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Johane: ‘You say, “Rafe, go and find me a seat in the new Parliament.” And off he goes, like a girl who's been told to bring the washing in.’

‘It was harder than that,’ Rafe says.

Johane says, ‘How would you know?’

Seats in the Commons are, largely, in the gift of lords; of lords, bishops, the king himself. A scanty handful of electors, if pressured from above, usually do as they're told.

Rafe has got him Taunton. It's Wolsey terrain; they wouldn't have let him in if the king had not said yes, if Thomas Howard had not said yes. He had sent Rafe to London to scout the uncertain territory of the duke's intentions: to find out what lies behind that ferrety grin. ‘Am obliged, Master.’

Now he knows. ‘The Duke of Norfolk,’ Rafe says, ‘believes my lord cardinal has buried treasure, and he thinks you know where it is.’

They talk alone. Rafe: ‘He'll ask you to go and work for him.’

‘Yes. Perhaps not in so many words.’

He watches Rafe's face as he weighs up the situation. Norfolk is already – unless you count the king's bastard son – the realm's premier nobleman. ‘I assured him,’ Rafe says, ‘of your respect, your … your reverence, your desire to be at his – erm –’

‘Commandment?’

‘More or less.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He said, hmm.’

He laughs. ‘And was that his tone?’

‘It was his tone.’

‘And his grim nod?’

‘Yes.’

Very well. I dry my tears, those tears from All Hallows day. I sit with the cardinal, by the fire at Esher in a room with a smoking chimney. I say, my lord, do you think I would forsake you? I locate the man in charge of chimneys and hearths. I give him orders. I ride to London, to Blackfriars. The day is foggy, St Hubert's Day. Norfolk is waiting, to tell me he will be a good lord to me.

The duke is now approaching sixty years old, but concedes nothing to the calendar. Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an axe head; his joints seem knitted together of supple chain links, and indeed he rattles a little as he moves, for his clothes conceal relics: in tiny jewelled cases he has shavings of skin and snippets of hair, and set into medallions he wears splinters of martyrs' bones. ‘Marry!’ he says, for an oath, and ‘By the Mass!’, and sometimes takes out one of his medals or charms from wherever it is hung about his person, and kisses it in a fervour, calling on some saint or martyr to stop his current rage getting the better of him. ‘St Jude give me patience!’ he will shout; probably he has mixed him up with Job, whom he heard about in a story when he was a little boy at the knee of his first priest. It is hard to imagine the duke as a little boy, or in any way younger or different from the self he presents now. He thinks the Bible a book unnecessary for laypeople, though he understands priests make some use of it. He thinks book-reading an affectation altogether, and wishes there were less of it at court. His niece is always reading, Anne Boleyn, which is perhaps why she is unmarried at the age of twenty-eight. He does not see why it's a gentleman's business to write letters; there are clerks for that.

Now he fixes an eye, red and fiery. ‘Cromwell, I am content you are a burgess in the Parliament.’

He bows his head. ‘My lord.’

‘I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine.’

‘Will they be the same, my lord?’

The duke scowls. He paces; he rattles a little; at last he bursts out, ‘Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a … person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.’

He waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a person, he is a presence. He knows how to edge blackly into a room so that you don't see him; but perhaps those days are over.

‘Smile away,’ says the duke. ‘Wolsey's household is a nest of vipers. Not that …’ he touches a medal, flinching, ‘God forbid I should …’

Compare a prince of the church to a serpent. The duke wants the cardinal's money, and he wants the cardinal's place at the king's side: but then again, he doesn't want to burn in Hell. He walks across the room; he slaps his hands together; he rubs them; he turns. ‘The king is preparing to quarrel with you, master. Oh yes. He will favour you with an interview because he wishes to understand the cardinal's affairs, but he has, you will learn, a very long and exact memory, and what he remembers, master, is when you were a burgess of the Parliament before this, and how you spoke against his war.’

‘I hope he doesn't think still of invading France.’

‘God damn you! What Englishman does not! We own France. We have to take back our own.’ A muscle in his cheek jumps; he paces, agitated; he turns, he rubs his cheek; the twitch stops, and he says, in a voice perfectly matter-of-fact, ‘Mind you, you're right.’

He waits. ‘We can't win,’ the duke says, ‘but we have to fight as if we can. Hang the expense. Hang the waste – money, men, horses, ships. That's what's wrong with Wolsey, you see. Always at the treaty table. How can a butcher's son understand –’

‘La gloire?’

‘Are you a butcher's son?’

‘A blacksmith's.’

‘Are you really? Shoe a horse?’

He shrugs. ‘If I were put to it, my lord. But I can't imagine –’

‘You can't? What can you imagine? A battlefield, a camp, the night before a battle – can you imagine that?’

‘I was a soldier myself.’

‘Were you so? Not in any English army, I'll be bound. There, you see.’ The duke grins, quite without animosity. ‘I knew there was something about you. I knew I didn't like you, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Where were you?’

‘Garigliano.’

‘With?’

‘The French.’

The duke whistles. ‘Wrong side, lad.’

‘So I noticed.’

‘With the French,’ he chuckles. ‘With the French. And how did you scramble out of that disaster?’

‘I went north. Got into …’ He's going to say money, but the duke wouldn't understand trading in money. ‘Cloth,’ he says. ‘Silk, mostly. You know what the market is, with the soldier over there.’

‘By the Mass, yes! Johnnie Freelance – he puts his money on his back. Those Switzers! Like a troupe of play-actors. Lace, stripes, fancy hats. Easy target, that's all. Longbowman?’

‘Now and then.’ He smiles. ‘On the short side for that.’

‘Me too. Now, Henry draws a bow. Very nice. Got the height for it. Got the arm. Still. We won't win many battles like that any more.’

‘Then how about not fighting any? Negotiate, my lord. It's cheaper.’

‘I tell you, Cromwell, you've got face, coming here.’

‘My lord – you sent for me.’

‘Did I?’ Norfolk looks alarmed. ‘It's come to that?’

The king's advisers are preparing no fewer than forty-four charges against the cardinal. They range from the violation of the statutes of praemunire – that is to say, the upholding of a foreign jurisdiction within the king's realm – to buying beef for his household at the same price as the king; from financial malfeasance to failing to halt the spread of Lutheran heresies.

