about Peter. Christ did not make Popes. He did not give his followers the power to make laws or levy taxes, both of which churchmen have claimed as their right.

Henry says, ‘I never remember the cardinal spoke of this.’

‘Would you, if you were a cardinal?’

Since Christ did not induce his followers into earthly power, how can it be maintained that the princes of today derive their power from the Pope? In fact, all priests are subjects, as Christ left them. It is for the prince to govern the bodies of his citizens, to say who is married and who can marry, who is a bastard and who legitimate.

Where does the prince get this power, and his power to enforce the law? He gets it through a legislative body, which acts on behalf of the citizens. It is from the will of the people, expressed in Parliament, that a king derives his kingship.

When he says this, Henry seems to be straining his ears, as if he might catch the sound of the people coming down the road to turn him out of his palace. He reassures him on the point: Marsiglio gives no legitimacy to rebels. Citizens may indeed band together to overthrow a despot, but he, Henry, is not a despot; he is a monarch who rules within the law. Henry likes the people to cheer him as he rides through London, but the wise prince is not always the most popular prince; he knows this.

He has other propositions to put to him. Christ did not bestow on his followers grants of land, or monopolies, offices, promotions. All these things are the business of the secular power. A man who has taken vows of poverty, how can he have property rights? How can monks be landlords?

The king says, ‘Cromwell, with your facility for large numbers …’ He stares into the distance. His fingers pick at the silver lacing of his cuff.

‘The legislative body,’ he says, ‘should provide for the maintenance of priests and bishops. After that, it should be able to use the church’s wealth for the public good.’

‘But how to free it,’ Henry says. ‘I suppose shrines can be broken.’ Gem-studded himself, he thinks of the kind of wealth you can weigh. ‘If there were any who dared.’

It is a characteristic of Henry, to run before you to where you were not quite going. He had meant to gentle him towards an intricate legal process of dispossession, repossession: the assertion of ancient sovereign rights, the taking back of what was always yours. He will remember that it was Henry who first suggested picking up a chisel and gouging the sapphire eyes out of saints. But he is willing to follow the king’s thought. ‘Christ taught us how to remember him. He left us bread and wine, body and blood. What more do we need? I cannot see where he asked for shrines to be set up, or instituted a trade in body parts, in hair and nails, or asked us to make plaster images and worship them.’

‘Would you be able to estimate,’ Henry says, ‘even … no, I suppose you wouldn’t.’ He gets to his feet. ‘Well, the sun shines, so …’

Better make hay. He sweeps the day’s papers together. ‘I can finish up.’ Henry goes off to get into his double-padded riding coat. He thinks, we don’t want our king to be the poor man of Europe. Spain and Portugal have treasure flowing in every year from the Americas. Where is our treasure?

Look around you.

His guess is, the clergy own a third of England. One day soon, Henry will ask him how the Crown can own it instead. It’s like dealing with a child; one day you bring in a box, and the child asks, what is in there? Then it goes to sleep and forgets, but next day, it asks again. It doesn’t rest until the box is open and the treats given out.

Parliament is about to reconvene. He says to the king, no parliament in history has worked as hard as I mean to work this one.

Henry says, ‘Do what you have to do. I will back you.’

It’s like hearing words you’ve waited all your life to hear. It’s like hearing a perfect line of poetry, in a language you knew before you were born.

He goes home happy, but the cardinal is waiting for him in a corner. He is plump as a cushion in his scarlet robes and his face wears a martial and mutinous expression. Wolsey says, you know he will take the credit for your good ideas, and you the blame for his bad ones? When fortune turns against you, you will feel her lash: you always, he never.

He says, my dear Wolsey. (For now that cardinals are finished in this realm, he addresses him as a colleague, not a master.) My dear Wolsey, not entirely so – he didn’t blame Charles Brandon for splintering a lance inside his helmet, he blamed himself for not putting his visor down.

The cardinal says, do you think this is a tilting ground? Do you think there are rules, protocols, judges to see fair play? One day, when you are still adjusting your harness, you will look up and see him thundering at you downhill.

The cardinal vanishes, with a chortle.

Even before the Commons convenes, his opponents meet to work out their tactics. Their meetings are not secret. Servants go in and out, and his method with the Pole conclaves bears repeating: there are young men in the Cromwell household not too proud to put on an apron and bring in a platter of halibut or a joint of beef. The gentlemen of England apply for places in his household now, for their sons and nephews and wards, thinking they will learn statecraft with him, how to write a secretary’s hand and deal with translation from abroad, and what books one ought to read to be a courtier. He takes it seriously, the trust placed in him; he takes gently from the hands of these noisy young persons their daggers, their pens, and he talks to them, finding out behind the passion and pride of young men of fifteen or twenty what they are really worth, what they value and would value under duress. You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

The boys are astonished by the question, their souls pour out. Perhaps no one has talked to them before. Certainly not their fathers.

You introduce these boys, violent or unscholarly as they are, to humble occupations. They learn the psalms. They learn the use of a filleting blade and a paring knife; only then, for self-defence and in no formal lesson, they learn the estoc, the killing jerk under the ribs, the simple twist of the wrist that makes you sure. Christophe offers himself as instructor. These messieurs, he says, be sure they are dainty. They are cutting off the head of the stag or the tail of the rat, I know not what, to send home to their dear papa. Only you and me, master, and Richard Cremuel, we know how to stop some little fuckeur in his tracks, so that’s the end of him, and he doesn’t even squeak.

Before spring comes, some of the poor men who stand at his gate find their way inside it. The eyes and ears of the unlettered are as sharp as those of the gentry, and you need not be a scholar to have a good wit. Horseboys and kennelmen overhear the confidences of earls. A boy with kindling and bellows hears the sleepy secrets of early morning, when he goes in to light a fire.

On a day of strong sunlight, sudden and deceptive warmth, Call-Me-Risley strides into Austin Friars. He barks, ‘Give you good morning, sir,’ throws off his jacket, sits down to his desk and scrapes forward his stool. He picks up his quill and looks at the tip of it. ‘Right, what do you have for me?’ His eyes are glittering and the tips of his ears are pink.

‘I think Gardiner must be back,’ he says.

‘How did you know?’ Call-Me throws down his pen. He jumps up. He strides about. ‘Why is he like he is? All this wrangling and jangling and throwing out questions when he doesn’t care about the answers?’

‘You liked it well enough when you were at Cambridge.’

‘Oh, then,’ Wriothesley says, with contempt for his young self. ‘It’s supposed to train our minds. I don’t know.’

‘My son claims it wore him out, the practice of scholarly disputation. He calls it the practice of futile argument.’

‘Perhaps Gregory’s not completely stupid.’

‘I would be glad to think not.’

Call-Me blushes a deep red. ‘I mean no offence, sir. You know Gregory’s not like us. As the world goes, he is too good. But you don’t have to be like Gardiner, either.’

‘When the cardinal’s advisers met, we would propose plans, there would perhaps be some dispute, but we would talk it through; then we would refine our plans, and implement them. The king’s council doesn’t work like that.’

‘How could it? Norfolk? Charles Brandon? They’ll fight you because of who you are. Even if they agree with you, they’ll fight you. Even if they know you’re right.’

‘I suppose Gardiner has been threatening you.’

‘With ruin.’ He folds one fist into the other. ‘I don’t regard it.’

‘But you should. Winchester is a powerful man and if he says he will ruin you that is what he means to do.’

‘He calls me disloyal. He says while I was abroad I should have minded his interests, instead of yours.’

‘My understanding is, you serve Master Secretary, whoever is acting in that capacity. If I,’ he hesitates, ‘if – Wriothesley, I make you this offer, if I am confirmed in the post, I will put you in charge at the Signet.’

‘I will be chief clerk?’ He sees Call-Me adding up the fees.

‘So now, go to Gardiner, apologise, and get him to make you a better offer. Hedge your bets.’

His face alarmed, Call-Me hovers. ‘Run, boy.’ He scoops up his jacket and thrusts it at him. ‘He’s still Secretary. He can have his seals back. Only tell him, he has to come here and collect them in person.’

Call-Me laughs. He rubs his forehead, dazed, as if he’s been in a fight. He throws on his coat. ‘We’re hopeless, aren’t we?’

Inveterate scrappers. Wolves snapping over a carcase. Lions fighting over Christians.

The king calls him in, with Gardiner, to look through the bill he proposes to put into Parliament to secure the succession of Anne’s children. The queen is with them; many private gentlemen see less of their wives, he thinks, than the king does. He rides, Anne rides. He hunts, Anne hunts. She takes his friends, and makes them into hers.

She has a habit of reading over Henry’s shoulder; she does it now, her exploring hand sliding across his silky bulk, through the layers of his clothing, so that a tiny fingernail hooks itself beneath the embroidered collar of his shirt, and she raises the fabric just a breath, just a fraction, from pale royal skin; Henry’s vast hand reaches to caress hers, an absent, dreamy motion, as if they were alone. The draft refers, time and again, and correctly it would seem, to ‘your most dear and entirely beloved wife Queen Anne’.

The Bishop of Winchester is gaping. As a man, he cannot unglue himself from the spectacle, yet as a bishop, it makes him clear his throat. Anne takes no notice; she carries on doing what she’s doing, and reading out the bill, until she looks up, shocked: it mentions my death! ‘If it should happen your said dear and entirely beloved wife Queen Anne to decease …’

‘I can’t exclude the event,’ he says. ‘Parliament can do anything, madam, except what is against nature.’

She flushes. ‘I shall not die of the child. I am strong.’

He doesn’t remember that Liz lost her wits when she was carrying a child. If anything, she was ever more sober and frugal, and spent time making store-cupboard inventories. Anne the queen takes the draft out of Henry’s hand. She shakes it in a passion. She is angry with the paper, jealous of the ink. She says, ‘This bill provides that if I die, say I die now, say I die of a fever and I die undelivered, then he can put another queen in my place.’

‘Sweetheart,’ the king says, ‘I cannot imagine another in your place. It is only notional. He must make provision for it.’

‘Madam,’ Gardiner says, ‘if I may defend Cromwell, he envisages only the customary situation. You would not condemn His Majesty to a life as perpetual widower? And we know not the hour, do we?’

Anne takes no notice, it’s as if Winchester had not spoken. ‘And if she has a son, it says, that son will inherit. It says, heirs male lawfully begotten. Then what happens to my daughter and her claim?’

‘Well,’ Henry says, ‘she is still a princess of England. If you look further down the paper, it says that …’ He closes his eyes. God give me strength.

Gardiner springs to supply some: ‘If the king never had a son, not in lawful matrimony with any woman, then your daughter would be queen. That is what Cromwell proposes.’

‘But why must it be written like this? And where does it say that Spanish Mary is a bastard?’

‘Lady Mary is out of the line of succession,’ he says, ‘so the inference is clear. We don’t need to say more. You must forgive any coldness of expression. We try to write laws sparingly. And so that they are not personal.’

‘By God,’ Gardiner says with relish, ‘if this isn’t personal, what is?’

The king seems to have invited Stephen to this conference in order to snub him. Tomorrow, of course, it could go the other way; he could arrive to see Henry arm in arm with Winchester and strolling among the snowdrops. He says, ‘We mean to seal this act with an oath. His Majesty’s subjects to swear to uphold the succession to the throne, as laid out in this paper and ratified by Parliament.’

‘An oath?’ Gardiner says. ‘What sort of legislation needs to be confirmed by an oath?’

‘You will always find those who will say a parliament is misled, or bought, or in some way incapable of representing the commonwealth. Again, you will find those who will deny Parliament’s competence to legislate in certain matters, saying they must be left to some other jurisdiction – to Rome, in effect. But I think that is a mistake. Rome has no legitimate voice in England. In my bill I mean to state a position. It is a modest one. I draft it, it may please Parliament to pass it, it may please the king to sign it. I shall then ask the country to endorse it.’

‘So what will you do?’ Stephen says, jeering. ‘Have your boys from Austin Friars up and down the land, swearing every man Jack you dig out of an alehouse? Every man Jack and every Jill?’

‘Why should I not swear them? Do you think because they are not bishops they are brutes? One Christian’s oath is as good as another’s. Look at any part of this kingdom, my lord bishop, and you will find dereliction, destitution. There are men and women on the roads. The sheep farmers are grown so great that the little man is knocked off his acres and the ploughboy is out of house and home. In a generation these people can learn to read. The ploughman can take up a book. Believe me, Gardiner, England can be otherwise.’

‘I have made you angry,’ Gardiner observes. ‘Provoked, you mistake the question. I asked you not if their word is good, but how many of them you propose to swear. But of course, in the Commons you have brought in a bill against sheep –’

‘Against the runners of sheep,’ he says, smiling.

The king says, ‘Gardiner, it is to help the common people – no grazier to run more than two thousand animals –’

The bishop cuts his king off as if he were a child. ‘Two thousand, yes, so while your commissioners are rampaging through the shires counting sheep, perhaps they can swear the shepherds at the same time, eh? And these ploughboys of yours, in their preliterate condition? And any drabs they find in a ditch?’

He has to laugh. The bishop is so vehement. ‘My lord, I will swear whoever is necessary to make the succession safe, and unite the country behind us. The king has his officers, his justices of the peace – and the lords of the council will be put on their honour to make this work, or I will know why.’

Henry says, ‘The bishops will take the oath. I hope they will be conformable.’

‘We want some new bishops,’ Anne says. She names her friend Hugh Latimer. His friend, Rowland Lee. It seems after all she does have a list, which she carries in her head. Liz made preserves. Anne makes pastors.

‘Latimer?’ Stephen shakes his head, but he cannot accuse the queen, to her face, of loving heretics. ‘Rowland Lee, to my certain knowledge, has never stood in a pulpit in his life. Some men come into the religious life only for ambition.’

‘And have barely the grace to disguise it,’ he says.

‘I make the best of my road,’ Stephen says. ‘I was set upon it. By God, Cromwell, I walk it.’

He looks up at Anne. Her eyes sparkle with glee. Not a word is lost on her.

Henry says, ‘My lord Winchester, you have been out of the country a great while, on your embassy.’

‘I hope Your Majesty thinks it has been to his profit.’

‘Indeed, but you have not been able to avoid neglecting your diocese.’

‘As a pastor, you should mind your flock,’ Anne says. ‘Count them, perhaps.’

He bows. ‘My flock is safe in fold.’

Short of kicking the bishop downstairs himself, or having him hauled out by the guards, the king can’t do much more. ‘All the same, feel free to attend to it,’ Henry murmurs.

There is a feral stink that rises from the hide of a dog about to fight. It rises now into the room, and he sees Anne turn aside, fastidious, and Stephen put his hand to his chest, as if to ruffle up his fur, to warn of his size before he bares his teeth. ‘I shall be back with Your Majesty within a week,’ he says. His dulcet sentiment comes out as a snarl from the depth of his guts.

Henry bursts into laughter. ‘Meanwhile we like Cromwell. Cromwell treats us very well.’

Once Winchester has gone, Anne hangs over the king again; her eyes flick sideways, as if she were drawing him into conspiracy. Anne’s bodice is still tight-laced, only a slight fullness of her breasts indicating her condition. There has been no announcement; announcements are never made, women’s bodies are uncertain things and mistakes can occur. But the whole court is sure she is carrying the heir, and she says so herself; apples are not mentioned this time, and all the foods she craved when she was carrying the princess revolt her, so the signs are good it will be a boy. This bill he will bring into the Commons is not, as she thinks, some anticipation of disaster, but a confirmation of her place in the world. She must be thirty-three this year. For how many years did he laugh at her flat chest and yellow skin? Even he can see her beauty, now she is queen. Her face seems sculpted in the purity of its lines, her skull small like a cat’s; her throat has a mineral glitter, as if it were powdered with fool’s gold.

Henry says, ‘Stephen is a resolute ambassador, no doubt, but I cannot keep him near me. I have trusted him with my innermost councils, and now he turns.’ He shakes his head. ‘I hate ingratitude. I hate disloyalty. That is why I value a man like you. You were good to your old master in his trouble. Nothing could commend you more to me, than that.’ He speaks as if he, personally, hadn’t caused the trouble; as if Wolsey’s fall were caused by a thunderbolt. ‘Another who has disappointed me is Thomas More.’

Anne says, ‘When you write your bill against the false prophetess Barton, put More in it, beside Fisher.’

He shakes his head. ‘It won’t run. Parliament won’t have it. There is plenty of evidence against Fisher, and the Commons don’t like him, he talks to them as if they were Turks. But More came to me even before Barton was arrested and showed me how he was clear in the matter.’

‘But it will frighten him,’ Anne says. ‘I want him frightened. Fright may unmake a man. I have seen it occur.’

Three in the afternoon: candles brought in. He consults Richard’s day-book: John Fisher is waiting. It is time to be enraged. He tries thinking about Gardiner, but he keeps laughing. ‘Arrange your face,’ Richard says.

‘You’d never imagine that Stephen owed me money. I paid for his installation at Winchester.’

‘Call it in, sir.’

‘But I have already taken his house for the queen. He is still grieving. I had better not drive him to an extremity. I ought to leave him a way back.’

Bishop Fisher is seated, his skeletal hands resting on an ebony cane. ‘Good evening, my lord,’ he says. ‘Why are you so gullible?’

The bishop seems surprised that they are not to start off with a prayer. Nevertheless, he murmurs a blessing.

‘You had better ask the king’s pardon. Beg the favour of it. Plead with him to consider your age and infirmities.’

‘I do not know my offence. And, whatever you think, I am not in my second childhood.’

‘But I believe you are. How else would you have given credence to this woman Barton? If you came across a puppet show in the street, would you not stand there cheering, and shout, “Look at their little wooden legs walking, look how they wave their arms? Hear them blow their trumpets”. Would you not?’

‘I don’t think I ever saw a puppet show,’ Fisher says sadly. ‘At least, not one of the kind of which you speak.’

‘But you’re in one, my lord bishop! Look around you. It’s all one great puppet show.’

‘And yet so many did believe in her,’ Fisher says mildly. ‘Warham himself, Canterbury that was. A score, a hundred of devout and learned men. They attested her miracles. And why should she not voice her knowledge, being inspired? We know that before the Lord goes to work, he gives warning of himself through his servants, for it is stated by the prophet Amos …’

‘Don’t prophet Amos me, man. She threatened the king. Foresaw his death.’

‘Foreseeing it is not the same as desiring it, still less plotting it.’

‘Ah, but she never foresaw anything that she didn’t hope would happen. She sat down with the king’s enemies and told them how it would be.’

‘If you mean Lord Exeter,’ the bishop says, ‘he is already pardoned, of course, and so is Lady Gertrude. If they were guilty, the king would have proceeded.’

‘That does not follow. Henry wishes for reconciliation. He finds it in him to be merciful. As he may be to you even yet, but you must admit your faults. Exeter has not been writing against the king, but you have.’

‘Where? Show me.’

‘Your hand is disguised, my lord, but not from me. Now you will publish no more.’ Fisher’s glance shoots upwards. Delicately, his bones move beneath his skin; his fist grips his cane, the handle of which is a gilded dolphin. ‘Your printers abroad are working for me now. My friend Stephen Vaughan has offered them a better rate.’

‘It is about the divorce you are hounding me,’ Fisher says. ‘It is not about Elizabeth Barton. It is because Queen Katherine asked my counsel and I gave it.’

‘You say I am hounding you, when I ask you to keep within the law? Do not try to lead me away from your prophetess, or I will lead you where she is and lock you up next door to her. Would you have been so keen to believe her, if in one of her visions she had seen Anne crowned queen a year before it occurred, and Heaven smiling down on the event? In that case, I put it to you, you would have called her a witch.’

Fisher shakes his head; he retreats into bafflement. ‘I always wondered, you know, it has puzzled me many a year, if in the gospels Mary Magdalene was the same Mary who was Martha’s sister. Elizabeth Barton told me for a certainty she was. In the whole matter, she didn’t hesitate.’

He laughs. ‘Oh, she’s familiar with these people. She’s in and out of their houses. She’s shared a bowl of pottage many a time with our Blessed Lady. Look now, my lord, holy simplicity was well enough in its day, but its day is over. We’re at war. Just because the Emperor’s soldiers aren’t running down the street, don’t deceive yourself – this is a war and you are in the enemy camp.’

The bishop is silent. He sways a little on his stool. Sniffs. ‘I see why Wolsey retained you. You are a ruffian and so was he. I have been a priest forty years, and I have never seen such ungodly men as those who flourish today. Such evil councillors.’

‘Fall ill,’ he says. ‘Take to your bed. That’s what I recommend.’

The bill of attainder against the Maid and her allies is laid before the House of Lords on a Saturday morning, 21 February. Fisher’s name is in it and so, at Henry’s command, is More’s. He goes to the Tower to see the woman Barton, to see if she has anything else to get off her conscience before her death is scheduled.

She has survived the winter, trailed across country to her outdoor confessions, standing exposed on scaffolds in the cutting wind. He brings a candle in with him, and finds her slumped on her stool like a badly tied bundle of rags; the air is both cold and stale. She looks up and says, as if they were resuming a conversation, ‘Mary Magdalene told me I should die.’

Perhaps, he thinks, she has been talking to me in her head. ‘Did she give you a date?’

‘You’d find that helpful?’ she asks. He wonders if she knows that Parliament, indignant over More’s inclusion, could delay the bill against her till spring. ‘I’m glad you’ve come, Master Cromwell. Nothing happens here.’

Not even his most prolonged, his most subtle interrogations had frightened her. To get Katherine pulled into it, he had tried every trick he knew: with no result. He says, ‘You are fed properly, are you?’

‘Oh yes. And my laundry done. But I miss it, when I used to go to Lambeth, see the archbishop, I liked that. Seeing the river. All the people bustling along, and the boats unloading. Do you know if I shall be burned? Lord Audley said I would be burned.’ She speaks as if Audley were an old friend.

‘I hope you can be spared that. It is for the king to say.’

‘I go to Hell these nights,’ she says. ‘Master Lucifer shows me a chair. It is carved of human bones and padded with cushions of flame.’

‘Is it for me?’

‘Bless you, no. For the king.’

‘Any sightings of Wolsey?’

‘The cardinal’s where I left him.’ Seated among the unborn. She pauses; a long drifting pause. ‘They say it can take an hour for the body to burn. Mother Mary will exalt me. I shall bathe in the flames, as one bathes in a fountain. To me, they will be cool.’ She looks into his face but at his expression she turns away. ‘Sometimes they pack gunpowder in the wood, don’t they? Makes it quick then. How many will be going with me?’

Six. He names them. ‘It could have been sixty. Do you know that? Your vanity brought them here.’

As he says it he thinks, it is also true that their vanity brought her: and he sees that she would have preferred sixty to die, to see Exeter and the Pole family pulled down to disgrace; it would have sealed her fame. That being so, why would she not name Katherine as party to the plot? What a triumph that would be for a prophet, to ruin a queen. There, he thinks, I shouldn’t have been so subtle after all; I should have played on her greed to be infamous. ‘Shall I not see you again?’ she says. ‘Or will you be there, when I suffer?’

‘This throne,’ he says. ‘This chair of bones. It would be as well to keep it to yourself. Not to let the king hear of it.’

‘I think he ought. He should have warning of what is waiting for him after death. And what can he do to me, worse than he already plans?’

‘You don’t want to plead your belly?’

She blushes. ‘I’m not with child. You’re laughing at me.’

‘I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life, by any means they can. Say you have been ill-used on the road. Say your guards have dishonoured you.’

‘But then I would have to say who did it, and they would be taken before a judge.’

He shakes his head, pitying her. ‘When a guard despoils a prisoner, he doesn’t leave her his name.’

Anyway, she doesn’t like his idea, that’s plain. He leaves her. The Tower is like a small town and its morning routine clatters on around him, the guards and the men from the Mint greet him, and the keeper of the king’s beasts trots up to say it’s dinner time – they eat early, the beasts – and does he want to see them fed? I take it very kindly, he says, waiving the pleasure; unbreakfasted himself, slightly nauseous, he can smell stale blood and from the direction of their cages hear their truffling grunts and smothered roars. High up on the walls above the river, out of sight, a man is whistling an old tune, and at the refrain breaks into song; he is a jolly forester, he sings. Which is most certainly untrue.

He looks around for his boatmen. He wonders whether the Maid is ill, and whether she will live to be killed. She was never harmed in his custody, only harassed; kept awake a night or two, but no longer than the king’s business keeps him awake, and you don’t, he thinks, find me confessing to anything. It’s nine o’clock; by ten o’clock dinner, he has to be with Norfolk and Audley, who he hopes will not scream and smell, like the beasts. There is a tentative, icy sun; loops of vapour coil across the river, a scribble of mist.

At Westminster, the duke chases out the servants. ‘If I want a drink I’ll get it for myself. Go on, out, out you go. And shut the door! Any lurking at the keyhole, I’ll skin you alive and salt you!’ He turns, swearing under his breath, and takes his chair with a grunt. ‘What if I begged him?’ he says. ‘What if I went down on my knees, said, Henry for the Lord’s sake, take Thomas More out of the attainder?’

‘What if we all begged him,’ Audley says, ‘on our knees?’

‘Oh, and Cranmer too,’ he says. ‘We’ll have him in. He’s not to escape this delectable interlude.’

‘The king swears,’ Audley says, ‘that if the bill is opposed, he will come before Parliament himself, both houses if need be, and insist.’

‘He may have a fall,’ the duke says. ‘And in public. For God’s sake, Cromwell, don’t let him do it. He knew More was against him and he let him creep off to Chelsea to coddle his conscience. But it’s my niece, I suppose, who wants him brought to book. She takes it personally. Women do.’

‘I think the king takes it personally.’

‘Which is weak,’ Norfolk says, ‘in my view. Why should he care how More judges him?’

Audley smiles uncertainly. ‘You call the king weak?’

‘Call the king weak?’ The duke lurches forward and squawks into Audley’s face, as if he were a talking magpie. ‘What’s this, Lord Chancellor, speaking up for yourself? You do usually wait till Cromwell speaks, and then it’s chirrup-chirrup, yes-sir-no-sir, whatever you say, Tom Cromwell.’

The door opens and Call-Me-Risley appears, in part. ‘By God,’ says the duke, ‘if I had a crossbow, I’d shoot your very head off. I said nobody was to come in here.’

‘Will Roper is here. He has letters from his father-in-law. More wants to know what you will do for him, sir, as you have admitted that in law he has no case to answer.’

‘Tell Will we are just now rehearsing how to beg the king to take More’s name out of the bill.’

The duke knocks back his drink, the one he has poured himself. He bounces his goblet back on the table. ‘Your cardinal used to say, Henry will give half his realm rather than be baulked, he will not be cheated of any part of his will.’

‘But I reason … do not you, Lord Chancellor …’

‘Oh, he does,’ the duke says. ‘Whatever you reason, Tom, he reasons. Squawk, squawk.’

Wriothesley looks startled. ‘Could I bring Will in?’

‘So we are united? On our knees to beg?’

‘I won’t do it unless Cranmer will,’ the duke says. ‘Why should a layman wear out his joints?’

‘Shall we send for my lord Suffolk too?’ Audley suggests.

‘No. His boy is dying. His heir.’ The duke scrubs his hand across his mouth. ‘He wants just a month of his eighteenth birthday.’ His fingers fidget for his holy medals, his relics. ‘Brandon’s got the one boy. So have I. So have you, Cromwell. And Thomas More. Just the one boy. God help Charles, he’ll have to start breeding again with his new wife; that’ll be a hardship to him, I’m sure.’ He gives a bark of laughter. ‘If I could pension my lady wife off, I could get a juicy fifteen-year-old too. But she won’t go.’

It is too much for Audley. His face flushes. ‘My lord, you have been married, and well married, these twenty years.’

‘Do I not know it? It’s like placing your person in a grizzled leather bag.’ The duke’s bony hand descends; he squeezes his shoulder. ‘Get me a divorce, Cromwell, will you? You and my lord archbishop, come up with some grounds. I promise there’ll be no murder done over it.’

‘Where is murder done?’ Wriothesley says.

‘We’re preparing to murder Thomas More, aren’t we? Old Fisher, we’re whetting the knife for him, eh?’

‘God forbid.’ The Lord Chancellor rises, sweeping his gown around him. ‘These are not capital charges. More and the Bishop of Rochester, they are only accessories.’

‘Which,’ Wriothesley says, ‘in all conscience is grave enough.’

Norfolk shrugs. ‘Kill them now or later. More won’t take your oath. Fisher won’t.’

‘I am quite sure they will,’ Audley says. ‘We shall use efficacious persuasions. No reasonable man will refuse to swear to the succession, for the safety of this realm.’

‘So is Katherine to be sworn,’ the duke says, ‘to uphold the succession of my niece’s infant? What about Mary – is she to be sworn? And if they will not, what do you propose? Draw them to Tyburn on a hurdle and hang them up kicking, for their relative the Emperor to see?’

He and Audley exchange a glance. Audley says, ‘My lord, you shouldn’t drink so much wine before noon.’

‘Oh, tweet, tweet,’ the duke says.

A week ago he had been up to Hatfield, to see the two royal ladies: the princess Elizabeth, and Lady Mary the king’s daughter. ‘Make sure you get the titles right,’ he had said to Gregory as they rode.

Gregory had said, ‘Already you are wishing you had brought Richard.’

He had not wanted to leave London during such a busy parliament, but the king persuaded him: two days and you can be back, I want your eye on things. The route out of the city was running with thaw water, and in copses shielded from the sun the standing pools were still iced. A weak sun blinked at them as they crossed into Hertfordshire, and here and there a ragged blackthorn blossomed, waving at him a petition against the length of winter.

‘I used to come here years ago. It was Cardinal Morton’s place, you know, and he would leave town when the law term was over and the weather was getting warm, and when I was nine or ten my uncle John used to pack me in a provisions cart with the best cheeses and the pies, in case anybody tried to steal them when we stopped.’

‘Did you not have guards?’

‘It was the guards he was afraid of.’

‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’

‘Me, evidently.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘I don’t know. Bitten them?’

The mellow brick frontage is smaller than he remembers, but that is what memory does. These pages and gentlemen running out, these grooms to lead away the horses, the warmed wine that awaits them, the noise and the fuss, it is a different sort of arrival from those of long ago. The portage of wood and water, the firing up the ranges, these tasks were beyond the strength or skill of a child, but he was unwilling to concede them, and worked alongside the men, grubby and hungry, till someone saw that he was about to fall over: or until he actually did.

Sir John Shelton is head of this strange household, but he has chosen a time when Sir John is from home; talk to the women, is his idea, rather than listen to Shelton after supper on the subjects of horses, dogs and his youthful exploits. But on the threshold, he almost changes his mind; coming downstairs at a rapid, creaking scuttle is Lady Bryan, mother of one-eyed Francis, who is in charge of the tiny princess. She is a woman of nearly seventy, well bedded into grand-maternity, and he can see her mouth moving before she is within range of his hearing: Her Grace slept till eleven, squalled till midnight, exhausted herself, poor little chicken! fell asleep an hour, woke up grizzling, cheeks scarlet, suspicion of fever, Lady Shelton woken, physician aroused, teething already, a treacherous time! soothing draught, settled by sun-up, woke at nine, took a feed … ‘Oh, Master Cromwell,’ Lady Bryan says, ‘this is never your son! Bless him! What a lovely tall young man! What a pretty face he has, he must get it from his mother. What age would he be now?’

‘Of an age to talk, I believe.’

Lady Bryan turns to Gregory, her face aglow as if at the prospect of sharing a nursery rhyme with him. Lady Shelton sweeps in. ‘Give you good day, masters.’ A small hesitation: does the queen’s aunt bow to the Master of the Jewel House? On the whole she thinks not. ‘I expect Lady Bryan has given you a full account of her charge?’

‘Indeed, and perhaps we could have an account of yours?’

‘You will not see Lady Mary for yourself?’

‘Yes, but forewarned …’

‘Indeed. I do not go armed, though my niece the queen recommends I use my fists on her.’ Her eyes sweep over him, assessing; the air crackles with tension. How do women do that? One could learn it, perhaps; he feels, rather than sees, his son back off, till his regress is checked by the cupboard displaying the princess Elizabeth’s already extensive collection of gold and silver plate. Lady Shelton says, ‘I am charged that, if the Lady Mary does not obey me, I should, and here I quote you my niece’s words, beat her and buffet her like the bastard she is.’

‘Oh, Mother of God!’ Lady Bryan moans. ‘I was Mary’s nurse too, and she was stubborn as an infant, so she’ll not change now, buffet her as you may. You’d like to see the baby first, would you not? Come with me …’ She takes Gregory into custody, hand squeezing his elbow. On she rattles: you see, with a child of that age, a fever could be anything. It could be the start of the measles, God forbid. It could be the start of the smallpox. With a child of six months, you don’t know what it could be the start of … A pulse is beating in Lady Bryan’s throat. As she chatters she licks her dry lips, and swallows.

He understands now why Henry wanted him here. The things that are happening cannot be put in a letter. He says to Lady Shelton, ‘Do you mean the queen has written to you about Lady Mary, using these terms?’

‘No. She has passed on a verbal instruction.’ She sweeps ahead of him. ‘Do you think I should implement it?’

‘We will perhaps speak in private,’ he murmurs.

‘Yes, why not?’ she says: a turn of her head, a little murmur back.

The child Elizabeth is wrapped tightly in layers, her fists hidden: just as well, she looks as if she would strike you. Ginger bristles poke from beneath her cap, and her eyes are vigilant; he has never seen an infant in the crib look so ready to take offence. Lady Bryan says, ‘Do you think she looks like the king?’

He hesitates, trying to be fair to both parties. ‘As much as a little maid ought.’

‘Let us hope she doesn’t share his girth,’ Lady Shelton says. ‘He fleshes out, does he not?’

‘Only George Rochford says not.’ Lady Bryan leans over the cradle. ‘He says, she’s every bit a Boleyn.’

‘We know my niece lived some thirty years in chastity,’ Lady Shelton says, ‘but not even Anne could manage a virgin birth.’

‘But the hair!’ he says.

‘I know,’ Lady Bryan sighs. ‘Saving Her Grace’s dignity, and with all respect to His Majesty, you could show her at a fair as a pig-baby.’ She pinches up the child’s cap at the hairline, and her fingers work busily, trying to stuff the bristles out of sight. The child screws up her face and hiccups in protest.

Gregory frowns down at her: ‘She could be anybody’s.’

Lady Shelton raises a hand to hide her smile. ‘You mean to say, Gregory, all babies look the same. Come, Master Cromwell.’

She takes him by the sleeve to lead him away. Lady Bryan is left reknotting the princess, who seems to have become loose in some particular. Over his shoulder, he says, ‘For God’s sake, Gregory.’ People have gone to the Tower for saying less. He says to Lady Shelton, ‘I don’t see how Mary can be a bastard. Her parents were in good faith when they got her.’

She stops, an eyebrow raised. ‘Would you say that to my niece the queen? To her face, I mean?’

‘I already have.’

‘And how did she take it?’

‘Well, I tell you, Lady Shelton, if she had had an axe to hand, she would have essayed to cut off my head.’

‘I tell you something in return, and you can carry it to my niece if you will. If Mary were indeed a bastard, and the bastard of the poorest landless gentleman that is in England, she should receive nothing but gentle treatment at my hands, for she is a good young woman, and you would need a heart of stone not to pity her situation.’

She is walking fast, her train sweeping over stone floors, into the body of the house. Mary’s old servants are about, faces he has seen before; there are clean patches on their jackets where Mary’s livery badge has been unpicked and replaced by the king’s badge. He looks about and recognises everything. He stops at the foot of the great staircase. Never was he allowed to run up it; there was a back staircase for boys like him, carrying wood or coals. Once he broke the rules; and when he reached the top, a fist came out of the darkness and punched the side of his head. Cardinal Morton himself, lurking?

He touches the stone, cold as a tomb: vine leaves intertwined with some nameless flower. Lady Shelton looks at him smiling, quizzical: why does he hesitate? ‘Perhaps we should change out of our riding clothes before we meet Lady Mary. She might feel slighted …’

‘So she might if you delay. She will make something of it, in either case. I say I pity her, but oh, she is not easy! She graces neither our dinner table nor supper table, because she will not sit below the little princess. And my niece the queen has laid down that food must not be carried to her own room, except the little bread for breakfast we all take.’

She has led him to a closed door. ‘Do they still call this the blue chamber?’

‘Ah, your father has been here before,’ she says to Gregory.

‘He’s been everywhere,’ Gregory says.

She turns. ‘See how you get on, gentlemen. By the way, she will not answer to “Lady Mary”.’

It is a long room, it is almost empty of furniture, and the chill, like a ghost’s ambassador, meets them on the threshold. The blue tapestries have been taken down and the plaster walls are naked. By an almost dead fire, Mary is sitting: huddled, tiny and pitifully young. Gregory whispers, ‘She looks like Malekin.’

Poor Malekin, she is a spirit girl; she eats at night, lives on crumbs and apple peel. Sometimes, if you come down early and are quiet on the stairs, you find her sitting in the ashes.

Mary glances up; surprisingly, her little face brightens. ‘Master Cromwell.’ She gets to her feet, takes a step towards him and almost stumbles, her feet entangled in the hem of her dress. ‘How long is it since I saw you at Windsor?’

‘I hardly know,’ he says gravely. ‘The years have been good to you, madam.’

She giggles; she is now eighteen. She casts around her as if bewildered for the stool on which she was sitting. ‘Gregory,’ he says, and his son dives to catch the ex-princess, before she sits down on empty air. Gregory does it as if it were a dance step; he has his uses.

‘I am sorry to keep you standing. You might,’ she waves vaguely, ‘sit down on that chest.’

‘I think we are strong enough to stand. Though I do not think you are.’ He sees Gregory glance at him, as if he has never heard this softened tone. ‘They do not make you sit alone, and by this miserable fire, surely?’

‘The man who brings the wood will not give me my title of princess.’

‘Do you have to speak to him?’

‘No. But it would be an evasion if I did not.’

That’s right, he thinks: make life as hard as possible for yourself. ‘Lady Shelton has told me about the difficulty in … the dinner difficulty. Suppose I were to send you a physician?’

‘We have one here. Or rather, the child has.’

‘I could send a more useful one. He might give you a regimen for your health, and lay it down that you were to take a large breakfast, in your own room.’

‘Meat?’ Mary says.

‘In quantity.’

‘But who would you send?’

‘Dr Butts?’

Her face softens. ‘I knew him at my court at Ludlow. When I was Princess of Wales. Which I still am. How is it I am put out of the succession, Master Cromwell? How is it lawful?’

‘It is lawful if Parliament makes it so.’

‘There is a law above Parliament. It is the law of God. Ask Bishop Fisher.’

‘I find God’s purposes obscure, and God knows I find Fisher no fit elucidator. By contrast, I find the will of Parliament plain.’

She bites her lip; now she will not look at him. ‘I have heard Dr Butts is a heretic these days.’

‘He believes as your father the king believes.’

He waits. She turns, her grey eyes fixed on his face. ‘I will not call my lord father a heretic.’

‘Good. It is better that these traps are tested, first, by your friends.’

‘I do not see how you can be my friend, if you are also friend to the person, I mean the Marquess of Pembroke.’ She will not give Anne her royal title.

‘That lady stands in a place where she has no need of friends, only of servants.’

‘Pole says you are Satan. My cousin Reginald Pole. Who lies abroad at Genoa. He says that when you were born, you were like any Christian soul, but that at some date the devil entered into you.’

‘Did you know, Lady Mary, I came here when I was a boy, nine or ten? My uncle was a cook to Morton, and I was a poor snivelling lad who bundled the hawthorn twigs at dawn to light the ovens, and killed the chickens for the boiling house before the sun was up.’ He speaks gravely. ‘Would you suppose the devil had entered me by that date? Or was it earlier, around the time when other people are baptised? You understand it is of interest to me.’

Mary watches him, and she does it sideways; she still wears an old-style gable hood, and she seems to blink around it, like a horse whose headcloth has slipped. He says softly, ‘I am not Satan. Your lord father is not a heretic.’

‘And I am not a bastard, I suppose.’

‘Indeed no.’ He repeats what he told Anne Shelton: ‘You were conceived in good faith. Your parents thought they were married. That does not mean their marriage was good. You can see the difference, I think?’

She rubs her forefinger under her nose. ‘Yes, I can see the difference. But in fact the marriage was good.’

‘The queen will be coming to visit her daughter soon. If you would simply greet her respectfully in the way you should greet your father’s wife –’

‘– except she is his concubine –’

‘– then your father would take you back to court, you would have everything you lack now, and the warmth and comfort of society. Listen to me, I intend this for your good. The queen does not expect your friendship, only an outward show. Bite your tongue and bob her a curtsey. It will be done in a heartbeat, and it will change everything. Make terms with her before her new child is born. If she has a son, she will have no reason afterwards to conciliate you.’

‘She is frightened of me,’ Mary says, ‘and she will still be frightened, even if she has a son. She is afraid I will make a marriage, and my own sons will threaten her.’

‘Does anyone talk to you of marriage?’

A dry little laugh, incredulous. ‘I was a baby at the breast when I was married into France. Then to the Emperor, into France again, to the king, to his first son, to his second son, to his sons I have lost count of, and once again to the Emperor, or one of his cousins. I have been contracted in marriage till I am exhausted. One day I shall really do it.’

‘But you will not marry Pole.’

She flinches, and he knows that it has been put to her: perhaps by her old governess Margaret Pole, perhaps by Chapuys, who stays up till dawn studying the tables of descent of the English aristocracy: strengthen her claim, put her beyond reproach, marry the half-Spanish Tudor back into the old Plantagenet line. He says, ‘I have seen Pole. I knew him before he went out of the kingdom. He is not the man for you. Whatever husband you get, he will need a strong sword arm. Pole is like an old wife sitting by the fire, starting at Hob in the Corner and the Boneless Man. He has nothing but a little holy water in his veins, and they say he weeps copiously if his servant swats a fly.’

She smiles: but she slaps a hand over her mouth like a gag. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘You say nothing to anybody.’

She says, from behind her fingers, ‘I can’t see to read.’

‘What, they keep you short of candles?’

‘No, I mean my sight is failing. All the time my head aches.’

‘You cry a good deal?’ She nods. ‘Dr Butts will bring a remedy. Till then, have someone read to you.’

‘They do. They read me Tyndale’s gospel. Do you know that Bishop Tunstall and Thomas More between them have identified two thousand errors in his so-called Testament? It is more heretical than the holy book of the Moslems.’

Fighting talk. But he sees that tears are welling up. ‘All this can be put right.’ She stumbles towards him and for a moment he thinks she will forget herself and lurch and sob against his riding coat. ‘The doctor will be here in a day. Now you shall have a proper fire, and your supper. Wherever you like it served.’

‘Let me see my mother.’

‘Just now the king cannot permit it. But that may change.’

‘My father loves me. It is only she, it is only that wretch of a woman, who poisons his mind.’

‘Lady Shelton would be kind, if you would let her.’

‘What is she, to be kind or not kind? I shall survive Anne Shelton, believe me. And her niece. And anyone else who sets themselves up against my title. Let them do their worst. I am young. I will wait them out.’

He takes his leave. Gregory follows him, his fascinated gaze trailing back to the girl who resumes her seat by the almost dead fire: who folds her hands, and begins the waiting, her expression set.

‘All that rabbit fur she is bundled up in,’ Gregory says. ‘It looks as if it has been nibbled.’

‘She’s Henry’s daughter for sure.’

‘Why, does someone say she is not?’

He laughs. ‘I didn’t mean that. Imagine … if the old queen had been persuaded into adultery, it would have been easy to be rid of her, but how do you fault a woman who has never known but the one man?’ He checks himself: it is hard even for the king’s closest supporters to remember that Katherine is supposed to have been Prince Arthur’s wife. ‘Known two men, I should say.’ He sweeps his eyes over his son. ‘Mary never looked at you, Gregory.’

‘Did you think she would?’

‘Lady Bryan thinks you such a darling. Wouldn’t it be in a young woman’s nature?’

‘I don’t think she has a nature.’

‘Get somebody to mend the fire. I’ll order the supper. The king can’t mean her to starve.’

‘She likes you,’ Gregory says. ‘That’s strange.’

He sees that his son is in earnest. ‘Is it impossible? My daughters liked me, I think. Poor little Grace, I am never sure if she knew who I was.’

‘She liked you when you made her the angel’s wings. She said she was always going to keep them.’ His son turns away; speaks as if he is afraid of him. ‘Rafe says you will be the second man in the kingdom soon. He says you already are, except in title. He says the king will put you over the Lord Chancellor, and everybody. Over Norfolk, even.’

‘Rafe is running ahead of himself. Listen, son, don’t talk about Mary to anyone. Not even to Rafe.’

‘Did I hear more than I should?’

‘What do you think would happen if the king died tomorrow?’

‘We should all be very sorry.’

‘But who would rule?’

Gregory nods towards Lady Bryan, towards the infant in her cradle. ‘Parliament says so. Or the queen’s child that is not born yet.’

‘But would that happen? In practice? An unborn child? Or a daughter not a year old? Anne as regent? It would suit the Boleyns, I grant you.’

‘Then Fitzroy.’

‘There is a Tudor who is better placed.’

Gregory’s eyes turn back towards Lady Mary. ‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘And look, Gregory, it’s all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.’

After supper he sits talking to Lady Shelton. Lady Bryan has gone to bed, then come down again to chivvy them along. ‘You’ll be tired in the morning!’

‘Yes,’ Anne Shelton agrees, waving her away. ‘In the morning there’ll be no doing anything with us. We’ll throw our breakfasts on the floor.’

They sit till the servants yawn off to another room, and the candles burn down, and they retreat into the house, to smaller and warmer rooms, to talk some more. You have given Mary good advice, she says, I hope she heeds it, I fear there are hard times ahead for her. She talks about her brother Thomas Boleyn, the most selfish man I ever knew, it is no wonder Anne is so grasping, all she has ever heard from him is talk of money, and how to gain a mean advantage over people, he would have sold those girls naked at a Barbary slave market if he had thought he would get a good price.

He imagines himself surrounded by his scimitared retainers, placing a bid for Mary Boleyn; he smiles, and returns his attention to her aunt. She tells him Boleyn secrets; he tells her no secrets, though she thinks he has.

Gregory is asleep when he comes in, but he turns over and says, ‘Dear father, where have you been, to bed with Lady Shelton?’