The law of praemunire dates from another century. No one who is alive now quite knows what it means. From day to day it seems to mean what the king says it means. The matter is argued in every talking shop in Europe. Meanwhile, my lord cardinal sits, and sometimes mutters to himself, and sometimes speaks aloud, saying, ‘Thomas, my colleges! Whatever happens to my person, my colleges must be saved. Go to the king. Whatever vengeance, for whatever imagined injury, he would like to wreak on me, he surely cannot mean to put out the light of learning?’

In exile at Esher, the cardinal paces and frets. The great mind which once revolved the affairs of Europe now cogitates ceaselessly on its own losses. He lapses into silent inactivity, brooding as the light fails; for God's sake, Thomas, Cavendish begs him, don't tell him you're coming if you're not.

I won't, he says, and I am coming, but sometimes I am held up. The House sits late and before I leave Westminster I have to gather up the letters and petitions to my lord cardinal, and talk with all the people who want to send messages but don't want them put into writing.

I understand, Cavendish says; but Thomas, he wails, you can't imagine what it's like here at Esher. What time is it? my lord cardinal says. What time will Cromwell be here? And in an hour, again: Cavendish, what time is it? He has us out with lights, and reporting on the weather; as if you, Cromwell, were a person to be impeded by hailstorms or ice. Then next he will ask, what if he has met with some accident on the road? The road from London is full of robbers; wasteland and heathland, as the light fails, are creeping with the agents of malefice. From that he will pass on to say, this world is full of snares and delusions, and into many of them I have fallen, miserable sinner that I am.

When he, Cromwell, finally throws off his riding cloak and collapses into a chair by the fire – God's blood, that smoking chimney – the cardinal is at him before he can draw breath. What said my lord of Suffolk? How looked my lord of Norfolk? The king, have you seen him, did he speak to you? And Lady Anne, is she in health and good looks? Have you worked any device to please her – because we must please her, you know?

He says, ‘There is one short way to please that lady, and that is to crown her queen.’ He closes his lips on the topic of Anne and has no more to say. Mary Boleyn says she has noticed him, but till recently Anne gave no sign of it. Her eyes passed over him on their way to someone who interested her more. They are black eyes, slightly protuberant, shiny like the beads of an abacus; they are shiny and always in motion, as she makes calculations of her own advantage. But Uncle Norfolk must have said to her, ‘There goes the man who knows the cardinal's secrets,’ because now when he comes into her sight her long neck darts; those shining black beads go click, click, as she looks him up and down and decides what use can be got out of him. He supposes she is in health, as the year creeps towards its end; not coughing like a sick horse, for instance, nor gone lame. He supposes she is in good looks, if that's what you like.

One night, just before Christmas, he arrives late at Esher and the cardinal is sitting alone, listening to a boy play the lute. He says, ‘Mark, thank you, go now.’ The boy bows to the cardinal; he favours him, barely, with the nod suitable for a burgess in the Parliament. As he withdraws from the room the cardinal says, ‘Mark is very adept, and a pleasant boy – at York Place, he was one of my choristers. I think I shouldn't keep him here, but send him to the king. Or to Lady Anne, perhaps, as he is such a pretty young thing. Would she like him?’

The boy has lingered at the door to drink in his praises. A hard Cromwellian stare – the equivalent of a kick – sends him out. He wishes people would not ask him what the Lady Anne would and would not like.

The cardinal says, ‘Does Lord Chancellor More send me any message?’

He drops a sheaf of papers on the table. ‘You look ill, my lord.’

‘Yes, I am ill. Thomas, what shall we do?’

‘We shall bribe people,’ he says. ‘We shall be liberal and open-handed with the assets Your Grace has left – for you still have benefices to dispose of, you still have land. Listen, my lord – even if the king takes all you have, people will be asking, can the king truly bestow what belongs to the cardinal? No one to whom he makes a grant will be sure in their title, unless you confirm it. So you still have, my lord, you still have cards in your hand.’

‘And after all, if he meant to bring a treason …’ his voice falters, ‘if …’

‘If he meant to charge you with treason you would be in the Tower by now.’

‘Indeed – and what use would I be to him, head in one place, body in another? This is how it is: the king thinks, by degrading me, to give a sharp lesson to the Pope. He thinks to indicate, I as King of England am master in my own house. Oh, but is he? Or is Lady Anne master, or Thomas Boleyn? A question not to be asked, not outside this room.’

The battle is, now, to get the king alone; to find out his intentions, if he knows them himself, and broker a deal. The cardinal urgently needs ready cash, that's the first skirmish. Day after day, he waits for an interview. The king extends a hand, takes from him what letters he proffers, glancing at the cardinal's seal. He does not look at him, saying merely an absent ‘Thanks.’ One day he does look at him, and says, ‘Master Cromwell, yes … I cannot talk about the cardinal.’ And as he opens his mouth to speak, the king says, ‘Don't you understand? I cannot talk about him.’ His tone is gentle, puzzled. ‘Another day,’ he says. ‘I will send for you. I promise.’

When the cardinal asks him, ‘How did the king look today?’ he says, he looks as if he does not sleep.

The cardinal laughs. ‘If he does not sleep it is because he does not hunt. This icy ground is too hard for the hounds' pads, they cannot go out. It is lack of fresh air, Thomas. It is not his conscience.’

Later, he will remember that night towards the end of December when he found the cardinal listening to music. He will run it through his mind, twice and over again.

Because as he is leaving the cardinal, and contemplating again the road, the night, he hears a boy's voice, speaking behind a half-open door: it is Mark, the lute-player. ‘… so for my skill he says he will prefer me to Lady Anne. And I shall be glad, because what is the use of being here when any day the king may behead the old fellow? I think he ought, for the cardinal is so proud. Today is the first day he ever gave me a good word.’

A pause. Someone speaks, muffled; he cannot tell who. Then the boy: ‘Yes, for sure the lawyer will come down with him. I say lawyer, but who is he? Nobody knows. They say he has killed men with his own hands and never told it in confession. But those hard kinds of men, they always weep when they see the hangman.’

He is in no doubt that it is his own execution Mark looks forward to. Beyond the wall, the boy runs on: ‘So when I am with Lady Anne she is sure to notice me, and give me presents.’ A giggle. ‘And look on me with favour. Don't you think? Who knows where she may turn while she is still refusing the king?’