These things happen: but not with Boleyns. ‘What strange dreams you must have. Lady Shelton has been thirty years married.’

‘I thought I could have sat with Mary after supper,’ Gregory murmurs. ‘If I didn’t say the wrong thing. But then she is so sneery. I couldn’t sit with such a sneery girl.’ He flounces over in the feather bed, and falls asleep again.

When Fisher comes to his senses and asks pardon, the old bishop begs the king to consider that he is ill and infirm. The king indicates that the bill of attainder must take its course: but it is his habit, he says, to grant mercy to those who admit their fault.

The Maid is to be hanged. He says nothing of the chair of human bones. He tells Henry she has stopped prophesying, and hopes that at Tyburn, with the noose around her neck, she will not make a liar out of him.

When his councillors kneel before the king, and beg that Thomas More’s name be taken out of the bill, Henry yields the point. Perhaps he has been waiting for this: to be persuaded. Anne is not present, or it might have gone otherwise.

They get up and go out, dusting themselves. He thinks he hears the cardinal laughing at them, from some invisible part of the room. Audley’s dignity has not suffered, but the duke looks agitated; when he tried to get up, elderly knees had failed him, and he and Audley had lifted him by the elbows and set him on his feet. ‘I thought I might be fixed there another hour,’ he says. ‘Entreating and entreating him.’

‘The joke is,’ he says to Audley, ‘More’s still being paid a pension from the treasury. I suppose that had better stop.’

‘He has a breathing space now. I pray to God he’ll see sense. Has he arranged his affairs?’

‘Made over what he can to the children. So Roper tells me.’

‘Oh, you lawyers!’ the duke says. ‘On the day I go down, who will look after me?’

Norfolk is sweating; he eases his pace, and Audley checks too, so they are dawdling along, and Cranmer comes behind like an afterthought. He turns back and takes his arm. He has been at every sitting of Parliament: the bench of bishops, otherwise, conspicuously underpopulated.

The Pope chooses this month, while he is rolling his great bills through Parliament, to give his judgment at last on Queen Katherine’s marriage – a judgment so long delayed that he thought Clement meant to die in his indecision. The original dispensations, Clements finds, are sound; therefore the marriage is sound. The supporters of the Emperor let off fireworks in the streets of Rome. Henry is contemptuous, sardonic. He expresses these feelings by dancing. Anne can dance still, though her belly shows; she must take the summer quietly. He remembers the king’s hand on Lizzie Seymour’s waist. Nothing came of that, the young woman is no fool. Now it is little Mary Shelton he is whirling around, lifting her off her feet and tickling her and squeezing her and making her breathless with compliments. These things mean nothing; he sees Anne lift up her chin and avert her gaze and lean back in her chair, making some murmured comment, her expression arch; her veil brushing, for the briefest moment, against the jacket of that grinning cur Francis Weston. It is clear Anne thinks Mary Shelton must be tolerated, kept sweet even. It’s safest to keep the king among cousins, if no sister is on hand. Where is Mary Boleyn? Down in the country, perhaps longing like him for warmer weather.

And the summer arrives, with no intermission for spring, promptly on a Monday morning, like a new servant with a shining face: 13 April. They are at Lambeth – Audley, himself, the archbishop – the sun shining strongly through the windows. He stands looking down at the palace gardens. This is how the book Utopia begins: friends, talking in a garden. On the paths below, Hugh Latimer and some of the king’s chaplains are play-fighting, pulling each other around like schoolboys, Hugh hanging around the necks of two of his clerical fellows so his feet swing off the floor. All they need is a football to make a proper holiday of it. ‘Master More,’ he says, ‘why don’t you go out and enjoy the sunshine? And we’ll call for you again in half an hour, and put the oath to you again: and you’ll give us a different answer, yes?’

He hears More’s joints snap as he stands. ‘Thomas Howard went on his knees for you!’ he says. That seems like weeks ago. Late-night sittings and a fresh row every day have tired him, but sharpened his senses too, so he is aware that in the room behind him Cranmer is working himself into a terrible anxiety, and he wants More out of the room before the dam breaks.

‘I don’t know what you think a half-hour will do for me,’ More says. His tone is easy, bantering. ‘Of course, it might do something for you.’

More had asked to see a copy of the Act of Succession. Now Audley unrolls it; pointedly, he bends his head and begins reading, though he has read it a dozen times. ‘Very well,’ More says. ‘But I trust I have made myself clear. I cannot swear, but I will not speak against your oath, and I will not try to dissuade anyone else from it.’

‘That is not enough. And you know it is not.’

More nods. He meanders towards the door, careering first into the corner of the table, making Cranmer flinch, his arm darting out to steady the ink. The door closes after him.

‘So?’

Audley rolls up the statute. Gently he taps it on the table, looking at the place where More had stood. Cranmer says, ‘Look, this is my idea. What if we let him swear in secret? He swears, but we offer not to tell anybody? Or if he cannot take this oath, we ask him what oath he can take?’

He laughs.

‘That would hardly meet the king’s purpose,’ Audley sighs. Tap, tap, tap. ‘After all we did for him, and for Fisher. His name taken out of the attainder, Fisher fined instead of locked up for life, what more could they ask for? Our efforts flung back at us.’

‘Oh well. Blessed are the peacemakers,’ he says. He wants to strangle somebody.

Cranmer says, ‘We will try again with More. At least, if he refuses, he should give his reasons.’

He swears under his breath, turns from the window. ‘We know his reasons. All Europe knows them. He is against the divorce. He does not believe the king can be head of the church. But will he say that? Not he. I know him. Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend upon it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out. And what I hate most of all is that Master More sits in the audience and sniggers when I trip over my lines, for he has written all the parts. And written them these many years.’

Cranmer, like a waiting-boy, pours him a cup of wine, edges towards him. ‘Here.’

In the archbishop’s hand, the cup cannot help a sacramental character: not watered wine, but some equivocal mixture, this is my blood, this is like my blood, this is more or less somewhat like my blood, do this in commemoration of me. He hands the cup back. The north Germans make a strong liquor, aquavitae: a shot of that would be more use. ‘Get More back,’ he says.

A moment, and More stands in the doorway, sneezing gently. ‘Come now,’ Audley says, smiling, ‘that’s not how a hero arrives.’

‘I assure you, I intend in no wise to be a hero,’ More says. ‘They have been cutting the grass.’ He pinches his nose on another sneeze, and shambles towards them, hitching his gown on to his shoulder; he takes the chair placed for him. Before, he had refused to sit down.

‘That’s better,’ Audley says. ‘I knew the air would do you good.’ He glances up, in invitation; but he, Cromwell, signals he will stay where he is, leaning by the window. ‘I don’t know,’ Audley says, good-humoured. ‘First one won’t sit. Then t’other won’t sit. Look,’ he pushes a piece of paper towards More, ‘these are the names of the priests we have seen today, who have sworn to the act, and set you an example. And you know all the members of Parliament are conformable. So why not you?’

More glances up, from under his eyebrows. ‘This is not a comfortable place for any of us.’

‘More comfortable than where you’re going,’ he says.

‘Not Hell,’ More says, smiling. ‘I trust not.’

‘So if taking the oath would damn you, what about all these?’ He launches himself forward from the wall. He snatches the list of names from Audley, rolls it up and slaps it on to More’s shoulder. ‘Are they all damned?’

‘I cannot speak for their consciences, only for my own. I know that, if I took your oath, I should be damned.’

‘There are those who would envy your insight,’ he says, ‘into the workings of grace. But then, you and God have always been on familiar terms, not so? I wonder how you dare. You talk about your maker as if he were some neighbour you went fishing with on a Sunday afternoon.’

Audley leans forward. ‘Let us be clear. You will not take the oath because your conscience advises you against it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you be a little more comprehensive in your answers?’

‘No.’

‘You object but you won’t say why?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it the matter of the statute you object to, or the form of the oath, or the business of oath-taking in itself?’

‘I would rather not say.’

Cranmer ventures, ‘Where it is a question of conscience, there must always be some doubt …’

‘Oh, but this is no whim. I have made long and diligent consultation with myself. And in this matter I hear the voice of my conscience clearly.’ He puts his head on one side, smiling. ‘It is not so with you, my lord?’

‘None the less, there must be some perplexity? For you must ask yourself, as you are a scholar and accustomed to controversy, to debate, how can so many learned men think on the one side, and I on the other? But one thing is certain, and it is that you owe a natural obedience to your king, as every subject does. Also, when you entered the king’s council, long ago, you took a most particular oath, to obey him. So will not you do so?’ Cranmer blinks. ‘Set your doubts against that certainty, and swear.’

Audley sits back in his chair. Eyes closed. As if to say, we’re not going to do better than that.

More says, ‘When you were consecrated archbishop, appointed by the Pope, you swore your oath to Rome, but all day in your fist, they say, all through the ceremonies, you kept a little paper folded up, saying that you took the oath under protest. Is that not true? They say the paper was written by Master Cromwell here.’

Audley’s eyes snap open: he thinks More has shown himself the way out. But More’s face, smiling, is a mask of malice. ‘I would not be such a juggler,’ he says softly. ‘I would not treat the Lord my God to such a puppet show, let alone the faithful of England. You say you have the majority. I say I have it. You say Parliament is behind you, and I say all the angels and saints are behind me, and all the company of the Christian dead, for as many generations as there have been since the church of Christ was founded, one body, undivided –’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he says. ‘A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. You call history to your aid, but what is history to you? It is a mirror that flatters Thomas More. But I have another mirror, I hold it up and it shows a vain and dangerous man, and when I turn it about it shows a killer, for you will drag down with you God knows how many, who will only have the suffering, and not your martyr’s gratification. You are not a simple soul, so don’t try to make this simple. You know I have respected you? You know I have respected you since I was a child? I would rather see my only son dead, I would rather see them cut off his head, than see you refuse this oath, and give comfort to every enemy of England.’

More looks up. For a fraction of a second, he meets his gaze, then turns away, coy. His low, amused murmur: he could kill him for that alone. ‘Gregory is a goodly young man. Don’t wish him away. If he has done badly, he will do better. I say the same of my own boy. What’s the use of him? But he is worth more than a debating point.’

Cranmer, distressed, shakes his head. ‘This is no debating point.’

‘You speak of your son,’ he says. ‘What will happen to him? To your daughters?’

‘I shall advise them to take the oath. I do not suppose them to share my scruples.’

‘That is not what I mean, and you know it. It is the next generation you are betraying. You want the Emperor’s foot on their neck? You are no Englishman.’

‘You are barely that yourself,’ More says. ‘Fight for the French, eh, bank for the Italians? You were scarcely grown up in this realm before your boyhood transgressions drove you out of it, you ran away to escape gaol or a noose. No, I tell you what you are, Cromwell, you are an Italian through and through, and you have all their vices, all their passions.’ He sits back in his chair: one mirthless grunt of laughter. ‘This relentless bonhomie of yours. I knew it would wear out in the end. It is a coin that has changed hands so often. And now the small silver is worn out, and we see the base metal.’

Audley smirks. ‘You seem not to have noted Master Cromwell’s efforts at the Mint. His coinage is sound, or it is nothing.’

The Chancellor cannot help it, that he is a smirking sort of man; someone must keep calm. Cranmer is pale and sweating, and he can see the pulse galloping at More’s temple. He says, ‘We cannot let you go home. Still, it seems to me that you are not yourself today, so rather than commit you to the Tower, we could perhaps place you in the custody of the Abbot of Westminster … Would that seem suitable to you, my lord of Canterbury?’

Cranmer nods. More says, ‘Master Cromwell, I should not mock you, should I? You have shown yourself my most especial and tender friend.’

Audley nods to the guard at the door. More rises smoothly, as if the thought of custody has put a spring in his step; the effect is spoiled only by his usual grab at his garments, the scuffle as he shrugs himself together; and even then he seems to step backwards, and tread on his own feet. He thinks of Mary at Hatfield, rising from her stool and forgetting where she’d left it. After some fashion, More is bundled out of the room. ‘Now he’s got exactly what he wants,’ he says.

He puts his palm against the glass of the window. He sees the smudge it makes, against the old flawed glass. A bank of cloud has come up over the river; the best of the day is behind them. Audley crosses the room to him. Hesitant, he stands at his shoulder. ‘If only More would indicate which part of the oath he finds objectionable, it is possible something might be written to meet his objection.’

‘You can forget that. If he indicates anything, he is done for. Silence is his only hope, and it is not much of a hope at that.’

‘The king might accept some compromise,’ Cranmer says. ‘But I fear the queen will not. And indeed,’ he says faintly, ‘why should she?’

Audley puts a hand on his arm. ‘My dear Cromwell. Who can understand More? His friend Erasmus told him to keep away from government, he told him he had not the stomach for it and he was right. He should never have accepted the office I now hold. He only did it to spite Wolsey, whom he hated.’

Cranmer says, ‘He told him to keep away from theology too. Unless I am wrong?’

‘How could you be? More publishes all his letters from his friends. Even when they reprove him, he makes a fine show of his humility and so turns it to his profit. He has lived in public. Every thought that passes through his mind he has committed to paper. He never kept anything private, till now.’

Audley reaches past him, opens the window. A torrent of birdsong crests on the edge of the sill and spills into the room, the liquid, fluent notes of the storm-thrush.

‘I suppose he’s writing an account of today,’ he says. ‘And sending it out of the kingdom to be printed. Depend upon it, in the eyes of Europe we will be the fools and the oppressors, and he will be the poor victim with the better turn of phrase.’

Audley pats his arm. He wants to console him. But who can begin to do it? He is the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible Master Cromwell.

Next day the king sends for him. He supposes it is to berate him for failing to get More to take the oath. ‘Who will accompany me to this fiesta?’ he enquires. ‘Master Sadler?’

As soon as he enters the king’s presence, Henry gestures with a peremptory sweep of his arm for his attendants to clear a space, and leave him alone in it. His face is like thunder. ‘Cromwell, have I not been a good lord to you?’

He begins to talk … gracious, and more than gracious … own sad unworthiness … if fallen short in any particular begs most gracious pardon …

He can do this all day. He learned it from Wolsey.

Henry says, ‘Because my lord archbishop thinks I have not done well by you. But,’ he says, in the tone of one misunderstood, ‘I am a prince known for my munificence.’ The whole thing seems to puzzle him. ‘You are to be Master Secretary. Rewards shall follow. I do not understand why I have not done this long ago. But tell me: when it was put to you, about the lords Cromwell that once were in England, you said you were nothing to them. Have you thought further?’

‘To be honest, I never gave it another thought. I wouldn’t wear another man’s coat, or bear his arms. He might rise up from his grave and take issue with me.’

‘My lord Norfolk says you enjoy being low-born. He says you have devised it so, to torment him.’ Henry takes his arm. ‘It would seem convenient to me,’ he says, ‘that wherever we go – though we shall not go far this summer, considering the queen’s condition – you should have rooms provided for you next to mine, so we can speak whenever I need you; and where it is possible, rooms that communicate directly, so that I need no go-between.’ He smiles towards the courtiers; they wash back, like a tide. ‘God strike me,’ Henry says, ‘if I meant to neglect you. I know when I have a friend.’

Outside, Rafe says, ‘God strike him … What terrible oaths he swears.’ He hugs his master. ‘This has been too long in coming. But listen, I have something to tell you when we get home.’

‘Tell me now. Is it something good?’

A gentleman comes forward and says, ‘Master Secretary, your barge is waiting to take you back to the city.’

‘I should have a house on the river,’ he says. ‘Like More.’

‘Oh, but leave Austin Friars? Think of the tennis court,’ Rafe says. ‘The gardens.’

The king has made his preparations in secret. Gardiner’s arms have been burned off the paintwork. A flag with his coat of arms is raised beside the Tudor flag. He steps into his barge for the first time, and on the river, Rafe tells his news. The rocking of the boat beneath them is imperceptible. The flags are limp; it is a still morning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green.

‘I have been married half a year,’ Rafe says, ‘and no one knows, but you know now. I have married Helen Barre.’

‘Oh, blood of Christ,’ he says. ‘Beneath my own roof. What did you do that for?’

Rafe sits mute while he says it all: she is a lovely nobody, a poor woman with no advantage to bring to you, you could have married an heiress. Wait till you tell your father! He will be outraged, he will say I have not looked after your interests. ‘And suppose one day her husband turns up?’

‘You told her she was free,’ Rafe says. He is trembling.

‘Which of us is free?’

He remembers what Helen had said: ‘So I could marry again? If anybody wanted me?’ He remembers how she had looked at him, a long look and full of meaning, only he did not read it. She might as well have turned somersaults, he would not have noticed, his mind had moved elsewhere; that conversation was over for him and he was on to something else. If I had wanted her for myself, and taken her, who could have reproached me for marrying a penniless laundress, even a beggar off the street? People would have said, so that was what Cromwell wanted, a beauty with supple flesh; no wonder he disdained the widows of the city. He doesn’t need money, he doesn’t need connections, he can afford to follow his appetites: he is Master Secretary now, and what next?

He stares down into the water, now brown, now clear as the light catches it, but always moving; the fish in its depths, the weeds, the drowned men with bony hands swimming. On the mud and shingle there are cast up belt buckles, fragments of glass, small warped coins with the kings’ faces washed away. Once when he was a boy he found a horseshoe. A horse in the river? It seemed to him a very lucky find. But his father said, if horseshoes were lucky, boy, I would be the King of Cockaigne.

First he goes out to the kitchens to tell Thurston the news. ‘Well,’ the cook says easily, ‘as you’re doing the job anyway.’ A chuckle. ‘Bishop Gardiner will be burning up inside. His giblets will be sizzling in his own grease.’ He whisks a bloodied cloth from a tray. ‘See these quails? You get more meat on a wasp.’

‘Malmsey?’ he suggests. ‘Seethe them?’

‘What, three dozen? Waste of good wine. I’ll do some for you, if you like. Come from Lord Lisle at Calais. When you write, tell him if he sends another batch, we want them fatter or not at all. Will you remember?’

‘I’ll make a note,’ he says gravely. ‘From now on I thought we might have the council meet here sometimes, when the king isn’t sitting with us. We can give them dinner before.’

‘Right.’ Thurston titters. ‘Norfolk could do with some flesh on his twiggy little legs.’

‘Thurston, you needn’t dirty your hands – you have enough staff. You could put on a gold chain, and strut about.’

‘Is that what you’ll be doing?’ A wet poultry slap; then Thurston looks up at him, wiping pluck from his fingers. ‘I think I’d rather keep my hand in. In case things take a down-turn. Not that I say they will. Remember the cardinal, though.’

He remembers Norfolk: tell him to go north, or I will come where he is and tear him with my teeth.

May I substitute the word ‘bite’?

The saying comes to him, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man.

‘So,’ he says to Rafe after supper, ‘you’ve made your name, Master Sadler. You’ll be held up as a prime example of how to waste your connections. Fathers will point you out to their sons.’

‘I couldn’t help it, sir.’ ‘How, not help it?’

Rafe says, as dry as he can manage, ‘I am violently in love with her.’

‘How does that feel? Is it like being violently angry?’

‘I suppose. Maybe. In that you feel more alive.’

‘I do not think I could feel any more alive than I am.’

He wonders if the cardinal was ever in love. But of course, why did he doubt? The all-consuming passion of Wolsey for Wolsey was hot enough to scorch all England. ‘Tell me, that evening after the queen was crowned …’ He shakes his head, turns over some papers on his desk: letters from the mayor of Hull.

‘I will tell you anything you ask,’ Rafe says. ‘I cannot imagine how I was not frank with you. But Helen, my wife, she thought it was better to be secret.’

‘But now she is carrying a child, I suppose, so you must declare yourselves?’

Rafe blushes.

‘That evening, when I came into Austin Friars looking for her, to take her to Cranmer’s wife … and she came down,’ his eyes move as if he were seeing it, ‘she came down without her cap, and you after, with your hair sticking up, and you were angry with me for taking her away …’

‘Well, yes,’ Rafe says. His hand creeps up and he flattens his hair with his palm, as if that would help matters now. ‘They were all gone out to the feasts. That was the first time I took her to bed, but it was no blame. By then she had promised herself to me.’

He thinks, I am glad I have not brought up in my house a young man without feeling, who only studies his advancement. If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy; under my protection, impulses are a thing Rafe can afford. ‘Look, Rafe, this is a – well, God knows, a folly but not a disaster. Tell your father my promotion in the world will ensure yours. Of course, he will stamp and roar. It is what fathers are for. He will shout, I rue the day I parted with my boy to the debauched house of Cromwell. But we will bring him around. A little and a little.’

Till now the boy has been standing; he subsides on to a stool, hands on his head, head flung back; relief washes through his whole body. Was he so afraid? Of me? ‘Look, when your father sets eyes on Helen, he’ll understand, unless he’s …’ Unless he’s what? You’d have to be dead and entombed not to notice: her bold and beautiful body, her mild eyes. ‘We just need to get her out of that canvas apron she goes around in, and dress her up as Mistress Sadler. And of course you will want a house of your own. I will help you there. I shall miss the little children, I have grown fond of them, and Mercy too, we are all fond of them. If you want this new one to be the first child in your house, we can keep them here.’

‘It is good of you. But Helen would never part with them. It is understood between us.’

So I shall never have any more children at Austin Friars, he thinks. Well, not unless I take time out of the king’s business and go wooing: not unless, when a woman speaks to me, I actually listen. ‘What will reconcile your father, and you can tell him this, is that from now on, when I am not with the king, you will be with him. Master Wriothesley will tease the diplomats and keep the ciphers, for it is sly work which will suit him, and Richard will be here to head the household when I am absent and drive my work forward, and you and I will attend on Henry, as sweet as two nursemaids, and cater to his whims.’ He laughs. ‘You are a gentleman born. He may promote you close to his person, to the privy chamber. Which would be useful to me.’

‘I did not look for this to happen. I did not plan it.’ Rafe drops his eyes. ‘I know I can never take Helen with me to court.’

‘Not as the world is now. And I do not think it will change in our lifetimes. But look, you have made your choice. You must never repent it.’

Rafe says, passionate, ‘How could I think to keep a secret from you? You see everything, sir.’

‘Ah. Only up to a point.’

When Rafe has gone he takes out his evening’s work and begins on it, methodical, tapping the papers into place. His bills are passed but there is always another bill. When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them. If your law exacts a penalty, you must be able to enforce it – on the rich as well as the poor, the people on the Scottish borders and the Welsh marches, the men of Cornwall as well as the men of Sussex and Kent. He has written this oath, a test of loyalty to Henry, and he means to swear the men of every burgh and village, and all women of any consequence: widows with inheritances, landowners. His people will be tramping the wold and heath-land, pledging those who have barely heard of Anne Boleyn to uphold the succession of the child in her womb. If a man knows the king is called Henry, swear him; never mind if he confuses this king with his father or some Henry who came before. For princes like other men fade from the memory of common people; their features, on those coins he used to sift from the river silt, were no more than a slight irregularity under his fingertips, and even when he had taken the coins home and scrubbed them he could not say who they might be; is this, he asked, Prince Caesar? Walter had said, let’s see; then he had flipped the coin away from him in disgust, saying, it’s but a tinny farthing from one of those kings who fought the French wars. Get out there and earn, he’d said, never mind Prince Caesar; Caesar was old when Adam was a lad.

He would chant, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?’ Walter would chase him and hit him if he could catch him: there’s a bloody rebel song for you, we know what to do with rebels here. They are dug into shallow graves, the Cornishmen who came up the country when he was a boy; but there are always more Cornishmen. And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marches of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and in hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug into unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of the uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future.

He stares down at the papers on his desk, but his thoughts are far from here. My daughter Anne said, ‘I choose Rafe.’ He lowers his head into his hands and closes his eyes; Anne Cromwell stands before him, ten or eleven years old, broad and resolute like a man at arms, her small eyes unblinking, sure of her power to make her fate.

He rubs his eyes. Sifts his papers. What is this? A list. A meticulous clerk’s hand, legible but making scant sense.

He turns the paper over, trying to find its origin. He sees that he is looking at the inventory of Elizabeth Barton’s goods, left behind at her nunnery. All this is forfeit to the king, the personal property of a traitor: a piece of plank which serves as a table, three pillowcases, two candlesticks, a coat valued at five shillings. An old mantle has been given in charity to the youngest nun in her convent. Another nun, a Dame Alice, has received a bed-cover.

He had said to More, prophecy didn’t make her rich. He makes a memorandum to himself: ‘Dame Elizabeth Barton to have money to fee the hangman.’ She has five days to live. The last person she will see as she climbs the ladder is her executioner, holding out his paw. If she cannot pay her way at the last, she may suffer longer than she needs. She had imagined how long it takes to burn, but not how long it takes to choke at the end of a rope. In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck.

Thomas More’s family has taken the oath. He has seen them himself, and Alice has left him in no doubt that she holds him personally responsible for failing to talk her husband into conformity. ‘Ask him what in the name of God he’s about. Ask him, is it clever, does he think it is, to leave his wife without company, his son without advice, his daughters without protection, and all of us at the mercy of a man like Thomas Cromwell?’

‘That’s you told,’ Meg had murmured, with half a smile. Head bowed, she had taken his hand between her own. ‘My father has spoken very warmly of you. Of how you have been courteous to him and how you have been vehement – which he accounts no less a favour. He says he believes you understand him. As he understands you.’

‘Meg? Surely you can look at me?’

Another face bowed under the weight of a gable hood: Meg twitches her veils about her, as if she were out in a gale and they would provide protection.

‘I can hold the king off for a day or two. I don’t believe he wishes to see your father in the Tower, every moment he looks for some sign of …’

‘Surrender?’

‘Support. And then … no honour would be too high.’

‘I doubt the king can offer the sort of honour he cares for,’ Will Roper says. ‘Unfortunately. Come on, Meg, let’s go home. We need to get your mother on the river before she starts a brawl.’ Roper holds out his hand. ‘We know you are not vengeful, sir. Though God knows, he has never been a friend to your friends.’

‘There was a time you were a Bible man yourself.’

‘Men may change opinions.’

‘I agree entirely. Tell your father-in-law that.’

It was a sour note to part on. I shall not indulge More, he thinks, or his family, in any illusion that they understand me. How could that be, when my workings are hidden from myself?

He makes a note: Richard Cromwell to present himself to the Abbot of Westminster, to escort Sir Thomas More, prisoner, to the Tower.

Why do I hesitate?

Let’s give him one more day.

It is 15 April 1534. He calls in a clerk to tidy and file his papers, ready for tomorrow, and lingers by the fire, chatting; it is midnight, and the candles are burned down. He takes one and goes upstairs; Christophe, snoring, sprawls across the foot of his wide and lonely bed. Dear God, he thinks, my life is ridiculous. ‘Wake up,’ he says, but in a whisper; when Christophe does not respond, he lays hands on him and rolls him up and down, as if he were the lid for a pie, till the boy wakes up, expostulating in gutter French. ‘Oh by the hairy balls of Jesus.’ He blinks violently. ‘My good master, I didn’t know it was you, I was dreaming I was a pastry. Forgive me, I am completely drunk, we have been celebrating the conjunction of the beautiful Helen with the fortunate Rafe.’ He raises a forearm, curls up his fist, makes a gesture of the utmost lewdness; his arm falls limp across his body, his eyelids slide ineluctably towards his cheeks, and with a final hiccup he subsides into sleep.

He hauls the boy to his pallet. Christophe is heavy now, a rotund bulldog pup; he grunts, he mutters, but he does not wake again.

He lays aside his clothes and says his prayers. He puts his head on the pillow: 7 sheets 2 pillows 1 bolster. He sleeps as soon as the candle is out. But his daughter Anne comes to him in a dream. She holds up her left hand, sorrowful, to show him she wears no wedding ring. She twists up her long hair and wraps it around her neck like a noose.

Midsummer: women hurry to the queen’s apartments with clean linen folded over their arms. Their faces are blank and shocked and they walk so quickly you know not to stop them. Fires are lit within the queen’s apartments to burn what has bled away. If there is anything to bury, the women keep it a secret between themselves.

That night, huddled in a window embrasure, the sky lit by stars like daggers, Henry will tell him, it is Katherine I blame. I believe she ill-wishes me. The truth is her womb is diseased. All those years she deceived me – she couldn’t carry a son, and she and her doctors knew it. She claims she still loves me, but she is destroying me. She comes in the night with her cold hands and her cold heart, and lies between me and the woman I love. She puts her hand on my member and her hand smells of the tomb.

The lords and ladies give the maids and midwives money, to say what sex the child was, but the women give different answers each time. Indeed, what would be worse: for Anne to have conceived another girl, or to have conceived and miscarried a boy?

Midsummer: bonfires are lit all over London, burning through the short nights. Dragons stalk the streets, puffing out smoke and clattering their mechanical wings.

Chapter II. The Map of Christendom. 1534—1535

‘Do you want Audley’s post?’ Henry asks him. ‘It’s yours if you say so.’

The summer is over. The Emperor has not come. Pope Clement is dead, and his judgments with him; the game is to play again, and he has left the door open, just a chink, for the next Bishop of Rome to hold a conversation with England. Personally, he would slam it shut; but these are not personal matters.

Now he thinks carefully: would it suit him to be Chancellor? It would be good to have a post in the legal hierarchy, so why not at the top? ‘I have no wish to disturb Audley. If Your Majesty is satisfied with him, I am too.’

He remembers how the post tied Wolsey to London, when the king was elsewhere. The cardinal was active in the law courts; but we have lawyers enough.

Henry says, only tell me what you deem best. Abased, like a lover, he cannot think of the best presents. He says, Cranmer bids me, listen to Cromwell, and if he needs a post, a tax, an impost, a measure in Parliament or a royal proclamation, give it to him.

The post of Master of the Rolls is vacant. It is an ancient judicial office, it commands one of the kingdom’s great secretariats. His predecessors will be those men, bishops for the most part, eminent in learning: those who lie down on their tombs, with their virtues in Latin engraved beneath. He is never more alive than when he twists the stem of this ripe fruit and snaps it from the tree.

‘You were also right about Cardinal Farnese,’ Henry says.

‘Now we have a new Pope – Bishop of Rome, I should say – I have collected on my bets.’

‘You see,’ he says, smiling. ‘Cranmer is right. Be advised by me.’ The court is amused to hear how the Romans have celebrated Pope Clement’s death. They have broken into his tomb, and dragged his naked body through the streets.

The Master’s house in Chancery Lane is the most curious house he has ever entered. It smells of must, mould and tallow, and behind its crooked facade it meanders back, a warren of little spaces with low doorways; were our forebears all dwarves, or were they not perfectly certain how to prop up a ceiling?

This house was founded three hundred years ago, by the Henry that was then; he built it as a refuge for Jews who wished to convert. If they took this step – advisable if they wished to be preserved from violence – they would forfeit all their possessions to the Crown. This being so, it was just that the Crown should house and feed them for their natural lives.

Christophe runs ahead of him, into the depths of the house. ‘Look!’ He trails his finger through a vast spider’s web.

‘You’ve broken up her home, you heartless boy.’ He examines Ariane’s crumbling prey: a leg, a wing. ‘Let’s be gone, before she comes back.’

Some fifty years after Henry had endowed the house, all Jews were expelled from the realm. Yet the refuge was never quite empty; even today two women live here. I shall call on them, he says.

Christophe is tapping the walls and beams, for all the world as if he knew what he was looking for. ‘Wouldn’t you run,’ he says with relish, ‘if someone tapped back?’

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Christophe crosses himself. ‘I expect a hundred men have died here, Jews and Christians both.’

Behind this wainscot, it is true, he can sense the tiny bones of mice: a hundred generations, their articulated forefeet folded in eternal rest. Their descendants, thriving, he can smell in the air. This is a job for Marlinspike, he says, if we can catch him. The cardinal’s cat is feral now, ranging at will through London gardens, lured by the scent of carp from the ponds of city monasteries, tempted – for all he knows – across the river, to be snuggled to the bosoms of whores, slack breasts rubbed with rose petals and ambergris; he imagines Marlinspike lolling, purring, declining to come home again. He says to Christophe, ‘I wonder how I can be Master of the Rolls, if I am not master of a cat.’

‘The Rolls have not paws to go walking.’ Christophe is kicking a skirting. ‘My foot go through it,’ he says, demonstrating.

Will he leave the comforts of Austin Friars, for the tiny windows with their warped panes, the creaking passages, the ancient draughts? ‘It will be a shorter journey to Westminster,’ he says. His aim is bent there – Whitehall, Westminster and the river, Master Secretary’s barge down to Greenwich or up to Hampton Court. I shall be back at Austin Friars often, he says to himself, almost every day. He is building a treasure room, a repository secure for any gold plate the king entrusts to him; whatever he deposits can quickly be turned into ready money. His treasure comes through the street on ordinary carts, to attract no attention, though there are vigilant outriders. The chalices are fitted into soft leather cases made for them. The bowls and dishes travel in canvas bags, interleaved with white woollen cloth at seven pence the yard. The jewels are swaddled in silk and packed into chests with new and shiny locks: and he has the keys. There are great pearls which gleam wet from the ocean, sapphires hot as India. There are jewels like the fruit you pick on a country afternoon: garnets like sloes, pink diamonds like rosehips. Alice says, ‘For a handful of these I would, myself, overthrow any queen in Christendom.’

‘What a good thing the king hasn’t met you, Alice.’

Jo says, ‘I would as soon have it in export licences. Or army contracts. Someone will make a fortune in the Irish wars. Beans, flour, malt, horseflesh …’

‘I shall see what I can do for you,’ he says.

At Austin Friars he holds the lease for ninety-nine years. His great-grandchildren will have it: some unknown Londoners. When they look at the documents his name will be there. His arms will be carved over the doorways. He rests his hand on the banister of the great staircase, looks up into the dust-mote glitter from a high window. When did I do this? At Hatfield, early in the year: looking up, listening for the sounds of Morton’s household, long ago. If he himself went to Hatfield, must not Thomas More have gone up too? Perhaps it was his light footstep he expected, overhead?

He starts to think again, about that fist that came out of nowhere.

His first idea had been, move clerks and papers to the Rolls, then Austin Friars will become a home again. But for whom? He has taken out Liz’s book of hours, and on the page where she kept the family listed he has made alterations, additions. Rafe will be moving out soon, to his new house in Hackney; and Richard is building in the same neighbourhood, with his wife Frances. Alice is marrying his ward Thomas Rotherham. Her brother Christopher is ordained and beneficed. Jo’s wedding clothes are ordered; she is snapped up by his friend John ap Rice, a lawyer, a scholar, a man he admires and on whose loyalty he counts. I have done well for my folk, he thinks: not one of them poor, or unhappy, or uncertain of their place in this uncertain world. He hesitates, looking up into the light: now gold, now blue as a cloud passes. Whoever will come downstairs and claim him, must do it now. His daughter Anne with her thundering feet: Anne, he would say to her, couldn’t we have felt mufflers over those hooves of yours? Grace skimming down like dust, drawn into a spiral, a lively swirl … going nowhere, dispersing, gone.

Liz, come down.

But Liz keeps her silence; she neither stays nor goes. She is always with him and not with him. He turns away. So this house will become a place of business. As all his houses will become places of business. My home will be where my clerks and files are; otherwise, my home will be with the king, where he is.

Christophe says, ‘Now we are removed to the Rolls House, I can tell you, cher maître, how I am happy that you did not leave me behind. For in your absence they would call me snail brain and turnip head.’

‘Alors …’ he takes a view of Christophe, ‘your head is indeed like a turnip. Thank you for attracting my attention to it.’

Installed at the Rolls, he takes a view of his situation: satisfactory. He has sold off his two Kent manors, but the king has given him one in Monmouthshire and he is buying another in Essex. He has his eye on plots in Hackney and Shoreditch, and is taking in leases on the properties around Austin Friars, which he intends to enfold in his building plans; and then, build a big wall around the lot. He has surveys to hand of a manor in Bedfordshire, one in Lincolnshire, and two Essex properties he intends to put in trust for Gregory. All this is small stuff. It’s nothing to what he intends to have, or to what Henry will owe him.

Meanwhile, his outgoings would frighten a lesser man. If the king wants something done, you have to be able to staff the enterprise and fund it. It is hard to keep up with the spending of his noble councillors, and yet there are a crew of them who live at the pawn-shop and come to him month by month to patch the holes in their accounts. He knows when to let these debts run; there is more than one kind of currency in England. What he senses is a great net is spreading about him, a web of favours done and favours received. Those who want access to the king expect to pay for it, and no one has better access than he. And at the same time, the word is out: help Cromwell and he will help you. Be loyal, be diligent, be intelligent on his behalf; you will come into a reward. Those who commit their service to him will be promoted and protected. He is a good friend and master; this is said of him everywhere. Otherwise, it is the usual abuse. His father was a blacksmith, a crooked brewer, he was an Irishman, he was a criminal, he was a Jew, and he himself was just a wool-trader, he was a shearsman, and now he is a sorcerer: how else but by being a sorcerer would he get the reins of power in his hand? Chapuys writes to the Emperor about him; his early life remains a mystery, but he is excellent company, and he keeps his household and retainers in magnificent style. He is a master of language, Chapuys writes, a man of most eloquent address; though his French, he adds, is only assez bien.

He thinks, it’s good enough for you. A nod and a wink will do for you.

These last months, the council has never been out of harness. A hard summer of negotiating has brought a treaty with the Scots. But Ireland is in revolt. Only Dublin Castle itself and the town of Waterford hold out for the king, while the rebel lords are offering their services and their harbours to the Emperor’s troops. Among these isles it is the most wretched of territories, which does not pay the king what it costs him to garrison it; but he cannot turn his back on it, for fear of who else might come in. Law is barely respected there, for the Irish think you can buy off murder with money, and like the Welsh they cost out a man’s life in cattle. The people are kept poor by imposts and seizures, by forfeitures and plain daylight robbery; the pious English abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, but the joke runs that the Irish are so godly they abstain every other day as well. Their great lords are brutal and imperious men, treacherous and fickle, inveterate feuders, extortionists and hostage takers, and their allegiance to England they hold cheap, for they are loyal to nothing and prefer force of arms to law. As for the native chiefs, they recognise no natural limit to their claims. They say that on their land they own every ferny slope and lake, they own the heather, the meadow grass and the winds that riffle it; they own every beast and every man, and in times of scarcity they take the bread to feed their hunting dogs.

No wonder they don’t want to be English. It would interrupt their status as slave-owners. The Duke of Norfolk still has serfs on his land, and even if the law courts move to free them the duke expects a fee from it. The king proposes to send Norfolk to Ireland, but he says he’s spent enough futile months over there and the only way he’ll go back is if they build a bridge so he can get home at the end of the week without getting his feet wet.

He and Norfolk fight in the council chamber. The duke rants, and he sits back and folds his arms and watches him ranting. You should have sent young Fitzroy to Dublin, he tells the council. An apprentice king – make a show, stage a spectacle, throw some money about.

Richard says to him, ‘Perhaps we should go to Ireland, sir.’

‘I think my campaigning days are over.’

‘I would like to be in arms. Every man should be a soldier once in his life.’

‘That is your grandfather speaking through you. Ap Evans the archer. Concentrate for now on making a show in the tournaments.’

Richard has proved a formidable man in the lists. It is more or less as Christophe says: biff, and they are flat. You would think the sport was in his nephew’s blood, as it is in the blood of the lords who compete. He carries the Cromwell colours, and the king loves him for it, as he loves any man with flair and courage and physical strength. Increasingly, his bad leg forces him to sit with the spectators. When he is in pain he is panicked, you can see it in his eyes, and when he is recovering he is restless. Uncertainty about his own state of health makes him less inclined for the expense and trouble of organising a large tournament. When he does run a course, with his experience, his weight and height, his superb horses and the steel of his temperament, he is likely to win. But to avoid accidents, he prefers to run against opponents he knows.

Henry says, ‘The Emperor, two or three years back when he was in Germany, did he not have an evil humour in his thigh? They say the weather didn’t suit him. But then his dominions offer a change of climate. Whereas from one part of my kingdom to the next there is no change to be found.’

‘Oh, I expect it’s worse in Dublin.’

Henry looks out, hopeless, at the teeming rain. ‘And when I ride out the people shout at me. They rise up out of ditches, and shout about Katherine, how I should take her back. How would they like it if I told them how to order their houses and wives and children?’

Even when the weather clears the king’s fears do not diminish. ‘She will escape and raise an army against me,’ he says. ‘Katherine. You do not know what she would do.’

‘She told me she would not run.’

‘And you think she never lies? I know she lies. I have proof of it. She lied about her own virginity.’

Oh, that, he thinks tiredly.

It seems Henry doesn’t believe in the power of armed guards, in locks and keys. He thinks an angel recruited by the Emperor Charles will make them fall away. When he travels, he takes with him a great iron lock, which is affixed to his chamber door by a servant who goes with him for the purpose. His food is tasted for poison and his bed examined, last thing at night, for concealed weapons, such as needles; but even so, he is afraid he will be murdered as he sleeps.

Autumn: Thomas More is losing weight, a wiry little man emerging from what was never a superfluity of flesh. He lets Antonio Bonvisi send him food in. ‘Not that you Lucchese know how to eat. I’d send it myself, but if he took ill, you know what people would say. He likes dishes of eggs. I don’t know if he likes much else.’

A sigh. ‘Milk puddings.’

He smiles. These are carnivorous days. ‘No wonder he doesn’t thrive.’

‘I’ve known him for forty years,’ Bonvisi says. ‘A lifetime, Tommaso. You wouldn’t hurt him, would you? Please assure me, if you can, that no one will hurt him.’

‘Why do you think I’m no better than he is? Look, I have no need to put him under pressure. His family and friends will do it. Won’t they?’

‘Can’t you just leave him there? Forget him?’

‘Of course. If the king allows.’

He arranges for Meg Roper to visit. Father and daughter walk in the gardens, arm in arm. Sometimes he watches them from a window in the Lord Lieutenant’s lodgings.

By November, this policy has failed. Turned back, really, and bitten his hand, like a dog that out of kindness you pick up in the street. Meg says, ‘He has told me, and he has asked me to tell his friends, that he will have no more to do with oaths of any kind, and that if we hear he has sworn, we are to take it that he has been forced, by ill-usage and rough handling. And if a paper is shown to the council, with his signature on it, we are to understand it is not his hand.’

More is now required to swear to the Act of Supremacy, an act which draws together all the powers and dignities assumed by the king in the last two years. It doesn’t, as some say, make the king head of the church. It states that he is head of the church, and always has been. If people don’t like new ideas, let them have old ones. If they want precedents, he has precedents. A second enactment, which will come into force in the new year, defines the scope of treason. It will be a treasonable offence to deny Henry’s titles or jurisdiction, to speak or write maliciously against him, to call him a heretic or a schismatic. This law will catch the friars who spread panic and say the Spanish are landing with the next tide to seize the throne for the Lady Mary. It will catch the priests who in their sermons rant against the king’s authority and say he is dragging his subjects after him to Hell. Is it much for a monarch to ask, that a subject keep a civil tongue in his head?

This is new, people say to him, this treason by words, and he says, no, be assured, it is old. It casts into statute law what the judges in their wisdom have already defined as common law. It is a measure for clarification. I am all for clarity.

Upon More’s refusal of this second oath, a bill is brought in against him, forfeiting his goods to the Crown. He now has no hope of release; or rather, the hope lies in himself. It is his duty to visit him, tell him he will no longer be allowed visitors, or strolls in the gardens.

‘Nothing to see, this time of year.’ More casts a glance at the sky, a narrow strip of grey through the high window. ‘I can still have my books? Write letters?’

‘For now.’

‘And John Wood, he stays with me?’

His servant. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘He brings me a little news from time to time. They say the sweating sickness has broken out among the king’s troops in Ireland. So late in the year, too.’

Plague has also broken out; he’s not going to tell More that, or that the whole Irish campaign is a debacle and a money sink and that he wishes he had done as Richard said and gone out there himself.

‘The sweat takes off so many,’ More says, ‘and so swiftly, and in their prime too. And if you survive it, you are in no condition to fight the wild Irish, that’s for sure. I remember when Meg took it, she nearly died. Have you had it? No, you’re never ill, are you?’ He is chattering pointlessly, then he looks up. ‘Tell me, what do you hear from Antwerp? They say Tyndale is there. They say he lives straitly. He dare not stray beyond the English merchants’ house. They say he is in prison, almost as I am.’

It is true, or partly true. Tyndale has laboured in poverty and obscurity, and now his world has shrunk to a little room; while outside in the city, under the Emperor’s laws, printers are branded and have their eyes put out, and brothers and sisters are killed for their faith, the men beheaded, the women buried alive. More has a sticky web in Europe still, a web made of money; it is his belief that his men have followed Tyndale these many months, but all his ingenuity, and Stephen Vaughan’s on the spot, have not been able to find out which of the Englishmen who pass through that busy town are More’s agents. ‘Tyndale would be safer in London,’ More says. ‘Under yourself, the protector of error. Now, look at Germany today. You see, Thomas, where heresy leads us. It leads us to Münster, does it not?’

Sectaries, anabaptists, have taken over the city of Münster. Your worst nightmares – when you wake, paralysed, and think you have died – are bliss compared with this. The burgomasters have been ejected from the council, and thieves and lunatics have taken their places, proclaiming that the end times have come and all must be rebaptised. Citizens who dissent have been driven beyond the walls, naked, to perish in the snow. Now the city is under siege from its own prince-bishop, who intends to starve it out. The defenders, they say, are for the most part the women and children left behind; they are held in dread by a tailor called Bockelson, who has crowned himself King of Jerusalem. It is rumoured that Bockelson’s friends have instituted polygamy, as recommended in the Old Testament, and that some of the women have been hanged or drowned rather than submit to rape under cover of Abraham’s law. These prophets engage in daylight robbery, in the name of holding goods in common. It is said they have seized the houses of the rich, burned their letters, slashed their pictures, mopped the floors with fine embroidery, and shredded the records of who owns what, so former times can never come back.

‘Utopia,’ he says. ‘Is it not?’

‘I hear they are burning the books from the city libraries. Erasmus has gone into the flames. What kind of devils would burn the gentle Erasmus? But no doubt, no doubt,’ More nods, ‘Münster will be restored to order. Philip the prince of Hesse, Luther’s friend, I have no doubt he will lend the good bishop his cannon and his cannoneers, and one heretic will put down another. The brethren fall to scrapping, do you see? Like rabid dogs drooling in the streets, who tear out each other’s entrails when they meet.’