A pause. Then Mark: ‘She is no maid. Not she.’

What an enchanting conversation: servants' talk. Again comes a muffled answer, and then Mark: ‘Could she be at the French court, do you think, and come home a maid? Any more than her sister could? And Mary was every man's hackney.’

But this is nothing. He is disappointed. I had hopes of particulars; this is just the on dit. But still he hesitates, and doesn't move away.

‘Besides, Tom Wyatt has had her, and everybody knows it, down in Kent. I have been down to Penshurst with the cardinal, and you know that palace is near to Hever, where the lady's family is, and the Wyatts' house an easy ride away.’

Witnesses? Dates?

But then, from the unseen person, ‘Shh!’ Again, a soft giggle.

One can do nothing with this. Except bear it in mind. The conversation is in Flemish: language of Mark's birthplace.

Christmas comes, and the king, with Queen Katherine, keeps it at Greenwich. Anne is at York Place; the king can come upriver to see her. Her company, the women say, is exacting; the king's visits are short, few and discreet.

At Esher the cardinal takes to his bed. Once he would never have done that, though he looks ill enough to justify it. He says, ‘Nothing will happen while the king and Lady Anne are exchanging their New Year kisses. We are safe from incursions till Twelfth Night.’ He turns his head, against his pillows. Says, vehement, ‘Body of Christ, Cromwell. Go home.’

The house at the Austin Friars is decorated with wreaths of holly and ivy, of laurel and ribboned yew. The kitchen is busy, feeding the living, but they omit this year their usual songs and Christmas plays. No year has brought such devastation. His sister Kat, her husband Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woollen bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking. As the year ends two orphans are added to his house, Richard and the child Walter. Morgan Williams, he was a big talker, but he was shrewd in his own way, and he worked hard for his family. And Kat – well, latterly she understood her brother about as well as she understood the motions of the stars: ‘I can never add you up, Thomas,’ she'd say, which was his failure entirely, because who had taught her, except him, to count on her fingers, and puzzle out a tradesman's bill?

If he were to give himself a piece of advice for Christmas, he'd say, leave the cardinal now or you'll be out on the streets again with the three-card trick. But he only gives advice to those who are likely to take it.

They have a big gilded star at the Austin Friars, which they hang in their great hall on New Year's Eve. For a week it shines out, to welcome their guests at Epiphany. From summer onwards, he and Liz would be thinking of costumes for the Three Kings, coveting and hoarding scraps of any strange cloth they saw, any new trimmings; then from October, Liz would be sewing in secrecy, improving on last year's robes by patching them over with new shining panels, quilting a shoulder and weighting a hem, and building each year some fantastical new crowns. His part was to think what the gifts would be, that the kings had in their boxes. Once a king had dropped his casket in shock when the gift began to sing.

This year no one has the heart to hang up the star; but he visits it, in its lightless store room. He slides off the canvas sleeves that protect its rays, and checks that they are unchipped and unfaded. There will be better years, when they will hang it up again; though he cannot imagine them. He eases back the sleeves, pleased at how ingeniously they have been made and how exactly they fit. The Three Kings' robes are packed into a chest, as also the sheepskins for the children who will be sheep. The shepherds' crooks lean in a corner; from a peg hang angel's wings. He touches them. His finger comes away dusty. He shifts his candle out of danger, then lifts them from the peg and gently shakes them. They make a soft sound of hissing, and a faint amber perfume washes into the air. He hangs them back on the peg; passes over them the palm of his hand, to soothe them and still their shiver. He picks up his candle. He backs out and closes the door. He pinches out the light, turns the lock and gives the key to Johane.

He says to her, ‘I wish we had a baby. It seems such a long time since there was a baby in the house.’

‘Don't look at me,’ Johane says.

He does, of course. He says, ‘Does John Williamson not do his duty by you these days?’

She says, ‘His duty is not my pleasure.’

As he walks away he thinks, that's a conversation I shouldn't have had.

On New Year's Day, when night falls, he is sitting at his writing table; he is writing letters for the cardinal, and sometimes he crosses the room to his counting board and pushes the counters about. It seems that in return for a formal guilty plea to the praemunire charges, the king will allow the cardinal his life, and a measure of liberty; but whatever money is left him, to maintain his state, will be a fraction of his former income. York Place has been taken already, Hampton Court is long gone, and the king is thinking of how to tax and rob the rich bishopric of Winchester.

Gregory comes in. ‘I brought you lights. My aunt Johane said, go in to your father.’

Gregory sits. He waits. He fidgets. He sighs. He gets up. He crosses to his father's writing table and hovers in front of him. Then, as if someone had said, ‘Make yourself useful,’ he reaches out timidly and begins to tidy the papers.

He glances up at his son, while keeping his head down over his task. For the first time, perhaps, since Gregory was a baby, he notices his hands, and he is struck by what they have become: not childish paws, but the large, white untroubled hands of a gentleman's son. What is Gregory doing? He is putting the documents into a stack. On what principle is he doing it? He can't read them, they're the wrong way up. He's not filing them by subject. Is he filing them by date? For God's sake, what is he doing?

He needs to finish this sentence, with its many vital subclauses. He glances up again, and recognises Gregory's design. It is a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the bottom, small ones on top.

‘Father …’ Gregory says. He sighs. He crosses to the counting board. With a forefinger he inches the counters about. Then he scoops them together, picks them up and clicks them into a tidy pile.

He looks up at last. ‘That was a calculation. It wasn't just where I dropped them.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ Gregory says politely. He sits down by the fire and tries not to disturb the air as he breathes.

The mildest eyes can be commanding; under his son's gaze, he asks, ‘What is it?’

‘Do you think you can stop writing?’

‘A minute,’ he says, holding up a delaying hand; he signs the letter, his usual form: ‘your assured friend, Thomas Cromwell.’ If Gregory is going to tell him that someone else in the house is mortally ill, or that he, Gregory, has offered himself in marriage to the laundry girl, or that London Bridge has fallen down, he must be ready to take it like a man; but he must sand and seal this. He looks up. ‘Yes?’

Gregory turns his face away. Is he crying? It would not be surprising, would it, as he has cried himself, and in public? He crosses the room. He sits down opposite his son, by the hearth. He takes off his cap of velvet and runs his hands back through his hair.

For a long time no one speaks. He looks down at his own thick-fingered hands, scars and burn marks hidden in the palms. He thinks, gentleman? So you call yourself, but who do you hope to mislead? Only the people who have never seen you, or the people you keep distanced with courtesy, legal clients and your fellows in the Commons, colleagues at Gray's Inn, the household servants of courtiers, the courtiers themselves … His mind strays to the next letter he must write. Then Gregory says, his voice small as if he had receded into the past, ‘Do you remember that Christmas, when there was the giant in the pageant?’

‘Here in the parish? I remember.’

‘He said, “I am a giant, my name is Marlinspike.” They said he was as tall as the Cornhill maypole. What's the Cornhill maypole?’

‘They took it down. The year of the riots. Evil May Day, they called it. You were only a baby then.’

‘Where's the maypole now?’

‘The city has it in store.’

‘Shall we have our star again next year?’

‘If our fortunes look up.’

‘Shall we be poor now the cardinal is down?’

‘No.’

The little flames leap and flare, and Gregory looks into them. ‘You remember the year I had my face dyed black, and I was wrapped in a black calfskin? When I was a devil in the Christmas play?’

‘I do.’ His face softens. ‘I remember.’

Anne had wanted to be dyed, but her mother had said it was not suitable for a little girl. He wishes he had said that Anne must have her turn as a parish angel – even if, being dark, she had to wear one of the parish's yellow knitted wigs, which slipped sideways, or fell over the children's eyes.

The year that Grace was an angel, she had wings made of peacock feathers. He himself had contrived it. The other little girls were dowdy goose creatures, and their wings fell off if they caught them on the corners of the stable. But Grace stood glittering, her hair entwined with silver threads; her shoulders were trussed with a spreading, shivering glory, and the rustling air was perfumed as she breathed. Lizzie said, Thomas, there's no end to you, is there? She has the best wings the city has ever seen.

Gregory stands up; he comes to kiss him good night. For a moment his son leans against him, as if he were a child; or as if the past, the pictures in the fire, were an intoxication.

Once the boy has gone to bed he sweeps his papers out of the tidy stack he has made. He refolds them. He sorts them with the endorsement out, ready for filing. He thinks of Evil May Day. Gregory did not ask, why were there riots? The riots were against foreigners. He himself had not long been home.

As 1530 begins, he does not hold an Epiphany feast, because so many people, sensible of the cardinal's disgrace, would be obliged to refuse his invitation. Instead, he takes the young men to Gray's Inn, for the Twelfth Night revels. He regrets it almost at once; this year they are noisier, and more bawdy, than any he remembers.

The law students make a play about the cardinal. They make him flee from his palace at York Place, to his barge on the Thames. Some fellows flap dyed sheets, to impersonate the river, and then others run up and throw water on them from leather buckets. As the cardinal scrambles into his barge, there are hunting cries, and one benighted fool runs into the hall with a brace of otter hounds on a leash. Others come with nets and fishing rods, to haul the cardinal back to the bank.

The next scene shows the cardinal floundering in the mud at Putney, as he runs to his bolt-hole at Esher. The students halloo and cry as the cardinal weeps and holds up his hands in prayer. Of all the people who witnessed this, who, he wonders, has offered it up as a comedy? If he knew, or if he guessed, the worse for them.

The cardinal lies on his back, a crimson mountain; he flails his hands; he offers his bishopric of Winchester to anyone who can get him back on his mule. Some students, under a frame draped with donkey skins, enact the mule, which turns about and jokes in Latin, and farts in the cardinal's face. There is much wordplay about bishoprics and bishop's pricks, which might pass as witty if they were street-sweepers, but he thinks law students should do better. He rises from his place, displeased, and his household has no choice but to stand up with him and walk out.

He stops to have a word with some of the benchers: how was this allowed to go forward? The Cardinal of York is a sick man, he may die, how will you and your students stand then before your God? What sort of young men are you breeding here, who are so brave as to assail a great man who has fallen on evil times – whose favour, a few short weeks ago, they would have begged for?

The benchers follow him, apologising; but their voices are lost in the roars of laughter that billow out from the hall. His young household are lingering, casting glances back. The cardinal is offering his harem of forty virgins to anyone who will help him mount; he sits on the ground and laments, while a flaccid and serpentine member, knitted of red wool, flops out from under his robes.

Outside, lights burn thin in the icy air. ‘Home,’ he says. He hears Gregory whisper, ‘We can only laugh if he permits us.’

‘Well, after all,’ he hears Rafe say, ‘he is the man in charge.’

He falls back a step, to speak with them. ‘Anyway, it was the wicked Borgia Pope, Alexander, who kept forty women. And none of them were virgins, I can tell you.’

Rafe touches his shoulder. Richard walks on his left, sticking close. ‘You don't have to hold me up,’ he says mildly. ‘I'm not like the cardinal.’ He stops. He laughs. He says, ‘I suppose it was …’

‘Yes, it was quite entertaining,’ Richard says. ‘His Grace must have been five feet around his waist.’

The night is loud with the noise of bone rattles, and alive with the flames of torches. A troop of hobby horses clatters past them, singing, and a party of men wearing antlers, with bells at their heels. As they near home a boy dressed as an orange rolls past, with his friend, a lemon. ‘Gregory Cromwell!’ they call out, and to him as their senior they courteously raise, in lieu of hats, an upper slice of rind. ‘God send you a good new year.’

‘The same to you,’ he calls. And, to the lemon: ‘Tell your father to come and see me about that Cheapside lease.’

They get home. ‘Go to bed,’ he says. ‘It's late.’ He feels it best to add, ‘God see you safe till morning.’

They leave him. He sits at his work table. He remembers Grace, at the end of her evening as an angel: standing in the firelight, her face white with fatigue, her eyes glittering, and the eyes of her peacock's wings shining in the firelight, each like a topaz, golden, smoky. Liz said, ‘Stand away from the fire, sweetheart, or your wings will catch alight.’ His little girl backed off, into shadow; the feathers were the colours of ash and cinders as she moved towards the stairs, and he said, ‘Grace, are you going to bed in your wings?’

‘Till I say my prayers,’ she said, darting a look over her shoulder. He followed her, afraid for her, afraid of fire and some other danger, but he did not know what. She walked up the staircase, her plumes rustling, her feathers fading to black.