‘I tell you how Münster will end. Someone inside the city will surrender it.’

‘You think so? You look as if you would offer me odds. But there, I was never much of a gambler. And now the king has all my money.’

‘A man like that, a tailor, jumps up for a month or two –’

‘A wool merchant, a blacksmith’s son, he jumps up for a year or two …’

He stands, picks up his cape: black wool, lambskin lining. More’s eyes gleam, ah, look, I have you on the run. Now he murmurs, as if it were a supper party, must you go? Stay a little, can’t you? He lifts his chin. ‘So I shall not see Meg again?’

The man’s tone, the emptiness, the loss: it goes straight to his heart. He turns away, to keep his reply calm and trite. ‘You have to say some words. That’s all.’

‘Ahh. Just words.’

‘And if you don’t want to say them I can put them to you in writing. Sign your name and the king will be happy. I will send my barge to row you back to Chelsea, and tie up at the wharf at the end of your own garden – not much to see, as you say, at this time of year, but think of the warm welcome within. Dame Alice is waiting – Alice’s cooking, well, that alone would restore you; she is standing by your side watching you chew and the minute you wipe your mouth she picks you up in her arms and kisses away the mutton fat, why husband I have missed you! She bears you off to her bedchamber, locks the door and drops the key in her pocket and pulls off your clothes till there you are in your shirt and nothing but your little white legs sticking out – well, admit it, the woman is within her rights. Then next day – think of it – you rise before dawn, shuffle to your familiar cell and flog yourself, call for your bread and water, and by eight o’clock back in your hair shirt, and over it your old woollen gown, that blood-coloured one with the rent in … feet up on a stool, and your only son bringing in your letters … snapping the seal on your darling Erasmus … Then when you have read your letters, you can hobble out – let’s say it’s a sunny day – and look at your caged birds, and your little fox in its pen, and you can say, I was a prisoner too, but no more, because Cromwell showed me I could be free … Don’t you want it? Don’t you want to come out of this place?’

‘You should write a play,’ More says wonderingly.

He laughs. ‘Perhaps I shall.’

‘It’s better than Chaucer. Words. Words. Just words.’

He turns. He stares at More. It’s as if the light has changed. A window has opened on a strange country, where a cold wind from childhood blows. ‘That book … Was it a dictionary?’

More frowns. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I came up the stairs at Lambeth – give me a moment … I came running up the stairs, carrying your measure of small beer and your wheaten loaf, to keep you from being hungry if you woke in the night. It was seven in the evening. You were reading, and when you looked up you held your hands over the book,’ he makes the shape of wings, ‘as if you were protecting it. I asked you, Master More, what is in that great book? You said, words, words, just words.’

More tilts his head. ‘This was when?’

‘I believe I was seven.’

‘Oh, nonsense,’ More says genially. ‘I didn’t know you when you were seven. Why, you were …’ he frowns, ‘you must have been … and I was …’

‘About to go to Oxford. You don’t remember. But why would you?’ He shrugs. ‘I thought you were laughing at me.’

‘Oh, very probably I was,’ More says. ‘If indeed such a meeting took place. Now witness these present days, when you come here and laugh at me. Talking about Alice. And my little white legs.’

‘I think it must have been a dictionary. You are sure you don’t remember? Well … my barge is waiting, and I don’t want to keep the oars out in the cold.’

‘The days are very long in here,’ More says. ‘The nights are longer. My chest is bad. My breathing is tight.’

‘Back to Chelsea then, Dr Butts will visit, tut-tut Thomas More, what have you been doing to yourself? Hold your nose and drink off this foul mixture …’

‘Sometimes I think I shall not see morning.’

He opens the door. ‘Martin?’

Martin is thirty, wiry, his fair hair under his cap already sparse: pleasant face with a crinkly smile. His native town is Colchester, his father a tailor, and he learned to read on Wycliffe’s gospel, which his father hid in their roof under the thatch. This is a new England; an England where Martin can dust the old text down, and show it to his neighbours. He has brothers, all of them Bible men. His wife is just now confined with her third child, ‘crawled into the straw,’ as he puts it. ‘Any news?’

‘Not yet. But will you stand godfather? Thomas if it’s a boy, or if it’s a girl you name her, sir.’

A touch of palms and a smile. ‘Grace,’ he says. A money gift is understood; the child’s start in life. He turns back to the sick man, who now slumps over his table. ‘Sir Thomas says at night his breath comes short. Bring him some bolsters, cushions, whatever you can find, prop him up to ease him. I want him to have every opportunity to live to rethink his position, show loyalty to our king, and go home. And now, bid you both good afternoon.’

More looks up. ‘I want to write a letter.’

‘Of course. You shall have ink and paper.’

‘I want to write to Meg.’

‘Then send her a human word.’

More’s letters are beyond the human. They may be addressed to his daughter, but they are written for his friends in Europe to read.

‘Cromwell …?’ More’s voice calls him back. ‘How is the queen?’

More is always correct, not like those who slip up and say ‘Queen Katherine’. How is Anne? he means. But what could he tell him? He is on his way. He is out of the door. In the narrow window a blue dusk has replaced the grey.

He had heard her voice, from the next room: low, relentless. Henry yelping in indignation. ‘Not me! Not me.’

In the antechamber, Thomas Boleyn, Monseigneur, his narrow face rigid. Some Boleyn hangers-on, exchanging glances: Francis Weston, Francis Bryan. In a corner, trying to make himself inconspicuous, the lutenist Mark Smeaton; what’s he doing here? Not quite a family conclave: George Boleyn is in Paris, holding talks. An idea has been floated that the infant Elizabeth should marry a son of France; the Boleyns really think this is going to happen.

‘Whatever can have occurred,’ he says, ‘to upset the queen?’ His tone is astonished: as if she were the most placid of women.

Weston says, ‘It’s Lady Carey, she is – that is to say she finds herself –’

Bryan snorts. ‘With a bellyful of bastard.’

‘Ah. Didn’t you know?’ The shock around him is gratifying. He shrugs. ‘I thought it a family matter.’

Bryan’s eyepatch winks at him, today a jaundiced yellow. ‘You must watch her very closely, Cromwell.’

‘A matter in which I have failed,’ Boleyn says. ‘Evidently. She claims the child’s father is William Stafford, and she has married him. You know this Stafford, do you?’

‘Just about. Well,’ he says cheerfully, ‘shall we go in? Mark, we are not setting this affair to music, so take yourself off to where you can be useful.’

Only Henry Norris is attending the king: Jane Rochford, the queen. Henry’s big face is white. ‘You blame me, madam, for what I did before I even knew you.’

They have crowded in behind him. Henry says, ‘My lord Wiltshire, can you not control either of your daughters?’

‘Cromwell knew,’ Bryan says. He snorts with laughter.

Monseigneur begins to talk, stumbling – he, Thomas Boleyn, diplomat famed for his silver-tongued finesse. Anne cuts him off: ‘Why should she get a child by Stafford? I don’t believe it’s his. Why would he agree to marry her, unless for ambition – well, he has made a false move there, for he will never come to court again, nor will she. She can crawl on her knees to me. I care not. She can starve.’

If Anne were my wife, he thinks, I’d go out for the afternoon. She looks haggard, and she cannot stay still; you wouldn’t trust her near a sharp knife. ‘What to do?’ Norris whispers. Jane Rochford is standing back against the tapestries, where nymphs entwine themselves in trees; the hem of her skirt is dipped in some fabulous stream, and her veil brushes a cloud, from which a goddess peeps. She lifts her face; her look is one of sober triumph.

I could have the archbishop fetched, he thinks. Anne wouldn’t rage and stamp under his eyes. Now she has Norris by the sleeve; what is she doing? ‘My sister has done this to spite me. She thinks she will sail about the court with her great belly, and pity me and laugh at me, because I have lost my own child.’

‘I feel sure that, if the matter were to be viewed –’ her father begins.

‘Get out!’ she says. ‘Leave me, and tell her – Mistress Stafford – that she has forfeited any claim on my family. I don’t know her. She is no longer a Boleyn.’

‘Wiltshire, go.’ Henry adds, in the tone in which a schoolboy is promised a whipping, ‘I shall speak to you later.’

He says to the king, innocent, ‘Majesty, shall we do no business today?’ Henry laughs.

Lady Rochford runs beside him. He does not slow his pace so she has to pick up her skirts. ‘Did you really know, Master Secretary? Or did you say that just to see their faces?’

‘You are too good for me. You see through all my ploys.’

‘Lucky I see through Lady Carey’s.’

‘It was you who detected her?’ Who else, he thinks? With her husband George away she has no one to spy on.

Mary’s bed is strewn with silks – flame, orange, carnation – as if a fire has broken out in the mattress. Across stools and a window seat trail lawn smocks, entangled ribbons and unpaired gloves. Are those the same green stockings she once revealed to the knee, running full-tilt towards him on the day she proposed marriage?

He stands in the doorway. ‘William Stafford, eh?’

She straightens up, her cheeks flushed, a velvet slipper in her hand. Now the secret is out, she has loosened her bodice. Her eyes slide past him. ‘Good girl, Jane, bring that here.’

‘Excuse me, Master.’ It is Jane Seymour, tiptoeing past him with an armful of folded laundry. Then a boy after her, bumping a yellow leather chest. ‘Just here, Mark.’

‘Behold me, Master Secretary,’ Smeaton says. ‘I’m making myself useful.’

Jane kneels before the chest and swings it opens. ‘Cambric to line it?’

‘Never mind cambric. Where’s my other shoe?’

‘Best be gone,’ Lady Rochford warns. ‘If Uncle Norfolk sees you he’ll take a stick to you. Your royal sister thinks the king has fathered your child. She says, why would it be William Stafford?’

Mary snorts. ‘So much does she know. What would Anne know of taking a man for himself? You can tell her he loves me. You can tell her he cares for me and no one else does. No one else in this world.’

He leans down and whispers, ‘Mistress Seymour, I did not think you were a friend of Lady Carey.’

‘No one else will help her.’ She keeps her head down; the nape of her neck flushes pink.

‘Those bed hangings are mine,’ Mary says. ‘Pull them down.’ Embroidered on them, he sees, are the arms of her husband Will Carey, dead what – seven years now? ‘I can unpick the badges.’ Of course: what use are a dead man and his devices? ‘Where’s my gilt basin, Rochford, have you got it?’ She gives the yellow chest a kick; it is stamped all over with Anne’s falcon badge. ‘If they see me with this, they’ll take it off me and tip my stuff in the road.’

‘If you can wait an hour,’ he says, ‘I’ll send someone with a chest for you.’

‘Will it be stamped Thomas Cromwell? God save me, I haven’t an hour. I know what!’ She begins to haul the sheets off the bed. ‘Make bundles!’

‘For shame,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘And run off like a servant who’s stolen the silver? Besides, you won’t need these things down in Kent. Stafford has a farm or something, hasn’t he? Some little manor? Still, you can sell them. You’ll have to, I suppose.’

‘My sweet brother will help me when he returns from France. He will not see me cut off.’

‘I beg to differ. Lord Rochford will be sensible, as I am, that you have disgraced all your kin.’

Mary turns on her, arm sweeping out like a cat flashing claws. ‘This is better than your wedding day, Rochford. It’s like getting a houseful of presents. You can’t love, you don’t know what love is, and all you can do is envy those who do know, and rejoice in their troubles. You are a wretched unhappy woman whose husband loathes her, and I pity you, and I pity my sister Anne, I would not change places with her, I had rather be in the bed of an honest poor gentleman who cares only for me than be like the queen and only able to keep her man with old whore’s tricks – yes, I know it is so, he has told Norris what she offers him, and it doesn’t conduce to getting a child, I can tell you. And now she is afraid of every woman at court – have you looked at her, have you looked at her lately? Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God protect us from answered prayers. She thought it would be like her coronation every day.’ Mary, breathless, reaches into the mill of her possessions and throws Jane Seymour a pair of sleeves. ‘Take these, sweetheart, with my blessing. You have the only kind heart at court.’

Jane Rochford, in departing, slams the door.

‘Let her go,’ Jane Seymour murmurs. ‘Forget her.’

‘Good riddance!’ Mary snaps. ‘I must be glad she didn’t pick my things over, and offer me a price.’ In the silence, her words go crash, flap, rattling around the room like trapped birds who panic and shit down the walls: he has told Norris what she offers him. By night, her ingenious proceedings. He is rephrasing it: as, surely, one must? I’ll bet Norris is all ears. Christ alive, these people! The boy Mark is standing, gapey-faced, behind the door. ‘Mark, if you stand there like a landed fish I shall have you filleted and fried.’ The boy flees.

When Mistress Seymour has tied the bundles they look like birds with broken wings. He takes them from her and reties them, not with silk tags but serviceable string. ‘Do you always carry string, Master Secretary?’

Mary says, ‘Oh, my book of love poems! Shelton has it.’ She pitches from the room.

‘She’ll need that,’ he says. ‘No poems down in Kent.’

‘Lady Rochford would tell her that sonnets don’t keep you warm. Not,’ Jane says, ‘that I’ve ever had a sonnet. So I wouldn’t really know.’

Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain? He turns. ‘Jane –’

‘Master Secretary?’ She dips her knees and rolls sideways on to the mattress; she sits up, drags her skirts from under her, finds her footing: gripping the bedpost, she scrambles up, reaches above her head, and begins to unhook the hangings.

‘Come down! I’ll do that. I’ll send a wagon after Mistress Stafford. She can’t carry all she owns.’

‘I can do it. Master Secretary doesn’t deal with bed hangings.’

‘Master Secretary deals with everything. I’m surprised I don’t make the king’s shirts.’

Jane sways gently above him. Her feet sink into the feathers. ‘Queen Katherine does. Still.’

‘The Dowager Katherine. Come down.’

She hops down to the rushes, giving her skirts a shake. ‘Even now after all that has passed between them. She sent a new parcel last week.’

‘I thought the king had forbidden her.’

‘Anne says they should be torn up and used for, well, you know what for, in a jakes. He was angry. Possibly because he doesn’t like the word “jakes”.’

‘No more does he.’ The king deprecates coarse language, and not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling some dirty story. ‘Is it true what Mary says? That the queen is afraid?’

‘For now he is sighing over Mistress Shelton. Well, you know that. You have observed.’

‘But surely that is harmless? A king is obliged to be gallant, till he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the fire with his chaplains.’

‘Explain it to Anne, she doesn’t see it. She wanted to send Shelton away. But her father and her brother would not have it. Because the Sheltons are their cousins, so if Henry is going to look elsewhere, they want it to be close to home. Incest is so popular these days! Uncle Norfolk said – I mean, His Grace –’

‘It’s all right,’ he says, distracted, ‘I call him that too.’

Jane puts a hand over her mouth. It is a child’s hand, with tiny gleaming nails. ‘I shall think of that when I am in the country and have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew Cromwell?’

‘You are leaving court?’ No doubt she has a husband in view: some country husband.

‘I hope that when I have served another season I might be released.’

Mary rips into the room, snarling. She juggles two embroidered cushions above the bulk of her child, a bulk which now seems evident; she has a hand free for her gilt basin, in which is her poetry book. She throws down the cushions, opens her fist and scatters a handful of silver buttons, which rattle into the basin like dice. ‘Shelton had these. Curse her for a magpie.’

‘It is not as if the queen likes me,’ Jane says. ‘And it is a long time since I saw Wolf Hall.’

For the king’s new-year gift he has commissioned from Hans a miniature on vellum, which shows Solomon on his throne receiving Sheba. It is to be an allegory, he explains, of the king receiving the fruits of the church and the homage of his people.

Hans gives him a withering look. ‘I grasp the point.’ Hans prepares sketches. Solomon is seated in majesty. Sheba stands before him, unseen face raised, her back to the onlooker.

‘In your own mind,’ he says, ‘can you see her face, even though it’s hidden?’

‘You pay for the back of her head, that’s what you get!’ Hans rubs his forehead. He relents. ‘Not true. I can see her.’

‘See her like a woman you meet in the street?’

‘Not quite like that. More like someone you remember. Like some woman you used to know when you were a child.’

They are seated in front of the tapestry the king gave him. The painter’s eyes stray to it. ‘This woman on the wall. Wolsey had her, Henry had her, now you.’

‘I assure you, she has no counterpart in real life.’ Well, not unless Westminster has some very discreet and versatile whore.

‘I know who she is.’ Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase it. ‘They talk about it in Antwerp. Why don’t you go over and claim her?’

‘She is married.’ He is taken aback, to think that his private business is common talk.

‘You think she would not come away with you?’

‘It’s years. I have changed.’

‘Ja. Now you are rich.’

‘But what would be said of me, if I enticed away a woman from her husband?’

Hans shrugs. They are so matter-of-fact, the Germans. More says the Lutherans fornicate in church. ‘Besides,’ Hans says, ‘there is the matter of the –’

‘The what?’

Hans shrugs: nothing. ‘Nothing! You are going to hang me up by my hands till I confess?’

‘I don’t do that. I only threaten to do it.’

‘I meant only,’ Hans says soothingly, ‘there is the matter of all the other women who want to marry you. The wives of England, they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you are the top of everyone’s list.’

In his idle moments – in the week there are two or three – he has been picking through the records of the Rolls House. Though the Jews are forbidden the realm, you cannot know what human flotsam will be washed up by the tide of fortune, and only once, for a single month in these three hundred years, has the house been empty. He runs his eye over the accounts of the successive wardens, and he handles, curious, the receipts for their relief given by the dead inhabitants, written in Hebrew characters. Some of them spent fifty years within these walls, flinching from the Londoners outside. When he walks the crooked passages, he feels their footsteps under his.

He goes to see the two who remain. They are silent and vigilant women of indeterminate age, and the names they go by are Katherine Wheteley and Mary Cook.

‘What do you do?’ With your time, he means.

‘We say our prayers.’

They watch him for evidence of his intentions, good or ill. Their faces say, we are two women with nothing left but our life stories. Why should we part with them to you?

He sends them presents of fowl but he wonders if they eat flesh from gentile hands. Towards Christmas, the prior of Christchurch in Canterbury sends him twelve Kentish apples, each one wrapped in grey linen, of a special kind that is good with wine. He takes these apples to the converts, with wine he has picked out. ‘In the year 1353,’ he says, ‘there was only one person in the house. I am sorry to think she lived here without company. Her last domicile was the city of Exeter, but I wonder where before that? Her name was Claricia.’

‘We know nothing of her,’ says Katherine, or possibly Mary. ‘It would be surprising if we did.’ Her fingertip tests the apples. Possibly she does not recognise their rarity, or that they are the best present the prior could find. If you don’t like them, he says, or if you do, I have stewing pears. Somebody sent me five hundred.

‘A man who meant to get himself noticed,’ says Katherine or Mary, and the other says, ‘Five hundred pounds would have been better.’

The women laugh, but their laughter is cold. He sees he will never be on terms with them. He likes the name Claricia and he wishes he had suggested it for the gaoler’s daughter. It is a name for a woman you might dream of: one you could see straight through.

When the king’s new-year present is done Hans says, ‘It is the first time I have made his portrait.’

‘You shall make another soon, I hope.’

Hans knows he has an English bible, a translation almost ready. He puts a finger to his lips; too soon to talk about it, next year maybe. ‘If you were to dedicate it to Henry,’ Hans says, ‘could he now refuse it? I will put him on the title page, displayed in glory, head of the church.’ Hans paces, growls out a few figures. He is thinking of paper and printer’s costs, estimating his profits. Lucas Cranach draws title pages for Luther. ‘Those pictures of Martin and his wife, he has sold prints by the basketful. And Cranach makes everybody look like a pig.’

True. Even those silvery nudes he paints have sweet pig-faces, and labourer’s feet, and gristly ears. ‘But if I paint Henry, I must flatter, I suppose. Show him how he was five years ago. Or ten.’

‘Stick to five. He will think you are mocking him.’

Hans draws his finger across his throat, buckles at the knees, thrusts out his tongue like a man hanged; it seems he envisages every method of execution.

‘An easy majesty would be called for,’ he says.

Hans beams. ‘I can do it by the yard.’

The end of the year brings cold and a green aqueous light, washing across the Thames and the city. Letters fall to his desk with a soft shuffle like great snowflakes: doctors of theology from Germany, ambassadors from France, Mary Boleyn from her exile in Kent.

He breaks the seal. ‘Listen to this,’ he says to Richard. ‘Mary wants money. She says, she knows she should not have been so hasty. She says, love overcame reason.’

‘Love, was it?’

He reads. She does not regret for a minute she has taken on William Stafford. She could have had, she says, other husbands, with titles and wealth. But ‘if I were at liberty and might choose, I ensure you, Master Secretary, I have tried so much honesty to be in him, that I had rather beg my bread with him than to be the greatest Queen christened.’

She dare not write to her sister the queen. Or her father or her uncle or her brother. They are all so cruel. So she is writing to him … He wonders, did Stafford lean over her shoulder, while she was writing? Did she giggle and say, Thomas Cromwell, I once raised his hopes.

Richard says, ‘I hardly remember how Mary and I were to be married.’

‘That was in other days than these.’ And Richard is happy; see how it has worked out; we can thrive without the Boleyns. But Christendom was overturned for the Boleyn marriage, to put the ginger pig in the cradle; what if it is true, what if Henry is sated, what if the enterprise is cursed? ‘Get Wiltshire in.’

‘Here to the Rolls?’

‘He will come to the whistle.’

He will humiliate him – in his genial fashion – and make him give Mary an annuity. The girl worked for him, on her back, and now he must pension her. Richard will sit in the shadows and take notes. It will remind Boleyn of the old days: the old days now being approximately six, seven years back. Last week Chapuys said to him, in this kingdom now you are all the cardinal was, and more.

It is Christmas Eve when Alice More comes to see him. There is a thin sharp light, like the edge of an old knife, and in this light Alice looks old.

He greets her like a princess, and leads her into one of the chambers he has had repanelled and painted, where a great fire leaps up a rebuilt chimney. The air smells of pine boughs. ‘You keep the feast here?’ Alice has made an effort for him; pinned her hair back fiercely, under a bonnet sewn with seed pearls. ‘Well! When I came here before it was a musty old place. My husband used to say,’ and he notes the past tense, ‘my husband used to say, lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he’ll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.’

‘Did he talk a lot about locking me in dungeons?’

‘It was only talk.’ She is uneasy. ‘I thought you might take me to see the king. I know he’s always courteous to women, and kind.’

He shakes his head. If he takes Alice to the king she will talk about when he used to come to Chelsea and walk in the gardens. She will upset him: agitate his mind, make him think about More, which at present he doesn’t. ‘He is very busy with the French envoys. He means to keep a large court this season. You will have to trust my judgement.’

‘You have been good to us,’ she says, reluctant. ‘I ask myself why. You always have some trick.’

‘Born tricky,’ he says. ‘Can’t help it. Alice, why is your husband so stubborn?’

‘I no more comprehend him than I do the Blessed Trinity.’

‘Then what are we to do?’

‘I think he’d give the king his reasons. In his private ear. If the king said beforehand that he would take away all penalties from him.’

‘You mean, license him for treason? The king can’t do it.’