Ah, Christ, he thinks, at least I'll never have to give her to anyone else. She's dead and I'll not have to sign her away to some purse-mouthed petty gent who wants her dowry. Grace would have wanted a title. She would have thought because she was lovely he should buy her one: Lady Grace. I wish my daughter Anne were here, he thinks, I wish Anne were here and promised to Rafe Sadler. If Anne were older. If Rafe were younger. If Anne were still alive.

Once more he bends his head over the cardinal's letters. Wolsey is writing to the rulers of Europe, to ask them to support him, vindicate him, fight his cause. He, Thomas Cromwell, wishes the cardinal would not, or if he must, could the encryption be more tricky? Is it not treasonable for Wolsey to urge them to obstruct the king's purpose? Henry would deem it is. The cardinal is not asking them to make war on Henry, on his behalf: he's merely asking them to withdraw their approval of a king who very much likes to be liked.

He sits back in his chair, hands over his mouth, as if to disguise his opinion from himself. He thinks, I am glad I love my lord cardinal, because if I did not, and I were his enemy – let us say I am Suffolk, let us say I am Norfolk, let us say I am the king – I would be putting him on trial next week.

The door opens. ‘Richard? You can't sleep? Well, I knew it. The play was too exciting for you.’

It is easy to smile now, but Richard does not smile; his face is in shadow. He says, ‘Master, I have a question to put to you. Our father is dead and you are our father now.’

Richard Williams, and Walter-named-after-Walter Williams: these are his sons. ‘Sit down,’ he says.

‘So shall we change our name to yours?’

‘You surprise me. The way things are with me, the people called Cromwell will be wanting to change their names to Williams.’

‘If I had your name, I should never disown it.’

‘Would your father like it? You know he believed he had his descent from Welsh princes.’

‘Ah, he did. When he'd had a drink, he would say, who will give me a shilling for my principality?’

‘Even so, you have the Tudor name in your descent. By some accounts.’

‘Don't,’ Richard pleads. ‘It makes beads of blood stand out on my forehead.’

‘It's not that hard.’ He laughs. ‘Listen. The old king had an uncle, Jasper Tudor. Jasper had two bastard daughters, Joan and Helen. Helen was Gardiner's mother. Joan married William ap Evan – she was your grandmother.’

‘Is that all? Why did my father make it sound so deep? But if I am the king's cousin,’ Richard pauses, ‘and Stephen Gardiner's cousin … what good can it do me? We're not at court and not likely to be, now the cardinal … well …’ He looks away. ‘Sir … when you were on your travels, did you ever think you would die?’

‘Yes. Oh, yes.’

Richard looks at him: how did that feel?

‘I felt,’ he said, ‘irritated. It seemed a waste, I suppose. To come so far. To cross the sea. To die for …’ He shrugs. ‘God knows why.’

Richard says, ‘Every day I light a candle for my father.’

‘Does that help you?’

‘No. I just do it.’

‘Does he know you do it?’

‘I can't imagine what he knows. I know the living must comfort each other.’

‘This comforts me, Richard Cromwell.’

Richard gets up, kisses his cheek. ‘Good night. Cysga'n dawel.’

Sleep well; it is the familiar form for those who are close to home. It is the usage for fathers, for brothers. It matters what name we choose, what name we make. The people lose their name who lie dead on the field of battle, the ordinary corpses of no lineage, with no herald to search for them and no chantry, no perpetual prayers. Morgan's bloodline won't be lost, he is sure of it, though he died in a busy year for death, when London was never out of black. He touches his throat, where the medal would have been, the holy medal that Kat gave him; his fingers are surprised not to find it there. For the first time he understands why he took it off and slid it into the sea. It was so that no living hand could take it. The waves took it, and the waves have it still.

The chimney at Esher continues to smoke. He goes to the Duke of Norfolk – who is always ready to see him – and asks him what is to be done about the cardinal's household.

In this matter, both dukes are helpful. ‘Nothing is more malcontent,’ says Norfolk, ‘than a masterless man. Nothing more dangerous. Whatever one thinks of the Cardinal of York, he was always well served. Prefer them to me, send them in my direction. They will be my men.’

He directs a searching look at Cromwell. Who turns away. Knows himself coveted. Wears an expression like an heiress: sly, coy, cold.

He is arranging a loan for the duke. His foreign contacts are less than excited. The cardinal down, he says, the duke has risen, like the morning sun, and sitteth at Henry's right hand. Tommaso, they say, seriously, you are offering what as guarantee? Some old duke who may be dead tomorrow – they say he is choleric? You are offering a dukedom as security, in that barbaric island of yours, which is always breaking out into civil war? And another war coming, if your wilful king will set aside the Emperor's aunt, and install his whore as queen?

Still: he'll get terms. Somewhere.

Charles Brandon says, ‘You here again, Master Cromwell, with your lists of names? Is there anyone you specially recommend to me?’

‘Yes, but I am afraid he is a man of a lowly stamp, and more fit that I should confer with your kitchen steward –’

‘No, tell me,’ says the duke. He can't bear suspense.

‘It's only the hearths and chimneys man, hardly a matter for Your Grace …’

‘I'll have him, I'll have him,’ Charles Brandon says. ‘I like a good fire.’

Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, has put his signature first on all the articles against Wolsey. They say one strange allegation has been added at his behest. The cardinal is accused of whispering in the king's ear and breathing into his face; since the cardinal has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch.

When he hears this he thinks, imagine living inside the Lord Chancellor's head. Imagine writing down such a charge and taking it to the printer, and circulating it through the court and through the realm, putting it out there to where people will believe anything; putting it out there, to the shepherds on the hills, to Tyndale's ploughboy, to the beggar on the roads and the patient beast in its byre or stall; out there to the bitter winter winds, and to the weak early sun, and the snowdrops in the London gardens.

It is a wan morning, low unbroken cloud; the light, filtering sparely through glass, is the colour of tarnished pewter. How brightly coloured the king is, like the king in a new pack of cards: how small his flat blue eye.

There is a crowd of gentlemen around Henry Tudor; they ignore his approach. Only Harry Norris smiles, gives him a polite good morning. At a signal from the king, the gentlemen retire to a distance; bright in their riding cloaks – it is a hunting morning – they flutter, eddy, cluster; they whisper, one to the other, and conduct a discourse in nods and shrugs.

The king glances out of the window. ‘So,’ he says, ‘how is …?’ He seems reluctant to name the cardinal.

‘He cannot be well till he has Your Majesty's favour.’

‘Forty-four charges,’ the king says. ‘Forty-four, master.’

‘Saving Your Majesty, there is an answer to each one, and given a hearing we would make them.’

‘Could you make them here and now?’

‘If Your Majesty would care to sit.’

‘I heard you were a ready man.’

‘Would I come here unprepared?’

He has spoken almost without thinking. The king smiles. That fine curl of the red lip. He has a pretty mouth, almost like a woman's; it is too small for his face. ‘Another day I would put you to the test,’ he says. ‘But my lord Suffolk is waiting for me. Will the cloud lift, do you think? I wish I'd gone out before Mass.’

‘I think it will clear,’ he says. ‘A good day to be chasing something.’

‘Master Cromwell?’ The king turns, he looks at him, astonished. ‘You are not of Thomas More's opinion, are you?’

He waits. He cannot imagine what the king is going to say.

‘La chasse. He thinks it barbaric.’

‘Oh, I see. No, Your Majesty, I favour any sport that's cheaper than battle. It's rather that …’ How can he put it? ‘In some countries, they hunt the bear, and the wolf and the wild boar. We once had these animals in England, when we had our great forests.’

‘My cousin France has boar to hunt. From time to time he says he will ship me some. But I feel …’

You feel he is taunting you.

‘We usually say,’ Henry looks straight at him, ‘we usually say, we gentlemen, that the chase prepares us for war. Which brings us to a sticky point, Master Cromwell.’

‘It does indeed,’ he says, cheerful.

‘You said, in the Parliament, some six years ago, that I could not afford a war.’

It was seven years: 1523. And how long has this audience lasted? Seven minutes? Seven minutes and he is sure already. There's no point backing off; do that and Henry will chase you down. Advance, and he may just falter. He says, ‘No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, “This is my budget; so this is the kind of war I can have.” You enter into one and it uses up all the money you've got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.’

‘When I went into France in the year 1513 I captured the town of Thérouanne, which in your speech you called –’

‘A doghole, Majesty.’

‘A doghole,’ the king repeats. ‘How could you say so?’

He shrugs. ‘I've been there.’

A flash of anger. ‘And so have I, at the head of my army. Listen to me, master – you said I should not fight because the taxes would break the country. What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?’

‘I believe I said – saving Your Majesty – we didn't have the gold to see you through a year's campaign. All the bullion in the country would be swallowed by the war. I have read there was a time when people exchanged leather tokens, for want of metal coins. I said we would be back to those days.’

‘You said I was not to lead my troops. You said if I was taken, the country couldn't put up the ransom. So what do you want? You want a king who doesn't fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl?’

‘That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes.’

The king takes a deep ragged breath. He's been shouting. Now – and it's a narrow thing – he decides to laugh. ‘You advocate prudence. Prudence is a virtue. But there are other virtues that belong to princes.’

‘Fortitude.’

‘Yes. Cost that out.’

‘It doesn't mean courage in battle.’

‘Do you read me a lesson?’

‘It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.’

Henry crosses the room. Stamp, stamp, stamp in his riding boots; he is ready for la chasse. He turns, rather slowly, to show his majesty to better effect: wide and square and bright. ‘We will pursue this. What constrains me?’

‘The distance,’ he says. ‘The harbours. The terrain, the people. The winter rains and the mud. When Your Majesty's ancestors fought in France, whole provinces were held by England. From there we could supply, we could provision. Now that we have only Calais, how can we support an army in the interior?’

The king stares out into the silver morning. He bites his lip. Is he in a slow fury, simmering, bubbling to boiling point? He turns, and his smile is sunny. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘So when we next go into France, we will need a sea coast.’

Of course. We need to take Normandy. Or Brittany. That's all.

‘Well reasoned,’ the king says. ‘I bear you no ill will. Only I suppose you have no experience in policy, or the direction of a campaign.’

He shakes his head. ‘None.’

‘You said – before, I mean, in this speech of yours to the Parliament – that there was one million pounds in gold in the realm.’

‘I gave a round figure.’

‘But how would you find that figure?’

‘I trained in the Florentine banks. And in Venice.’

The king stares at him. ‘Howard said you were a common soldier.’

‘That too.’

‘Anything else?’

‘What would Your Majesty like me to be?’

The king looks him full in the face: a rare thing with him. He looks back; it is his habit. ‘Master Cromwell, your reputation is bad.’

He inclines his head.

‘You don't defend yourself?’

‘Your Majesty is able to form his own opinion.’

‘I can. I will.’

At the door, the guards part their spears; the gentlemen step aside and bow; Suffolk pounds in. Charles Brandon: he looks too hot in his clothes. ‘You ready?’ he says to the king. ‘Oh, Cromwell.’ He grins. ‘How's your fat priest?’

The king flushes with displeasure. Brandon doesn't notice. ‘You know,’ he chuckles, ‘they say the cardinal once rode out with his servant, and checked his horse at the head of a valley, where looking down he saw a very fair church and its lands about. He says to his servant, Robin, who owns that? I would that were my benefice! Robin says, It is, my lord, it is.’

His story meets with poor success, but he laughs at it himself.

He says, ‘My lord, they tell that story all over Italy. Of this cardinal, or that.’

Brandon's face falls. ‘What, the same story?’

‘Mutatis mutandis. The servant isn't called Robin.’

The king meets his eye. He smiles.

Leaving, he pushes past the gentlemen, and who should he meet but the king's Secretary! ‘Good morning, good morning!’ he says. He doesn't often repeat things, but the moment seems to call for it.

Gardiner is rubbing his great blue hands together. ‘Cold, no?’ he says. ‘And how was that, Cromwell? Unpleasant, I think?’

‘On the contrary,’ he says. ‘Oh, and he's going out with Suffolk; you'll have to wait.’ He walks on, but then turns. There is a pain like a dull bruise inside his chest. ‘Gardiner, can't we drop this?’

‘No,’ Gardiner says. His drooping eyelids flicker. ‘No, I don't see that we can.’

‘Fine,’ he says. He walks on. He thinks, you wait. You may have to wait a year or two, but you just wait.