‘Holy Agnes! Thomas Cromwell, to tell the king what he can’t do! I’ve seen a cock swagger in a barnyard, master, till a girl comes one day and wrings his neck.’

‘It’s the law of the land. The custom of the country.’

‘I thought Henry was set over the law.’

‘We don’t live at Constantinople, Dame Alice. Though I say nothing against the Turk. We cheer on the infidels, these days. As long as they keep the Emperor’s hands tied.’

‘I don’t have much money left,’ she says. ‘I have to find fifteen shillings every week for his keep. I worry he’ll be cold.’ She sniffs. ‘Still, he could tell me so himself. He doesn’t write to me. It’s all her, her, his darling Meg. She’s not my child. I wish his first wife were here, to tell me if she was born the way she is now. She’s close, you know. Keeps her own counsel, and his. She tells me now he gave her his shirts to wash the blood out, that he wore a shirt of hair beneath his linen. He did so when we were married and I begged him to leave it off and I thought he had. But how would I know? He slept alone and drew the bolt on his door. If he had an itch I never knew it, he was perforce to scratch it himself. Well, whatever, it was between the two of them, and me no part of it.’

‘Alice –’

‘Don’t think I have no tenderness for him. He didn’t marry me to live like a eunuch. We have had dealings, one time or another.’ She blushes, more angry than shy. ‘And when that is true, you cannot help feeling it, if a man might be cold, if he might be hungry, his flesh being one with yours. You feel to him as you might a child.’

‘Fetch him out, Alice, if it is within your power.’

‘More in yours than mine.’ She smiles sadly. ‘Is your little man Gregory home for the season? I have sometimes said to my husband, I wish Gregory Cromwell were my boy. I could bake him in a sugar crust and eat him all up.’

Gregory comes home for Christmas, with a letter from Rowland Lee saying he is a treasure and can come back to his household any time. ‘So must I back,’ Gregory says, ‘or am I finished being educated now?’

‘I have a scheme for the new year to improve your French.’

‘Rafe says I am being brought up like a prince.’

‘For now, you are all I have to practise on.’

‘My sweet father …’ Gregory picks up his little dog. He hugs her, and nuzzles the fur at the back of her neck. He waits. ‘Rafe and Richard say that when my education is sufficient you mean to marry me to some old dowager with a great settlement and black teeth, and she will wear me out with lechery and rule me with her whims, and she will leave her estate away from the children she has and they will hate me and scheme against my life and one morning I shall be dead in my bed.’

The spaniel swivels in his son’s arms, turns on him her mild, round, wondering eyes. ‘They are making sport of you, Gregory. If I knew such a woman, I would marry her myself.’

Gregory nods. ‘She would never rule you, sir. And I dare say she would have a good deer park, which would be convenient to hunt. And the children would be in fear of you, even if they were men grown.’ He appears half-consoled. ‘What’s that map? Is it the Indies?’

‘This is the Scots border,’ he says gently. ‘Harry Percy’s country. Look, let me show you. These are parcels of his estates he has given away to his creditors. We cannot let it continue, because we can’t leave our borders to chance.’

‘They say he is sick.’

‘Sick, or mad.’ His tone is indifferent. ‘He has no heir, and he and his wife never come together, so it is not likely he will. He has fallen out with his brothers, and he owes a deal of money to the king. So it would make sense to name the king his heir, would it not? He will be brought to see it.’

Gregory looks stricken. ‘Take his earldom?’

‘He can keep the style. We’ll give him something to live on.’

‘Is this because of the cardinal?’

Harry Percy stopped Wolsey at Cawood, as he was riding south. He came in, keys in his hand, spattered with mud from the road: my lord, I arrest you for high treason. Look at my face, the cardinal said: I am not afraid of any man alive.

He shrugs. ‘Gregory, go and play. Take Bella and practise your French with her; she came to me from Lady Lisle in Calais. I won’t be long. I have to settle the kingdom’s bills.’

For Ireland at the next dispatch, brass cannon and iron shot, rammers and charging ladles, serpentine powder and four hundredweight of brimstone, five hundred yew bows and two barrels of bowstrings, two hundred each of spades, shovels, crowbars, pickaxes, horsehides, one hundred felling axes, one thousand horseshoes, eight thousand nails. The goldsmith Cornelys has not been paid for the cradle he made for the king’s last child, the one that never saw the light; he claims for twenty shillings disbursed to Hans for painting Adam and Eve on the cradle, and he is owed for white satin, gold tassels and fringes, and the silver for modelling the apples in the garden of Eden.

He is talking to people in Florence about hiring a hundred arquebusiers for the Irish campaign. They don’t down tools, like Englishmen do, if they have to fight in the woods or on rocky terrain.

The king says, a lucky new year to you, Cromwell. And more to follow. He thinks, luck has nothing to do with it. Of all his presents, Henry is most pleased with the Queen of Sheba, and with a unicorn’s horn, and a device to squeeze oranges with a great gold ‘H’ on it.

Early in the new year the king gives him a title no one has ever held before: Vicegerent in Spirituals, his deputy in church affairs. Rumours that the religious houses will be put down have been running about the kingdom for three years and more. Now he has the power to visit, inspect and reform monasteries; to close them, if need be. There is hardly an abbey whose affairs he does not know, by virtue of his training under the cardinal and the letters that arrive day by day – some monks complaining of abuses and scandals and their superiors’ disloyalty, others seeking offices within their communities, assuring him that a word in the right quarter will leave them forever in his debt.

He says to Chapuys, ‘Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth,’ he says, ‘set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the centre. Straight to where you should be.’

Officially, he and the ambassador are barely on speaking terms. Unofficially, Chapuys sends him a vat of good olive oil. He retaliates with capons. The ambassador himself arrives, followed by a retainer carrying a parmesan cheese.

Chapuys looks doleful and chilly. ‘Your poor queen keeps the season meagrely at Kimbolton. She is so afraid of the heretic councillors about her husband that she has all her food cooked over the fire in her own room. And Kimbolton is more like a stable than a house.’

‘Nonsense,’ he says briskly. He hands the ambassador a warming glass of spiced wine. ‘We only moved her from Buckden because she complained it was damp. Kimbolton is a very good house.’

‘Ah, you say that because it has thick walls and a wide moat.’ The scent of honey and cinnamon wafts into the room, logs crackle in the hearth, the green boughs decorating his hall diffuse their own resinous scent. ‘And the Princess Mary is ill.’

‘Oh, the Lady Mary is always ill.’

‘The more cause to care for her!’ But Chapuys softens his tone. ‘If her mother could see her, it would be much comfort to them both.’

‘Much comfort to their escape plans.’

‘You are a heartless man.’ Chapuys sips his wine. ‘You know, the Emperor is ready to stand your friend.’ A pause, heavy with significance; into which, the ambassador sighs. ‘There are rumours that La Ana is distraught. That Henry is looking at another lady.’

He takes a breath and begins to talk. Henry has no time for other women. He is too busy counting his money. He is growing very close, he doesn’t want Parliament to know his income. I have difficulty getting him to part with anything for the universities, or to pay his builders, or even for the poor. He only thinks of ordnance. Munitions. Shipbuilding. Beacons. Forts.

Chapuys turns down his mouth. He knows when he’s being spun a line; if he didn’t, where would be the pleasure in it? ‘So I am to tell my master, am I, that the King of England is so set on war he has no time for love?’

‘There will be no war unless your master makes it. Which, with the Turks at his heels, he scarcely has time to do. Oh, I know his coffers are bottomless. The Emperor could ruin us all if he liked.’ He smiles. ‘But what good would that do the Emperor?’

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. The king – lord of generalities – must now learn to labour over detail, led on by intelligent greed. As his prudent father’s son, he knows all the families of England and what they have. He has registered their holdings in his head, down to the last watercourse and copse. Now the church’s assets are to come under his control, he needs to know their worth. The law of who owns what – the law generally – has accreted a parasitic complexity – it is like a barnacled hull, a roof slimy with moss. But there are lawyers enough, and how much ability does it require, to scrape away as you are directed? Englishmen may be superstitious, they may be afraid of the future, they may not know what England is; but the skills of adding and subtraction are not scarce. Westminster has a thousand scratching pens, but Henry will need, he thinks, new men, new structures, new thinking. Meanwhile he, Cromwell, puts his commissioners on the road. Valor ecclesiasticus. I will do it in six months, he says. Such an exercise has never been attempted before, it is true, but he has already done much that no one else has even dreamed of.

One day at the beginning of spring he comes back from Westminster chilled. His face aches, as if his bones lie open to the weather, and nagging at his memory is that day when his father mashed him into the cobblestones: his sideways view of Walter’s boot. He wants to get back to Austin Friars, because he has had stoves installed and the whole house is warm; the Chancery Lane house is only warm in patches. Besides, he wants to be behind his wall.

Richard says, ‘Your eighteen-hour days, sir, can’t continue for ever.’

‘The cardinal did them.’

That night in his sleep he goes down to Kent. He is looking over the accounts of Bayham Abbey, which is to be closed by Wolsey’s command. The hostile faces of the monks, hovering over him, cause him to swear and say to Rafe, pack these ledgers and get them on the mule, we’ll examine them over our supper and a glass of white burgundy. It is high summer. On horseback, the mule plodding after them, they pick a route through the monastery’s neglected vineyards, dipping with the track into a sylvan dimness, into the bowl of broad-leaved green at the valley bottom. He says to Rafe, we are like two caterpillars sliding through a salad. They ride out again into a flood of sunlight, and before them is the tower of Scotney Castle: its sandstone walls, gold stippled with grey, shimmer above its moat.

He wakes. He has dreamed of Kent, or been there? The ripple of the sunshine is still on his skin. He calls for Christophe.

Nothing happens. He lies still. No one comes. It is early: no sound from the house below. The shutters are closed, and the stars are struggling to get in, working themselves with steel points into the splinters of the wood. It occurs to him that he has not really called for Christophe, only dreamed he has.

Gregory’s many tutors have presented him with a sheaf of bills. The cardinal stands at the foot of his bed, wearing his full pontificals. The cardinal becomes Christophe, opening the shutter, moving against the light. ‘You have a fever, master?’

Surely he knows, one way or the other? Have I to do everything, know everything? ‘Oh, it is the Italian one,’ he says, as if that discounts it.

‘So must we fetch an Italian doctor?’ Christophe sounds dubious.

Rafe is here. The whole household is here. Charles Brandon is here, who he thinks is real, till Morgan Williams comes in, who is dead, and William Tyndale, who is in the English House at Antwerp and dare not venture. On the stairs he can hear the efficient, deathly clip of his father’s steel-tipped boots.

Richard Cromwell roars, can we have quiet in here? When he roars, he sounds Welsh; he thinks, on an ordinary day I would never have noticed that. He closes his eyes. Ladies move behind his lids: transparent like little lizards, lashing their tails. The serpent queens of England, black-fanged and haughty, dragging their blood-soaked linen and their crackling skirts. They kill and eat their own children; this is well-known. They suck their marrow before they are even born.

Someone asks him if he wants to confess.

‘Must I?’

‘Yes, sir, or you will be thought a sectary.’

But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they’re mine. Besides, when I come to judgment I mean to come with a memorandum in my hand: I shall say to my Maker, I have fifty items here, possibly more.

‘If I must confess, I’ll have Rowland.’

Bishop Lee is in Wales, they tell him. It might take days.

Dr Butts comes, with other doctors, a swarm of them sent by the king. ‘It is a fever I got in Italy,’ he explains.

‘Let’s say it is.’ Butts frowns down at him.

‘If I am dying, get Gregory. I have things to tell him. But if I am not, don’t interrupt his studies.’

‘Cromwell,’ Butts says, ‘I couldn’t kill you if I shot you through with cannon. The sea would refuse you. A shipwreck would wash you up.’

They talk about his heart; he overhears them. He feels they should not: the book of my heart is a private book, it is not an order book left on the counter for any passing clerk to scrawl in. They give him a draught to swallow. Shortly afterwards he returns to his ledgers. The lines keep slipping and the figures intermingling and as soon as he has totalled up one column the total unmakes itself and all sense is subtracted. But he keeps trying and trying and adding and adding, until the poison or the healing draught loosens its grip on him and he wakes. The pages of the ledgers are still before his eyes. Butts thinks he is resting as ordered, but in the privacy of his mind little stick figures with arms and legs of ink climb out of the ledgers and walk about. They are carrying firewood in for the kitchen range, but the venison that is trussed to butcher turns back into deer, who rub themselves in innocence on the bark of the trees. The songbirds for the fricassee refeather themselves, hopping back on to the branches not yet cut for firewood, and the honey for basting has gone back to the bee, and the bee has gone back to the hive. He can hear the noises of the house below, but it is some other house, in another country: the chink of coins changing hands, and the scrape of wooden chests over a stone floor. He can hear his own voice, telling some story in Tuscan, in Putney, in the French of the camp and the Latin of a barbarian. Perhaps this is Utopia? At the centre of that place, which is an island, there is a place called Amaurotum, the City of Dreams.

He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.

Thomas Avery comes up from the counting house. He sits by him and holds his hand. Hugh Latimer comes and says psalms. Cranmer comes and looks at him dubiously. Perhaps he is afraid that he will ask, in his fever, how is your wife Grete these days?

Christophe says to him, ‘I wish your old master the cardinal were here to comfort you, sir. He was a comfortable man.’

‘What do you know of him?’

‘I robbed him, sir. Did you not know? I robbed his gold plate.’

He struggles to sit up. ‘Christophe? You were the boy at Compiègne?’

‘Certainly it was me. Up and down the stairs with buckets of hot water for the bath, and each time a gold cup in the empty bucket. I was sorry to rob him, for he was so gentil. “What, you again with your pail, Fabrice?” You must understand, Fabrice was my name in Compiègne. “Give this poor child his dinner,” he said. I tasted apricots, which I never had before.’

‘But did they not catch you?’

‘My master was caught, a very great thief. They branded him. There was a hue and cry. But you see, master, I was meant for greater fortune.’

I remember, he says, I remember Calais, the alchemists, the memory machine. ‘Guido Camillo is making it for François so he will be the wisest king in the world, but the dolt will never learn how to use it.’

This is fantasy, Butts says, the fever rising, but Christophe says, no, I assure you, there is a man in Paris who has built a soul. It is a building but it is alive. The whole of it is lined with little shelves. On these shelves you find certain parchments, fragments of writing, they are in the nature of keys, which lead to a box which contains a key which contains another key, but these keys are not made of metal, or these enfolded boxes of wood.

Then what, frog-boy? someone says.

They are made of spirit. They are what we shall have left, if all the books are burned. They will enable us to remember not only the past, but the future, and to see all the forms and customs that will one day inhabit the earth.

Butts says, he is burning up. He thinks of Little Bilney, how he put a hand in the candle flame the night before he died, testing out the pain. It seared his shrinking flesh; in the night he whimpered like a child and sucked his raw hand, and in the morning the city councillors of Norwich dragged him to the pit where their forefathers had burned Lollards. Even when his face was burned away, they were still pushing into it the emblems and banners of popery: their fabric singed and fringes alight, their blank-eyed virgins cured like herring and curling in the smoke.

He asks, politely and in several languages, for water. Not too much, Butts says, a little and a little. He has heard of an island called Ormuz, the driest kingdom in the world, where there are no trees and no crop but salt. Stand at its centre, and you look over thirty miles in all directions of ashy plain: beyond which lies the seashore, encrusted with pearls.

His daughter Grace comes by night. She makes her own light, wrapped within her shining hair. She watches him, steady, unblinking, till it is morning, and when they open the shutter the stars are fading and the sun and moon hang together in a pale sky.

A week passes. He is better and he wants work brought in but the doctors forbid it. How will it go forward, he asks, and Richard says, sir, you have trained us all and we are your disciples, you have made a thinking machine that marches forward as if it were alive, you don’t need to be tending it every minute of every day.

Still, Christophe says, they say le roi Henri is groaning as if he were in pain himself: oh, where is Cremuel?

A message is brought. Henry has said, I am coming to visit. It’s an Italian fever, so I am sure not to take it.

He can hardly believe it. Henry ran away from Anne when she had the sweat: even at the height of his love for her.

He says, send Thurston up. They have been keeping him on a low diet, invalid food like turkey. Now, he says, we are going to plan – what? – a piglet, stuffed and roasted in the way I once saw it done at a papal banquet. You will need chopped chicken, lardo, and a goat’s liver, minced fine. You will need fennel seeds, marjoram, mint, ginger, butter, sugar, walnuts, hen’s eggs and some saffron. Some people put in cheese but we don’t make the right kind here in London, besides I myself think it is unnecessary. If you’re in trouble about any of this send out to Bonvisi’s cook, he’ll see you right.

He says, ‘Send next door to prior George, tell him to keep his friars off the streets when the king comes, lest he reform them too soon.’ It’s his feeling that the whole process should go slowly, slowly, so people will see the justice of it; no need to spill the religious out on to the streets. The friars who live at his gates are a disgrace to their order, but they are good neighbours to him. They have given up their refectory, and from their chamber windows at night drifts the sound of merry supper parties. Any day you can join a crowd of them drinking at the Well with Two Buckets just outside his gates. The abbey church is more like a market, and a fleshmarket too. The district is full of young bachelors from the Italian merchant houses, who are serving their London year; he often entertains them, and when they leave his table (drained of market information) he knows they make a dash for the friars’ precincts, where enterprising London girls are sheltering from the rain and waiting to make amiable terms.

It is 17 April when the king makes his visit. At dawn there are showers. By ten o’clock the air is mild as buttermilk. He is up and in a chair, from which he rises. My dear Cromwell: Henry kisses him firmly on both cheeks, takes him by the arms and (in case he thinks he is the only strong man in the kingdom) he sits him back, decisively, in his chair. ‘You sit and give me no argument,’ Henry says. ‘Give me no argument for once, Master Secretary.’

The ladies of the house, Mercy and his sister-in-law Johane, are decked out like Walsingham madonnas on a feast day. They curtsey low, and Henry sways above them, informally attired, jacket of silver brocade, vast gold chain across his chest, his fists flashing with Indian emeralds. He has not wholly mastered the family relationships, for which no one can blame him. ‘Master Secretary’s sister?’ he says to Johane. ‘No, forgive me. I remember now that you lost your sister Bet at the same time my own lovely sister died.’

It is such a simple, human sentence, coming from a king; at the mention of their most recent loss, tears well into the eyes of the two women, and Henry, turning to one, then the other, with a careful forefinger dots them from their cheeks, and makes them smile. The little brides Alice and Jo he whirls up into the air as if they were butterflies, and kisses them on the mouth, saying he wishes he had known them when he was a boy. The sad truth is, do you not notice, Master Secretary, the older one gets, the lovelier the girls?

Then eighty will have its advantages, he says: every drab will be a pearl. Mercy says to the king, as if talking to a neighbour, give over, sir: you’re no age. Henry stretches out his arms and displays himself before the company: ‘Forty-five in July.’

He notes the incredulous hush. It does the job. Henry is gratified.

Henry walks around and looks at all his paintings and asks who the people are. He looks at Anselma, the Queen of Sheba, on the wall. He makes them laugh by picking up Bella and talking to her in Honor Lisle’s atrocious French. ‘Lady Lisle sent the queen a little creature even smaller. He tips his head to one side and his ears prick up, as if to say, why are you speaking to me? So she calls him Pourquoi.’ When he speaks of Anne his voice drips uxorious sentiment: like clear honey. The women smile, pleased to see their king set such an example. ‘You know him, Cromwell, you have seen him on her arm. She takes him everywhere. Sometimes,’ and now he nods judiciously, ‘I think she loves him better than me. Yes, I am second to the dog.’

He sits smiling, no appetite, watching as Henry eats from the silver dishes Hans has designed.

Henry speaks kindly to Richard, calling him cousin. He signals for him to stand by while he talks to his councillor, and for others to retreat a little way. What if King Francis this and Francis that, should I cross the sea myself to patch together some sort of deal, would you cross over yourself when you are on your feet again? What if the Irish, what if the Scots, what if it all gets out of hand and we have wars like in Germany and peasants crowning themselves, what if these false prophets, what if Charles overruns me and Katherine takes the field, she is of mettlesome temper and the people love her, God knows why for I do not.

If that happens, he says, I will be out of this chair and take the field, my own sword in my hand.

When the king has enjoyed his dinner he sits by him and talks softly about himself. The April day, fresh and showery, puts him in mind of the day his father died. He talks of his childhood: I lived at the palace at Eltham, I had a fool called Goose. When I was seven the Cornish rebels came up, led by a giant, do you remember that? My father sent me to the Tower to keep me safe. I said, let me out, I want to fight! I wasn’t frightened of a giant from the west, but I was frightened of my grandmother Margaret Beaufort, because her face was like a death’s head, and her grip on my wrist was like a skeleton’s grip.

When we were young, he says, we were always told, your grandmother gave birth to your lord father the king when she was a little creature of thirteen years. Her past was like a sword she held over us. What, Harry, are you laughing in Lent? When I, at little more years than you, gave birth to the Tudor? What, Harry, are you dancing, what, Harry, are you playing at ball? Her life was all duty. She kept twelve paupers in her house at Woking and once she made me kneel down with a basin and wash their yellow feet, she’s lucky I didn’t throw up on them. She used to start praying every morning at five. When she knelt down at her priedieu she cried out from the pain in her knees. And whenever there was a celebration, a wedding or a birth, a pastime or an occasion of mirth, do you know what she did? Every time? Without failing? She wept.

And with her, it was all Prince Arthur. Her shining light and her creeping saint. ‘When I became king instead, she lay down and died out of spite. And on her deathbed, do you know what she told me?’ Henry snorts. ‘Obey Bishop Fisher in all things! Pity she didn’t tell Fisher to obey me!’

When the king has left with his gentlemen, Johane comes to sit with him. They talk quietly; though everything they say is fit to be overheard. ‘Well, it came off sweetly.’

‘We must give the kitchen a present.’

‘The whole household did well. I am glad to have seen him.’

‘Is he what you hoped?’

‘I had not thought him so tender. I see why Katherine has fought so hard for him. I mean, not just to be queen, which she thinks is her right, but to have him for a husband. I would say he is a man very apt to be loved.’

Alice bursts in. ‘Forty-five! I thought he was past that.’

‘You would have bedded him for a handful of garnets,’ Jo sneers. ‘You said so.’

‘Well, you for export licences!’

‘Stop!’ he says. ‘You girls! If your husbands should hear you.’

‘Our husbands know what we are,’ Jo says. ‘We are full of ourselves, aren’t we? You don’t come to Austin Friars to look for shy little maids. I wonder our uncle doesn’t arm us.’

‘Custom constrains me. Or I’d send you to Ireland.’

Johane watches them rampage away. When they are out of earshot, she checks over her shoulder and murmurs, you will not credit what I am going to say next.

‘Try me.’

‘Henry is frightened of you.’

He shakes his head. Who frightens the Lion of England?

‘Yes, I swear to you. You should have seen his face, when you said you would take your sword in your hand.’

The Duke of Norfolk comes to visit him, clattering up from the yard where his servants hold his plumed horse. ‘Liver, is it? My liver’s shot to pieces. And these five years my muscles have been wasting. Look at that!’ He sticks out a claw. ‘I’ve tried every physician in the realm, but they don’t know what ails me. Yet they never fail to send in their accounts.’