Esher, two days later: he is hardly through the gateway when Cavendish comes hurtling across the courtyard. ‘Master Cromwell! Yesterday the king –’

‘Calmly, George,’ he advises.

‘– yesterday he sent us four cartloads of furnishings – come and see! Tapestry, plate, bed hangings – was it by your suit?’

Who knows? He hadn't asked for anything directly. If he had, he'd have been more specific. Not that hanging, but this hanging, which my lord likes; he likes goddesses, rather than virgin martyrs, so away with St Agnes, and let's have Venus in a grove. My lord likes Venetian glassware; take away these battered silver goblets.

He looks contemptuous as he inspects the new stuff. ‘Only the best for you boys from Putney,’ Wolsey says. ‘It is possible,’ he adds, almost apologising, ‘that what the king appointed for me was not in fact what was sent. That inferior substitutions were made, by inferior persons.’

‘That is entirely possible,’ he says.

‘Still. Even so. We are more comfortable for it.’

‘The difficulty is,’ Cavendish says, ‘we need to move. This whole house needs to be scrubbed out and aired.’

‘True,’ the cardinal says. ‘St Agnes, bless her, would be knocked over by the smell of the privies.’

‘So will you make suit to the king's council?’

He sighs. ‘George, what is the point? Listen. I'm not talking to Thomas Howard. I'm not talking to Brandon. I'm talking to him.’

The cardinal smiles. A fat paternal beam.

He is surprised – as they thrash out a financial settlement for the cardinal – at Henry's grasp of detail. Wolsey has always said that the king has a fine mind, as quick as his father's, but more comprehensive. The old king grew narrow as he aged; he kept a hard hand on England; there was no nobleman he did not hold by a debt or bond, and he said frankly that if he could not be loved he would be feared. Henry has a different nature, but what is it? Wolsey laughs and says, I should write you a handbook.

But as he walks in the gardens of the little lodge at Richmond, where the king has allowed him to remove, the cardinal's mind becomes clouded, he talks about prophecies, and about the downfall of the priests of England, which he says is foretold, and will now happen.

Even if you don't believe in omens – and he doesn't, personally – he can see the problem. For if the cardinal is guilty of a crime in asserting his jurisdiction as legate, are not all those clerics, from bishops downwards, who assented to his legacy, also guilty? He can't be the only person who's thinking about this; but mostly, his enemies can't see past the cardinal himself, his vast scarlet presence on the horizon; they fear it will loom up again, ready for revenge. ‘These are bad times for proud prelates,’ says Brandon, when next they meet. He sounds jaunty, a man whistling to keep his courage up. ‘We need no cardinals in this realm.’

‘And he,’ the cardinal says, furious, ‘he, Brandon, when he married the king's sister out of hand – when he married her in the first days of her widowhood, knowing the king intended her for another monarch – his head would have been parted from his body, if I, a simple cardinal, had not pleaded for him to the king.’

I, a simple cardinal.

‘And what excuse did Brandon make?’ the cardinal says. ‘“Oh, Your Majesty, your sister Mary cried. How she did cry and beg me to marry her myself! I never saw woman cry so!” So he dried her tears and got himself up to a dukedom! And now he talks as if he's held his title since the Garden of Eden. Listen, Thomas, if men of sound learning and good disposition come to me – as Bishop Tunstall comes, as Thomas More comes – and plead that the church must be reformed, why then I listen. But Brandon! To talk about proud prelates! What was he? The king's horsekeeper! And I've known horses with more wit.’

‘My lord,’ Cavendish pleads, ‘be more temperate. And Charles Brandon, you know, was of an ancient family, a gentleman born.’

‘Gentleman, he? A swaggering braggart. That's Brandon.’ The cardinal sits down, exhausted. ‘My head aches,’ he says. ‘Cromwell, go to court and bring me better news.’

Day by day he takes his instructions from Wolsey at Richmond, and rides to wherever the king is. He thinks of the king as a terrain into which he must advance, with no sea coast to supply him.

He understands what Henry has learned from his cardinal: his floating diplomacy, his science of ambiguity. He sees how the king has applied this science to the slow, trackless, dubious ruin of his minister. Every kindness, Henry matches with a cruelty, some further charge or forfeiture. Till the cardinal moans, ‘I want to go away.’

‘Winchester,’ he suggests, to the dukes. ‘My lord cardinal is willing to proceed to his palace there.’

‘What, so near the king?’ Brandon says. ‘We are not fools to ourselves, Master Cromwell.’

Since he, the cardinal's man, is with Henry so often, rumours have run all over Europe that Wolsey is about to be recalled. The king is cutting a deal, people say, to have the church's wealth in exchange for Wolsey's return to favour. Rumours leak from the council chamber, from the privy chamber: the king does not like his new set-up. Norfolk is found ignorant; Suffolk is accused of having an annoying laugh.

He says, ‘My lord won't go north. He is not ready for it.’

‘But I want him north,’ Howard says. ‘Tell him to go. Tell him Norfolk says he must be on the road and out of here. Or – and tell him this – I will come where he is, and I will tear him with my teeth.’

‘My lord.’ He bows. ‘May I substitute the word “bite”?’

Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, ‘Substitute nothing, you misbegotten –’ The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. ‘You … person,’ he says; and again, ‘you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.’

He stands there, pushing away, like a baker pressing the dimples into a batch of manchet loaves. Cromwell flesh is firm, dense and impermeable. The ducal finger just bounces off.

Before they left Esher, one of the cats that had been brought in to kill the vermin gave birth to a litter in the cardinal's own rooms. What presumption, in an animal! But wait – new life, in the cardinal's suite? Could that be an omen? One day, he fears, there will be an omen of another sort: a dead bird will fall down that smoking chimney, and then – oh, woe is us! – he'll never hear the last of it.

But for the while the cardinal is amused, and puts the kittens on a cushion in an open chest, and watches as they grow. One of them is black and hungry, with a coat like wool and yellow eyes. When it is weaned he brings it home. He takes it from under his coat, where it has been sleeping curled against his shoulder. ‘Gregory, look.’ He holds it out to his son. ‘I am a giant, my name is Marlinspike.’

Gregory looks at him, wary, puzzled. His glance flinches; his hand pulls away. ‘The dogs will kill it,’ he says.