Norfolk, he knows it for a fact, would never pay anything so mere as a doctor’s bill.

‘And the colics and the gripes,’ the duke says, ‘they make my mortal life a Purgatory. Sometimes I’m at stool all night.’

‘Your Grace should take life more easily,’ Rafe says. Not bolt your food, he means. Not race about in a lather like a post horse.

‘I intend to, believe me. My niece makes it clear she wants none of my company and none of my counsel. I’m for my house at Kenninghall, and Henry can find me there if he wants me. God restore you, Master Secretary. St Walter is good, I hear, if a job’s getting too much for you. And St Ubald against the headache, he does the trick for me.’ He gropes inside his jacket. ‘Brought you a medal. Pope blessed it. Bishop of Rome, sorry.’ He drops it on the table. ‘Thought you might not have one.’

He is out of the door. Rafe picks up the medal. ‘It’s probably cursed.’

On the stairs they can hear the duke, his voice raised, plaintive: ‘I thought he was nearly dead! They told me he was nearly dead …’

He says to Rafe, ‘Seen him off.’

Rafe grins. ‘Suffolk too.’

Henry has never remitted the fine of thirty thousand pounds he imposed when Suffolk married his sister. From time to time he remembers it, and this is one of those times; Brandon has had to give up his lands in Oxfordshire and Berkshire to pay his debts, and now he keeps small state down in the country.

He closes his eyes. It is bliss to think of: two dukes on the run from him.

His neighbour Chapuys comes in. ‘I told my master in dispatches that the king has visited you. My master is amazed that the king would go to a private house, to one not even a lord. But I told him, you should see the work he gets out of Cromwell.’

‘He should have such a servant,’ he says. ‘But Eustache, you are an old hypocrite, you know. You would dance on my grave.’

‘My dear Thomas, you are always the only opponent.’

Thomas Avery smuggles in to him Luca Pacioli’s book of chess puzzles. He has soon done all the puzzles, and drawn out some of his own on blank pages at the back. His letters are brought and he reviews the latest round of disasters. They say that the tailor at Münster, the King of Jerusalem with sixteen wives, has had a row with one of them and cut her head off in the marketplace.

He re-emerges into the world. Knock him down and he will get up. Death has called to inspect him, she has measured him, breathed into his face: walked away again. He is a little leaner, his clothes tell him; for a while he feels light, no longer grounded in the world, each day buoyant with possibilities. The Boleyns congratulate him heartily on his return to health, and so they should, for without him how would they be what they are now? Cranmer, when they meet, keeps leaning forward to pat his shoulder and squeeze his hand.

While he has been recovering, the king has cropped his hair. He has done this to disguise his increasing baldness, though it doesn’t, not at all. His loyal councillors have done the same, and soon it becomes a mark of fellowship between them. ‘By God, sir,’ Master Wriothesley says, ‘if I wasn’t frightened of you before, I would be now.’

‘But Call-Me,’ he says, ‘you were frightened of me before.’

There is no change in Richard’s aspect; committed to the tilting ground, he keeps his hair cropped to fit under a helmet. The shorn Master Wriothesley looks more intelligent, if that were possible, and Rafe more determined and alert. Richard Riche has lost the vestiges of the boy he was. Suffolk’s huge face has acquired a strange innocence. Monseigneur looks deceptively ascetic. As for Norfolk, no one notices the change. ‘What sort of hair did he have before?’ Rafe asks. Strips of iron-grey fortify his scalp, as if laid out by a military engineer.

The fashion spreads into the country. When Rowland Lee next pitches into the Rolls House, he thinks a cannonball is coming at him. His son’s eyes look large and calm, a still golden colour. Your mother would have wept over your baby curls, he says, rubbing his head affectionately. Gregory says, ‘Would she? I hardly remember her.’

As April goes out, four treacherous monks are put on trial. The oath has been offered them repeatedly, and refused. It is a year since the Maid was put to death. The king showed mercy to her followers; he is not now so disposed. It is the Charterhouse of London where the mischief originates, that austere house of men who sleep on straw; it is where Thomas More tried his vocation, before it was revealed to him that the world needed his talents. He, Cromwell, has visited the house, as he has visited the recalcitrant community at Syon. He has spoken gently, he has spoken bluntly, he has threatened and cajoled; he has sent enlightened clerics to argue the king’s case, and he has interviewed the disaffected members of the community and set them to work against their brethren. It is all to no avail. Their response is, go away, go away and leave me to my sanctified death.

If they think that they will maintain to the end the equanimity of their prayer-lives, they are wrong, because the law demands the full traitor’s penalty, the short spin in the wind and the conscious public disembowelling, a brazier alight for human entrails. It is the most horrible of all deaths, pain and rage and humiliation swallowed to the dregs, the fear so great that the strongest rebel is unmanned before the executioner with his knife can do the job; before each one dies he watches his fellows and, cut down from the rope, he crawls like an animal round and round on the bloody boards.

Wiltshire and George Boleyn are to represent the king at the spectacle, and Norfolk, who, grumbling, has been dragged up from the country and told to prepare for an embassy to France. Henry thinks of going himself to see the monks die, for the court will wear masks, edging on their high-stepping horses among the city officials and the ragged populace, who turn out by the hundred to see any such show. But the king’s build makes it difficult to disguise him, and he fears there may be demonstrations in favour of Katherine, still a favourite with the more verminous portion of every crowd. Young Richmond shall stand in for me, his father decides; one day he may have to defend, in battle, his half-sister’s title, so it becomes him to learn the sights and sounds of slaughter.

The boy comes to him at night, as the deaths are scheduled next day: ‘Good Master Secretary, take my place.’

‘Will you take mine, at my morning meeting with the king? Think of it like this,’ he says, firm and pleasant. ‘If you plead sickness, or fall off your horse tomorrow or vomit in front of your father-in-law, he’ll never let you forget it. If you want him to let you into your bride’s bed, prove yourself a man. Keep your eyes on the duke, and pattern your conduct on his.’

But Norfolk himself comes to him, when it is over, and says, Cromwell, I swear upon my life that one of the monks spoke when his heart was out. Jesus, he called, Jesus save us, poor Englishmen.

‘No, my lord. It is not possible he should do so.’

‘Do you know that for a fact?’

‘I know it from experience.’

The duke quails. Let him think it, that his past deeds have included the pulling out of hearts. ‘I dare say you’re right.’ Norfolk crosses himself. ‘It must have been a voice from the crowd.’

The night before the monks met their end, he had signed a pass for Margaret Roper, the first in months. Surely, he thinks, for Meg to be with her father when traitors are being led out to their deaths; surely she will turn from her resolve, she will say to her father, come now, the king is in his killing vein, you must take the oath as I have done. Make a mental reservation, cross your fingers behind your back; only ask for Cromwell or any officer of the king, say the words, come home.

But his tactic fails. She and her father stood dry-eyed at a window as the traitors were brought out, still in their habits, and launched on their journey to Tyburn. I always forget, he thinks, how More neither pities himself nor takes pity on others. Because I would have protected my own girls from such a sight, I think he would too. But he uses Meg to harden his resolve. If she will not give way, he cannot; and she will not give way.

The following day he goes in to see More himself. The rain splashes and hisses from the stones underfoot; walls and water are indistinguishable, and around small corners a wind moans like a winter wind. When he has struggled out of his wet outer layers he stands chatting to the turnkey Martin, getting the news of his wife and new baby. How shall I find him, he asks at last and Martin says, have you ever noticed how he has one shoulder up and the other down?

It comes from overmuch writing, he says. One elbow on the desk, the other shoulder dropped. Well, whatever, Martin says: he looks like a little carved hunchback on a bench end.

More has grown his beard; he looks as one imagines the prophets of Münster to look, though he would abhor the comparison. ‘Master Secretary, how does the king take the news from abroad? They say the Emperor’s troops are on the move.’

‘Yes, but to Tunis, I think.’ He casts a glance at the rain. ‘If you were the Emperor, wouldn’t you pick Tunis, rather than London? Look, I haven’t come to quarrel with you. Just to see if you are comfortable.’

More says, ‘I hear you have sworn my fool, Henry Pattinson.’ He laughs.

‘Whereas the men who died yesterday had followed your example, and refused to swear.’

‘Let me be clear. I am no example. I am just myself, alone. I say nothing against the act. I say nothing against the men that made it. I say nothing against the oath, or against any man that swears it.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he sits down on the chest where More keeps his possessions, ‘but all this saying nothing, it won’t do for a jury, you know. Should it come to a jury.’

‘You have come to threaten me.’

‘The Emperor’s feats of arms shorten the king’s temper. He means to send you a commission, who will want a straight answer as to his title.’

‘Oh I’m sure your friends will be too good for me. Lord Audley? And Richard Riche? Listen. Ever since I came here I have been preparing for my death, at your hands – yes, yours – or at the hands of nature. All I require is peace and silence for my prayers.’

‘You want to be a martyr.’

‘No, what I want is to go home. I am weak, Thomas. I am weak as we all are. I want the king to take me as his servant, his loving subject, as I have never ceased to be.’

‘I have never understood where the line is drawn, between sacrifice and self-slaughter.’

‘Christ drew it.’

‘You don’t see anything wrong with the comparison?’

Silence. The loud, contentious, quality of More’s silence. It’s bouncing off the walls. More says he loves England, and he fears all England will be damned. He is offering some kind of bargain to his God, his God who loves slaughter: ‘It is expedient that one man shall die for the people.’ Well, I tell you, he says to himself. Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don’t give a fourpenny fuck. Today is 5 May. In two days’ time the commission will visit you. We will ask you to sit, you will decline. You will stand before us looking like a desert father, and we snugly wrapped against the summer chill. I will say what I say. You will say what you say. And maybe I will concede you have won. I will walk away and leave you, the king’s good subject if you say so, till your beard grows down to your knees and the spiders weave webs across your eyes.

Well, that’s his plan. Events overtake it. He says to Richard, has any damnable bishop of Rome in the history of his pox-ridden jurisdiction ever done anything so stupidly ill-timed as this? Farnese has announced England is to have a new cardinal: Bishop Fisher. Henry is enraged. He swears he will send Fisher’s head across the sea to meet his hat.

The third of June: himself to the Tower, with Wiltshire for the Boleyn interest, and Charles Brandon, looking as if he would as soon be fishing. Riche to make notes; Audley to make jokes. It’s wet again, and Brandon says, this must be the worst summer ever, eh? Yes, he says, good thing His Majesty isn’t superstitious. They laugh: Suffolk, a little uncertainly.

Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his neighbour as the Antichrist. The news from Münster is that the skies are falling fast. The besiegers are demanding unconditional surrender; the besieged are threatening mass suicide.

He leads the way. ‘Christ, what a place,’ Brandon says. Drips are spoiling his hat. ‘Doesn’t it oppress you?’

‘Oh, we’re always here.’ Riche shrugs. ‘One thing or another. Master Secretary is wanted at the Mint or the jewel house.’

Martin lets them in. More’s head jerks up as they enter.

‘It’s yes or no today,’ he says.

‘Not even good day and how do you.’ Somebody has given More a comb for his beard. ‘Well, what do I hear from Antwerp? Do I hear Tyndale is taken?’

‘That is not to the point,’ the Lord Chancellor says. ‘Answer to the oath. Answer to the statute. Is it a lawfully made statute?’

‘They say he strayed outside and the Emperor’s soldiers have seized him.’

He says coldly, ‘Had you prior knowledge?’

Tyndale has been, not just taken, but betrayed. Someone tempted him out of his haven, and More knows who. He sees himself, a second self, enacting another rainy morning just like this: in which he crosses the room, hauls the prisoner to his feet, beats out of him the name of his agent. ‘Now, Your Grace,’ he says to Suffolk, ‘you are wearing a violent expression, pray be calm.’

Me? Brandon says. Audley laughs. More says, ‘Tyndale’s devil will desert him now. The Emperor will burn him. And the king will not lift a finger to save him, because Tyndale would not support his new marriage.’

‘Perhaps you think he showed sense there?’ Riche says.

‘You must speak,’ Audley says, gently enough.

More is agitated, words tumbling over each other. He is ignoring Audley, speaking to him, Cromwell. ‘You cannot compel me to put myself in hazard. For if I had an opinion against your Act of Supremacy, which I do not concede, then your oath would be a two-edged sword. I must put my body in peril if I say no to it, my soul if I say yes to it. Therefore I say nothing.’

‘When you interrogated men you called heretics, you did not allow evasion. You compelled them to speak and racked if they would not. If they were made to answer, why not you?’

‘The cases are not the same. When I compel an answer from a heretic, I have the whole body of law behind me, the whole might of Christendom. What I am threatened with here is one particular law, one singular dispensation of recent make, recognised here but in no other country –’

He sees Riche make a note. He turns away. ‘The end is the same. Fire for them. Axe for you.’

‘If the king grants you that mercy,’ Brandon says.

More quails; he curls up his fingers on the tabletop. He notices this, detached. So that’s a way in. Put him in fear of the more lingering death. Even as he thinks it, he knows he will not do it; the notion is contaminating. ‘On numbers I suppose you have me beat. But have you looked at a map lately? Christendom is not what it was.’

Riche says, ‘Master Secretary, Fisher is more a man than this prisoner before us, for Fisher dissents and takes the consequences. Sir Thomas, I think you would be an overt traitor, if you dared.’

More says softly, ‘Not so. It is not for me to thrust myself on God. It is for God to draw me to him.’

‘We take note of your obstinacy,’ Audley says. ‘We spare you the methods you have used on others.’ He stands up. ‘It is the king’s pleasure that we move to indictment and trial.’

‘In the name of God! What ill can I effect from this place? I do nobody harm. I say none harm. I think none harm. If this be not enough to keep a man alive –’

He cuts in on him, incredulous. ‘You do nobody harm? What about Bainham, you remember Bainham? You forfeited his goods, committed his poor wife to prison, saw him racked with your own eyes, you locked him in Bishop Stokesley’s cellar, you had him back at your own house two days chained upright to a post, you sent him again to Stokesley, saw him beaten and abused for a week, and still your spite was not exhausted: you sent him back to the Tower and had him racked again, so that finally his body was so broken that they had to carry him in a chair when they took him to Smithfield to be burned alive. And you say, Thomas More, that you do no harm?’

Riche begins to gather More’s papers from the table. It is suspected he has been passing letters to Fisher upstairs: which is not a bad thing, if collusion in Fisher’s treason can be shown. More drops his hand on them, fingers spread; then shrugs, and yields them. ‘Have them if you must. You read all I write.’

He says, ‘Unless we hear soon of a change of heart, we must take away your pen and papers. And your books. I will send someone.’

More seems to shrink. He bites his lip. ‘If you must take them, take them now.’

‘For shame,’ Suffolk says. ‘Do you take us for porters, Master More?’

Anne says, ‘It is all about me.’ He bows. ‘When finally you have out of More what troubles his singular conscience, you will find that what is at the root of it is that he will not bend his knee to my queenship.’

She is small and white and angry. Long fingers tip to tip, bending each other back; eyes bright.

Before they go further, he has to recall to Henry last year’s disaster; remind him that he cannot always have his own way, just by asking for it. Last summer Lord Dacre, who is one of the northern lords, was indicted for treason, accused of collusion with the Scots. Behind the accusation were the Clifford family, Dacre’s hereditary enemies and rivals; behind them the Boleyns, for Dacre had been outspoken in support of the former queen. The stage was set in Westminster Hall, Norfolk presiding over the court, as High Steward of the kingdom: and Dacre to be judged, as was his right, by twenty fellow lords. And then … mistakes were made. Possibly the whole thing was a miscalculation, an affair driven too fast and hard by the Boleyns. Possibly he had erred in not taking charge of the prosecution himself; he had thought it was best to stay in the background, as many titled men have a spite against him for being who he is, and will take a risk to work him displeasure. Or else Norfolk was the problem, losing control of the court … Whatever the reason, the charges were thrown out, to an outpouring by the king of astonishment and rage. Dacre was taken straight back to the Tower by the king’s guard, and he was sent in to strike some deal, which must, he knew, end with Dacre broken. At his trial Dacre had talked for seven hours, in his own defence; but he, Cromwell, can talk for a week. Dacre had admitted to misprision of treason, a lesser offence. He bought a royal pardon for £10,000. He was released to go north again, a pauper.

But the queen was sick with frustration; she wanted an example made. And affairs in France are not going her way; some say that at the mention of her name, François sniggers. She suspects, and she is right, that her man Cromwell is more interested in the friendship of the German princes than in an alliance with France; but she has to pick her time for that quarrel, and she says she will have no peace till Fisher is dead, till More is dead. So now she circles the room, agitated, less than regal, and she keeps veering towards Henry, touching his sleeve, touching his hand, and he brushes her away, each time, as if she were a fly. He, Cromwell, watches. They are not the same couple from day to day: sometimes doting, sometimes chilly and distanced. The billing and cooing, on the whole, is the more painful to watch.

‘Fisher gives me no anxiety,’ he says, ‘his offence is clear. In More’s case … morally, our cause is unimpeachable. No one is in doubt of his loyalty to Rome and his hatred of Your Majesty’s title as head of the church. Legally, however, our case is slender, and More will use every legal, every procedural device open to him. This is not going to be easy.’

Henry stirs into life. ‘Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.’ He drops his voice. ‘Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.’

As he leaves, he is conscious of the silence falling behind him. Anne walking to the window. Henry staring at his feet.

So when Riche comes in, quivering with undisclosed secrets, he is inclined to swat him like a fly; but then he takes hold of himself, rubs his palms together instead: the merriest man in London. ‘Well, Sir Purse, did you pack up the books? And how was he?’

‘He drew the blind down. I asked him why, and he said, the goods are taken away, so now I am closing the shop.’

He can hardly bear it, to think of More sitting in the dark.

‘Look, sir.’ Riche has a folded paper. ‘We had some conversation. I wrote it down.’

‘Talk me through it.’ He sits down. ‘I am More. You are Riche.’ Riche stares at him. ‘Shall I close the shutter? Is this better played out in the dark?’

‘I could not,’ Riche says, hesitant, ‘leave him without trying once again –’

‘Quite. You have your way to make. But why would he talk to you, if he would not talk to me?’

‘Because he has no time for me. He thinks I don’t matter.’

‘And you Solicitor General,’ he says, mocking.

‘So we were putting cases.’

‘What, as if you were at Lincoln’s Inn after supper?’

‘To tell the truth I pitied him, sir. He craves conversation and you know he rattles away. I said to him, suppose Parliament were to pass an act saying that I, Richard Riche, were to be king. Would you not take me for king? And he laughed.’

‘Well, you admit it is not likely.’

‘So I pressed him on it; he said, yes, majestic Richard, I so take you, for Parliament can do it, and considering what they have done already I should hardly be surprised if I woke up in the reign of King Cromwell, for if a tailor can be King of Jerusalem I suppose a lad from the smithy can be King of England.’

Riche pauses: has he given offence? He beams at him. ‘When I am King Cromwell, you shall be a duke. So, to the point, Purse … or isn’t there one?’

‘More said, well, you have put a case, I shall put you a higher case. Suppose Parliament were to pass an act saying God should not be God? I said, it would have no effect, for Parliament has no power to do it. Then he said, aye, well, young man, at least you recognise an absurdity. And there he stopped, and gave me a look, as if to say, let us deal in the real world now. I said to him, I will put you a middle case. You know our lord the king has been named by Parliament head of the church. Why will you not go with the vote, as you go with it when it makes me monarch? And he said – as if he were instructing some child – the cases are not alike. For one is a temporal jurisdiction, and Parliament can do it. The other is a spiritual jurisdiction, and is what Parliament cannot exercise, for the jurisdiction is out of this realm.’

He stares at Riche. ‘Hang him for a papist,’ he says.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We know he thinks it. He has never stated it.’

‘He said that a higher law governed this and all realms, and if Parliament trespassed on God’s law …’

‘On the Pope’s law, he means – for he holds them the same, he couldn’t deny that, could he? Why is he always examining his conscience, if not to check day and night that it is in accord with the church of Rome? That is his comfort, that is his guide. It seems to me, if he plainly denies Parliament its capacity, he denies the king his title. Which is treason. Still,’ he shrugs, ‘how far does it take us? Can we show the denial was malicious? He will say, I suppose, that it was just talk, to pass the time. That you were putting cases, and that anything said in that wise cannot be held against a man.’

‘A jury won’t understand that. They’ll take him to mean what he said. After all, sir, he knew it wasn’t some students’ debate.’

‘True. You don’t hold those at the Tower.’

Riche offers the memorandum. ‘I have written it down faithfully to the best of my recollection.’

‘You don’t have a witness?’

‘They were in and out, packing up the books in a crate, he had a lot of books. You cannot blame me for carelessness, sir, for how was I to know he would talk to me at all?’

‘I don’t blame you.’ He sighs. ‘In fact, Purse, you are the apple of my eye. You’ll stand behind this in court?’

Doubtful, Riche nods. ‘Tell me you will, Richard. Or tell me you won’t. Let’s have it straight. Have the grace to say so now, if you think your courage might fail. If we lose another trial, we can kiss goodbye to our livelihoods. And all our work will be for nothing.’

‘You see, he couldn’t resist it, the chance to put me right,’ Riche says. ‘He will never let it drop, what I did as a boy. He uses me to make his sermon on. Well, let him make his next sermon on the block.’

The evening before Fisher is to die, he visits More. He takes a strong guard with him, but he leaves them in the outer chamber and goes in alone. ‘I’ve got used to the blind drawn,’ More says, almost cheerfully. ‘You don’t mind sitting in the twilight?’

‘You need not be afraid of the sun. There is none.’

‘Wolsey used to boast that he could change the weather.’ He chuckles. ‘It’s good of you to visit me, Thomas, now that we have no more to say. Or have we?’

‘The guards will come for Bishop Fisher early tomorrow. I am afraid they will wake you.’

‘I should be a poor Christian if I could not keep vigil with him.’ His smile has seeped away. ‘I hear the king has granted him mercy as to the manner of his death.’

‘He being a very old man, and frail.’

More says, with tart pleasantness, ‘I’m doing my best, you know. A man can only shrivel at his own rate.’

‘Listen.’ He reaches across the table, takes his hand, wrings it: harder than he meant. My blacksmith’s grip, he thinks: he sees More flinch, feels his fingers, the skin dry as paper over the bones. ‘Listen. When you come before the court, throw yourself at that instant on the king’s mercy.’

More says, wonderingly, ‘What good will that do me?’

‘He is not a cruel man. You know that.’

‘Do I? He used not to be. He had a sweet disposition. But then he changed the company he kept.’

‘He is susceptible always to a plea for mercy. I do not say he will let you live, the oath unsworn. But he may grant you the same mercy as Fisher.’

‘It is not so important, what happens to the body. I have led in some ways a blessed life. God has been good and not tested me. Now he does I cannot fail him. I have been vigilant over my heart, and I have not always liked what I have found there. If it comes into the hands of the hangman at the last, so be it. It will be in God’s hands soon enough.’

‘Will you think me sentimental, if I say I do not want to see you butchered?’ No reply. ‘Are you not afraid of the pain?’

‘Oh yes, I am very much afraid, I am not a bold and robust man such as yourself, I cannot help but rehearse it in my mind. But I will only feel it for a moment, and God will not let me remember it afterwards.’

‘I am glad I am not like you.’

‘Undoubtedly. Or you would be sitting here.’

‘I mean, my mind fixed on the next world. I realise you see no prospect of improving this one.’

‘And you do?’

Almost a flippant question. A handful of hail smacks itself against the window. It startles them both; he gets up, restless. He would rather know what’s outside, see the summer in its sad blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is. ‘I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it’s just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one’s solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn’t have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.’

‘How you can talk,’ More says. Words, words, just words. ‘I do, of course, pray for you. I pray with all my heart that you will see that you are misled. When we meet in Heaven, as I hope we will, all our differences will be forgot. But for now, we cannot wish them away. Your task is to kill me. Mine is to keep alive. It is my role and my duty. All I own is the ground I stand on, and that ground is Thomas More. If you want it you will have to take it from me. You cannot reasonably believe I will yield it.’

‘You will want pen and paper to write out your defence. I will grant you that.’

‘You never give up trying, do you? No, Master Secretary, my defence is up here,’ he taps his forehead, ‘where it will stay safe from you.’

How strange the room is, how empty, without More’s books: it is filling with shadows. ‘Martin, a candle,’ he calls.

‘Will you be here tomorrow? For the bishop?’

He nods. Though he will not witness the moment of Fisher’s death. The protocol is that the spectators bow their knee and doff their hats to mark the passing of the soul.

Martin brings a pricket candle. ‘Anything else?’ They pause while he sets it down. When he is gone, they still pause: the prisoner sits hunched over, looking into the flame. How does he know if More has begun on a silence, or on preparation for speech? There is a silence which precedes speech, there is a silence which is instead of speech. One need not break it with a statement, one can break it with a hesitation: if … as it may be … if it were possible … He says, ‘I would have left you, you know. To live out your life. To repent of your butcheries. If I were king.’

The light fades. It is as if the prisoner has withdrawn himself from the room, leaving barely a shape where he should be. A draught pulls at the candle flame. The bare table between them, clear now of More’s driven scribblings, has taken on the aspect of an altar; and what is an altar for, but a sacrifice? More breaks his silence at last: ‘If, at the end and after I am tried, if the king does not grant, if the full rigour of the penalty … Thomas, how is it done? You would think when a man’s belly were slashed open he would die, with a great effusion of blood, but it seems it is not so … Do they have some special implement, that they use to pith him while he is alive?’

‘I am sorry you should think me expert.’

But had he not told Norfolk, as good as told him, that he had pulled out a man’s heart?

He says, ‘It is the executioner’s mystery. It is kept secret, to keep us in awe.’

‘Let me be killed cleanly. I ask nothing, but I ask that.’ Swaying on his stool, he is seized, between one heartbeat and the next, in the grip of bodily agitation; he cries out, shudders from head to foot. His hand beats, weakly, at the clean tabletop; and when he leaves him, ‘Martin, go in, give him some wine’ – he is still crying out, shuddering, beating the table.

The next time he sees him will be in Westminster Hall.

On the day of the trial, rivers breach their banks; the Thames itself rises, bubbling like some river in Hell, and washes its flotsam over the quays.

It’s England against Rome, he says. The living against the dead.

Norfolk will preside. He tells him how it will be. The early counts in the indictment will be thrown out: they concern sundry words spoken, at sundry times, about the act and the oath, and More’s treasonable conspiracy with Fisher – letters went between the two of them, but it seems those letters are now destroyed. ‘Then on the fourth count, we will hear the evidence of the Solicitor General. Now, Your Grace, this will divert More, because he cannot see young Riche without working himself into a fit about his derelictions when he was a boy –’ The duke raises an eyebrow. ‘Drinking. Fighting. Women. Dice.’

Norfolk rubs his bristly chin. ‘I have noticed, a soft-looking lad like that, he always does fight. To make a point, you see. Whereas we damned slab-faced old bruisers who are born with our armour on, there’s no point we need to make.’

‘Quite,’ he says. ‘We are the most pacific of men. My lord, please attend now. We don’t want another mistake like Dacre. We would hardly survive it. The early counts will be thrown out. At the next, the jury will look alert. And I have given you a handsome jury.’

More will face his peers; Londoners, the merchants of the livery companies. They are experienced men, with all the city’s prejudices. They have seen enough, as all Londoners have, of the church’s rapacity and arrogance, and they do not take kindly to being told they are unfit to read the scriptures in their own tongue. They are men who know More and have known him these twenty years. They know how he widowed Lucy Petyt. They know how he wrecked Humphrey Monmouth’s business, because Tyndale had been a guest at his house. They know how he has set spies in their households, among their apprentices whom they treat as sons, among the servants so familiar and homely that they hear every night their master’s bedside prayers.

One name makes Audley hesitate: ‘John Parnell? It might be taken wrong. You know he has been after More since he gave judgment against him in Chancery –’

‘I know the case. More botched it, he didn’t read the papers, too busy writing a billet-doux to Erasmus, or locking some poor Christian soul in his stocks at Chelsea. What do you want, Audley, do you want me to go to Wales for a jury, or up to Cumberland, or somewhere they think better of More? I must make do with London men, and unless I swear in a jury of newborns, I cannot wipe their memories clear.’

Audley shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, Cromwell.’

‘Oh, he’s a sharp fellow,’ the duke says. ‘When Wolsey came down, I said, mark him, he’s a sharp fellow. You’d have to get up early in the morning to be ahead of him.’

The night before the trial, as he is going through his papers at the Austin Friars, a head appears around the door: a little, narrow London head with a close-shaved skull and a raw young face. ‘Dick Purser. Come in.’

Dick Purser looks around the room. He keeps the snarling bandogs who guard the house by night, and he has not been in here before. ‘Come here and sit. Don’t be afraid.’ He pours him some wine, into a thin Venetian glass that was the cardinal’s. ‘Try this. Wiltshire sent it to me, I don’t make much of it myself.’

Dick takes the glass and juggles it dangerously. The liquid is pale as straw or summer light. He takes a gulp. ‘Sir, can I come in your train to the trial?’

‘It still smarts, does it?’ Dick Purser was the boy whom More had whipped before the household at Chelsea, for saying the host was a piece of bread. He was a child then, he is not much more now; when he first came to Austin Friars, they say he cried in his sleep. ‘Get yourself a livery coat,’ he says. ‘And remember to wash your hands and face in the morning. I don’t want you to disgrace me.’

It is the word ‘disgrace’ that works on the child. ‘I hardly minded the pain,’ he says. ‘We have all had, saving you sir, as much if not worse from our fathers.’

‘True,’ he says. ‘My father beat me as if I were a sheet of metal.’

‘It was that he laid my flesh bare. And the women looking on. Dame Alice. The young girls. I thought one of them might speak up for me, but when they saw me unbreached, I only disgusted them. It made them laugh. While the fellow was whipping me, they were laughing.’

In stories it is always the young girls, innocent girls, who stay the hand of the man with the rod or the axe. But we seem to have strayed into a different story: a child’s thin buttocks dimpling against the cold, his skinny little balls, his shy prick shrinking to a button, while the ladies of the house giggle and the menservants jeer, and the thin weals spring out against his skin and bleed.

‘It’s done and forgotten now. Don’t cry.’ He comes from behind his desk. Dick Purser drops his shorn head against his shoulder and bawls, in shame, in relief, in triumph that soon he will have outlived his tormentor. More did John Purser to death, he harassed him for owning German books; he holds the boy, feeling the jump of his pulses, his stiff sinews, the ropes of his muscles, and makes sounds of comfort, as he did to his children when they were small, or as he does to a spaniel whose tail has been trodden on. Comfort is often, he finds, imparted at the cost of a flea or two.

‘I will follow you to the death,’ the boy declares. His arms, fists clenched, grip his master: knuckles knead his spine. He sniffs. ‘I think I will look well in a livery coat. What time do we start?’

Early. With his staff he is at Westminster Hall before anybody else, vigilant for last-minute hitches. The court convenes around him, and when More is brought in, the hall is visibly shocked at his appearance. The Tower was never known to do a man good, but he startles them, with his lean person and his ragged white beard, looking more like a man of seventy than what he is. Audley whispers, ‘He looks as if he has been badly handled.’

‘And he says I never miss a trick.’

‘Well, my conscience is clear,’ the Lord Chancellor says breezily. ‘He has had every consideration.’

John Parnell gives him a nod. Richard Riche, both court official and witness, gives him a smile. Audley asks for a seat for the prisoner, but More twitches to the edge of it: keyed up, combative.

He glances around to check that someone is taking notes for him.

Words, words, just words.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn’t remember me. You never even saw me coming.

Chapter III. To Wolf Hall. July 1535

On the evening of More’s death the weather clears, and he walks in the garden with Rafe and Richard. The sun shows itself, a silver haze between rags of cloud. The beaten-down herb beds are scentless, and a skittish wind pulls at their clothes, hitting the backs of their necks and then veering round to slap their faces.

Rafe says, it’s like being at sea. They walk at either side of him, and close, as if there were danger from whales, pirates and mermaids.

It is five days since the trial. Since then, much business has supervened, but they cannot help rehearse its events, trading with each other the pictures in their heads: the Attorney General jotting a last note on the indictment; More sniggering when some clerk made a slip in his Latin; the cold smooth faces of the Boleyns, father and son, on the judges’ bench. More had never raised his voice; he sat in the chair Audley had provided for him, attentive, head tipped a little to the left, picking away at his sleeve.

So Riche’s surprise, when More turned on him, was visible; he had taken a step backwards, and steadied himself against a table. ‘I know you of old, Riche, why would I open my mind to you?’ More on his feet, his voice dripping contempt. ‘I have known you since your youth, a gamer and a dicer, of no commendable fame even in your own house …’

‘By St Julian!’ Justice Fitzjames had exclaimed; it was ever his oath. Under his breath, to him, Cromwell: ‘Will he gain by this?’

The jury had not liked it: you never know what a jury will like. They took More’s sudden animation to be shock and guilt, at being confronted with his own words. For sure, they all knew Riche’s reputation. But are not drinking, dice and fighting more natural in a young man, on the whole, than fasting, beads and self-flagellation? It was Norfolk who had cut in on More’s tirade, his voice dry: ‘Leave aside the man’s character. What do you say to the matter in hand? Did you speak those words?’

Was it then that Master More played a trick too many? He had pulled himself together, hauling his slipping gown on to his shoulder; the gown secured, he paused, he calmed himself, he fitted one fist into the other. ‘I did not say what Riche alleges. Or if I did say it, I did not mean it with malice, therefore I am clear under the statute.’

He had watched an expression of derision cross Parnell’s face. There’s nothing harder than a London burgess who thinks he’s being played for a fool. Audley or any of the lawyers could have put the jury right: it’s just how we lawyers argue. But they don’t want a lawyer’s argument, they want the truth: did you say it, or didn’t you? George Boleyn leans forward: can the prisoner let us have his own version of the conversation?

More turns, smiling, as if to say, a good point there, young master George. ‘I made no note of it. I had no writing materials, you see. They had already taken them away. For if you remember, my lord Rochford, that was the very reason Riche came to me, to remove from me the means of recording.’

And he had paused again, and looked at the jury as if expecting applause; they looked back, faces like stones.

Was that the turning point? They might have trusted More, being, as he was, Lord Chancellor at one time, and Purse, as everybody knows, such a waster. You never know what a jury will think: though when he had convened them, of course he had been persuasive. He had spoken with them that morning: I do not know what his defence is, but I don’t hold out hope we will be finished by noon; I hope you all had a good breakfast? When you retire, you must take your time, of course, but if you are gone more than twenty minutes by my reckoning, I will come in to see how you do. To put you out of doubt, on any points of law.

Fifteen minutes was all they needed.

Now, this evening in the garden, July 6, the feast day of St Godelva (a blameless young wife of Bruges, whose evil husband drowned her in a pond), he looks up at the sky, feeling a change in the air, a damp drift like autumn. The interlude of feeble sun is over. Clouds drift and mass in towers and battlements, blowing in from Essex, stacking up over the city, driven by the wind across the broad soaked fields, across the sodden pastureland and swollen rivers, across the dripping forests of the west and out over the sea to Ireland. Richard retrieves his hat from a lavender bed and knocks droplets from it, swearing softly. A spatter of rain hits their faces. ‘Time to go in. I have letters to write.’

‘You’ll not work till all hours tonight.’

‘No, grandfather Rafe. I shall get my bread and milk and say my Ave and so to bed. Can I take my dog up with me?’

‘Indeed no! And have you scampering overhead till all hours?’

It’s true he didn’t sleep much last night. It had come to him, the wrong side of midnight, that More was no doubt asleep himself, not knowing that it was his last night on earth. It is not usual, till the morning, to prepare the condemned man; so, he had thought, any vigil I keep for him, I keep alone.

They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes his arm. He says, this silence of More’s, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More’s dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shrivelled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.

Someone – probably not Christophe – has put on his desk a shining silver pot of cornflowers. The dusky blueness at the base of the crinkled petals reminds him of this morning’s light; a late dawn for July, a sullen sky. By five, the Lieutenant of the Tower would have gone in to More.

Down below, he can hear a stream of messengers coming into the courtyard. There is much to do, tidying up after the dead man; after all, he thinks, I did it when I was a child, picking up after Morton’s young gentlemen, and this is the last time I will have to do it; he pictures himself in the dawn, slopping into a leather jug the dregs of small beer, squeezing up the candle ends to take to the chandlery for remelting.

He can hear voices in the hall; never mind them: he returns to his letters. The Abbot of Rewley solicits a vacant post for his friend. The Mayor of York writes to him about weirs and fish traps; the Humber is running clean and sweet, he reads, so is the Ouse. A letter from Lord Lisle in Calais, relating some muddled tale of self-justification: he said, then I said, so he said.

Thomas More stands before him, more solid in death than he was in life. Perhaps he will always be here now: so agile of mind and so adamant, as he appeared in his final hour before the court. Audley was so happy with the guilty verdict that he began to pass sentence without asking the prisoner if he had anything to say; Fitzjames had to reach out and slap his arm, and More himself rose from his chair to halt him. He had much to say, and his voice was lively, his tone biting, and his eyes, his gestures, hardly those of a condemned man, in law already dead.

But there was nothing new in it: not new anyway to him. I follow my conscience, More said, you must follow yours. My conscience satisfies me – and now I will speech plainly – that your statute is faulty (and Norfolk roars at him) and that your authority baseless (Norfolk roars again: ‘Now we see your malice plain’). Parnell had laughed, and the jury exchanged glances, nodding to each other; and while the whole of Westminster Hall murmured, More proffered again, speaking against the noise, his treasonable method of counting. My conscience holds with the majority, which makes me know it does not speak false. ‘Against Henry’s kingdom, I have all the kingdoms of Christendom. Against each one of your bishops, I have a hundred saints. Against your one parliament, I have all the general councils of the church, stretching back for a thousand years.’

Norfolk said, take him out. It is finished.

Now it is Tuesday, it is eight o’clock. The rain drums against the window. He breaks the seal of a letter from the Duke of Richmond. The boy complains that in Yorkshire where he is seated, he has no deer park, so can show his friends no sport. Oh, you poor tiny duke, he thinks, how can I relieve your pain? Gregory’s dowager with the black teeth, the one he is going to marry; she has a deer park, so perhaps the princeling should divorce Norfolk’s daughter and marry her instead? He flips aside Richmond’s letter, tempted to file it on the floor; he passes on. The Emperor has left Sardinia with his fleet, sailing to Sicily. A priest at St Mary Woolchurch says Cromwell is a sectary and he is not frightened of him: fool. Harry Lord Morley sends him a greyhound. There is news of refugees pouring out of the Münster area, some of them heading for England.

Audley had said, ‘Prisoner, the court will ask the king to make grace upon you, as to the manner of your death.’ Audley had leaned across: Master Secretary, did you promise him anything? On my life, no: but surely the king will be good to him? Norfolk says, Cromwell, will you move him in that regard? He will take it from you; but if he will not, I myself will come and plead with him. What a marvel: Norfolk, asking for mercy? He had glanced up, to see More taken out, but he had vanished already, the tall halberdiers closing rank behind him: the boat for the Tower is waiting at the steps. It must feel like going home: the familiar room with the narrow window, the table empty of papers, the pricket candle, the drawn blind.

The window rattles; it startles him, and he thinks, I shall bolt the shutter. He is rising to do it when Rafe comes in with a book in his hand. ‘It is his prayer book, that More had with him at the last.’

He examines it. Mercifully, no blood specks. He holds it up by the spine and lets the leaves fan out. ‘I already did that,’ Rafe says.

More has written his name in it. There are underlinings in the text: Remember not the sins of my youth. ‘What a pity he remembered Richard Riche’s.’

‘Shall I have it sent to Dame Alice?’

‘No. She might think she is one of the sins.’ The woman has put up with enough. In his last letter, he didn’t even say goodbye to her. He shuts the book. ‘Send it to Meg. He probably meant it for her anyway.’

The whole house is rocking about him; wind in the eaves, wind in the chimneys, a piercing draught under every door. It’s cold enough for a fire, Rafe says, shall I see to it? He shakes his head. ‘Tell Richard, tomorrow morning, go to London Bridge and see the bridge-master. Mistress Roper will come to him and beg her father’s head to bury it. The man should take what Meg offers and see she is not impeded. And keep his mouth shut.’

Once in Italy, when he was young, he had joined a burial party. It isn’t something you volunteer for; you’re just told. They had bound cloth across their mouths, and shovelled their comrades into unhallowed ground; walked away with the smell of putrefaction on their boots.

Which is worse, he thinks, to have your daughters dead before you, or to leave them to tidy away your remains?

‘There’s something …’ He frowns down at his papers. ‘What have I forgotten, Rafe?’

‘Your supper?’

‘Later.’

‘Lord Lisle?’

‘I’ve dealt with Lord Lisle.’ Dealt with the river Humber. With the slanderous priest from Mary Woolchurch; well, not dealt with him, but put him in the pending pile. He laughs. ‘You know what I need? I need the memory machine.’

Guido has quit Paris, they say. He has scuttled back to Italy and left the device half built. They say that before his flight for some weeks he had neither spoken nor eaten. His well-wishers say he has gone mad, awed by the capacities of his own creature: fallen into the abyss of the divine. His ill-wishers maintain that demons crawled out of the crannies and crevices of the device, and panicked him so that he ran off by night in his shirt with not even a crust and a lump of cheese for the journey, leaving all his books behind him and his magus’s robes.

It is not impossible that Guido has left writings behind in France. For a fee they might be obtained. It is not impossible to have him followed to Italy; but would there be any point? It is likely, he thinks, that we shall never know what his invention really was. A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don’t have it, at least the King of France doesn’t either.

He reaches for his pen. He yawns and puts it down and picks it up again. I shall be found dead at my desk, he thinks, like the poet Petrarch. The poet wrote many unsent letters: he wrote to Cicero, who died twelve hundred years before he was born. He wrote to Homer, who possibly never even existed; but I, I have enough to do with Lord Lisle, and the fish traps, and the Emperor’s galleons tossing on the Middle Sea. Between one dip of the pen, Petrarch writes, ‘between one dip of the pen and the next, the time passes: and I hurry, I drive myself, and I speed towards death. We are always dying – I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.’

He picks up the next batch of letters. A man called Batcock wants a licence to import 100 tuns of woad. Harry Percy is sick again. The authorities in Yorkshire have rounded up their rioters, and divided them into those to be charged with affray and manslaughter, and those to be indicted for murder and rape. Rape? Since when do food riots involve rape? But I forget, this is Yorkshire.

‘Rafe, bring me the king’s itinerary. I’ll check that and then I’m finished here. I think we might have some music before we go to bed.’

The court is riding west this summer, as far as Bristol. The king is ready to leave, despite the rain. They will depart from Windsor, then to Reading, Missenden, Abingdon, moving across Oxfordshire, their spirits lifting, we hope, with the distance from London; he says to Rafe, if the country air goes to work, the queen will return with a big belly. Rafe says, I wonder the king can stand the hope each time. It would wear out a lesser man.

‘If we ourselves leave London on the eighteenth, we can aim to catch up with them at Sudely. Will that work?’

‘Better leave a day earlier. Consider the state of the roads.’

‘There won’t be any short cuts, will there?’ He will use no fords but bridges, and against his inclination he will stick to the main roads; better maps would help. Even in the cardinal’s day he was asking himself, might this be a project we could undertake? There are maps, of a kind; castles stud their fields, their battlements prettily inked, their chases and parks marked by lines of bushy trees, with drawings of harts and bristling boar. It is no wonder Gregory mistook Northumbria for the Indies, for these maps are deficient in all practical respects; they do not, for example, tell you which way is north. It would be useful to know where the bridges are, and to have a note of the distance between them. It would be useful to know how far you are from the sea. But the trouble is, maps are always last year’s. England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.

When he was a small child, six years old or about that, his father’s apprentice had been making nails from the scrap pile: just common old flat-heads, he’d said, for fastening coffin lids. The nail rods glowed in the fire, a lively orange. ‘What for do we nail down the dead?’

The boy barely paused, tapping out each head with two neat strokes. ‘It’s so the horrible old buggers don’t spring out and chase us.’

He knows different now. It’s the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumour that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn’t enough for him to take Bilney’s life away; he had to take his death too.

Today, More was escorted to the scaffold by Humphrey Monmouth, serving his turn as Sheriff of London. Monmouth is too good a man to rejoice in the reversal of fortune. But perhaps we can rejoice for him?

More is at the block, he can see him now. He is wrapped in a rough grey cape that he remembers as belonging to his servant John Wood. He is speaking to the headsman, apparently making some quip to him, wiping the drizzle from his face and beard. He is shedding the cape, the hem of which is sodden with rainwater. He kneels at the block, his lips moving in his final prayer.

Like all the other witnesses, he swirls his own cloak about him and kneels. At the sickening sound of the axe on flesh he darts one glance upwards. The corpse seems to have leapt back from the stroke and folded itself like a stack of old clothes – inside which, he knows, its pulses are still beating. He makes the sign of the cross. The past moves heavily inside him, a shifting of ground.

‘So, the king,’ he says. ‘From Gloucester, he strikes out to Thornbury. Then Nicholas Poynz’s house at Iron Acton: does Poynz know what he’s letting himself in for? From there to Bromham …’

Just this last year a scholar, a foreigner, has written a chronicle of Britain, which omits King Arthur on the ground that he never existed. A good ground, if he can sustain it; but Gregory says, no, he is wrong. Because if he is right, what will happen to Avalon? What will happen to the sword in the stone?

He looks up. ‘Rafe, are you happy?’

‘With Helen?’ Rafe blushes. ‘Yes, sir. No man was ever happier.’

‘I knew your father would come round, once he had seen her.’

‘It is only thanks to you, sir.’

From Bromham – we are now in early September – towards Winchester. Then Bishop’s Waltham, Alton, Alton to Farnham. He plots it out, across country. The object is to get the king back to Windsor for early October. He has his sketch map across the page, England in a drizzle of ink; his calendar, quickly jotted, running down it. ‘I seem to have four, five days in hand. Ah well. Who says I never get a holiday?’

Before ‘Bromham’, he makes a dot in the margin, and draws a long arrow across the page. ‘Now here, before we go to Winchester, we have time to spare, and what I think is, Rafe, we shall visit the Seymours.’

He writes it down.

Early September. Five days. Wolf Hall.