Marlinspike goes down to the kitchen, to grow stout and live out his beastly nature. There is a summer ahead, though he cannot imagine its pleasures; sometimes when he's walking in the garden he sees him, a half-grown cat, lolling watchful in an apple tree, or snoring on a wall in the sun.

Spring 1530: Antonio Bonvisi, the merchant, invites him to supper at his fine tall house on Bishopsgate. ‘I won't be late,’ he tells Richard, expecting that it will be the usual tense gathering, everyone cross and hungry: for even a rich Italian with an ingenious kitchen cannot find a hundred ways with smoked eel or salt cod. The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, their nightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now till Ash Wednesday their knives will be out for some cut-throat intelligence, some mean commercial advantage.

But it is a grander occasion than he thought; the Lord Chancellor is there, amongst a company of lawyers and aldermen. Humphrey Monmouth, whom More once locked up, is seated well away from the great man; More looks at his ease, holding the company captive with one of his stories about that great scholar Erasmus, his dear friend. But when he looks up and sees him, Cromwell, he falls silent halfway through a sentence; he casts his eyes down, and an opaque and stony look grows on his face.

‘Did you want to talk about me?’ he asks. ‘You can do it while I'm here, Lord Chancellor. I have a thick skin.’ He knocks back a glass of wine and laughs. ‘Do you know what Brandon is saying? He can't fit my life together. My travels. The other day he called me a Jewish peddler.’

‘And was that to your face?’ his host asks politely.

‘No. The king told me. But then my lord cardinal calls Brandon a horsekeeper.’

Humphrey Monmouth says, ‘You have the entrée these days, Thomas. And what do you think, now you are a courtier?’

There are smiles around the table. Because, of course, the idea is so ridiculous, the situation so temporary. More's people are city people, no grander; but he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit. And More says, ‘Perhaps we should not press the point. There are delicate issues here. There is a time to be silent.’

An elder of the drapers' guild leans across the table and warns, his voice low: ‘Thomas More said, when he took his seat, that he won't discuss the cardinal, or the Lady either.’

He, Cromwell, looks around at the company. ‘The king surprises me, though. What he will tolerate.’

‘From you?’ More says.

‘I mean Brandon. They're going to hunt: he walks in and shouts, are you ready?’

‘Your master the cardinal found it a constant battle,’ Bonvisi says, ‘in the early years of the reign. To stop the king's companions becoming too familiar with him.’

‘He wanted only himself to be familiar,’ More suggests.

‘Though, of course, the king may raise up whom he will.’

‘Up to a point, Thomas,’ Bonvisi says; there is some laughter.

‘And the king enjoys his friendships. That is good, surely?’

‘A soft word, from you, Master Cromwell.’

‘Not at all,’ Monmouth says. ‘Master Cromwell is known as one who does everything for his friends.’

‘I think …’ More stops; he looks down at the table. ‘In all truth, I am not sure if one can regard a prince as a friend.’

‘But surely,’ Bonvisi says, ‘you've known Henry since he was a child.’

‘Yes, but friendship should be less exhausting … it should be restorative. Not like …’ More turns to him, for the first time, as if inviting comment. ‘I sometimes feel it is like … like Jacob wrestling with the angel.’

‘And who knows,’ he says, ‘what that fight was about?’

‘Yes, the text is silent. As with Cain and Abel. Who knows?’

He senses a little disquiet around the table, among the more pious, the less sportive; or just those keen for the next course. What will it be? Fish!

‘When you speak to Henry,’ More says, ‘I beg you, speak to the good heart. Not the strong will.’

He would pursue it, but the aged draper waves for more wine, and asks him, ‘How's your friend Stephen Vaughan? What's new in Antwerp?’ The conversation is about trade then; it is about shipping, interest rates; it is no more than a background hum to unruly speculation. If you come into a room and say, this is what we're not talking about, it follows that you're talking about nothing else. If the Lord Chancellor weren't here it would be just import duties and bonded warehouses; we would not be thinking of the brooding scarlet cardinal, and our starved Lenten minds would not be occupied by the image of the king's fingers creeping over a resistant, quick-breathing and virginal bosom. He leans back and fixes his gaze on Thomas More. In time there is a natural pause in conversation, a lull; and after a quarter-hour in which he has not spoken, the Lord Chancellor breaks into it, his voice low and angry, his eyes on the remnants of what he has eaten. ‘The Cardinal of York,’ he says, ‘has a greed that will never be appeased, for ruling over other men.’

‘Lord Chancellor,’ Bonvisi says, ‘you are looking at your herring as if you hate it.’

Says the gracious guest, ‘There's nothing wrong with the herring.’

He leans forward, ready for this fight; he means not to let it pass. ‘The cardinal is a public man. So are you. Should he shrink from a public role?’

‘Yes.’ More looks up. ‘Yes, I think, a little, he should. A little less evident appetite, perhaps.’

‘It's late,’ Monmouth says, ‘to read the cardinal a lesson in humility.’

‘His real friends have read it long ago, and been ignored.’

‘And you count yourself his friend?’ He sits back, arms folded. ‘I'll tell him, Lord Chancellor, and by the blood of Christ he will find it a consolation, as he sits in exile and wonders why you have slandered him to the king.’

‘Gentlemen …’ Bonvisi rises in his chair, edgy.

‘No,’ he says, ‘sit down. Let's have this straight. Thomas More here will tell you, I would have been a simple monk, but my father put me to the law. I would spend my life in church, if I had the choice. I am, as you know, indifferent to wealth. I am devoted to things of the spirit. The world's esteem is nothing to me.’ He looks around the table. ‘So how did he become Lord Chancellor? Was it an accident?’

The doors open; Bonvisi jumps to his feet; relief floods his face. ‘Welcome, welcome,’ he says. ‘Gentlemen: the Emperor's ambassador.’

It is Eustache Chapuys, come in with the desserts; the new ambassador, as one calls him, though he has been in post since fall. He stands poised on the threshold, so they may know him and admire: a little crooked man, in a doublet slashed and puffed, blue satin billowing through black; beneath it, his little black spindly legs. ‘I regret to be so late,’ he says. He simpers. ‘Les dépêches, toujours les dépêches.’

‘That's the ambassador's life.’ He looks up and smiles. ‘Thomas Cromwell.’

‘Ah, c'est le juif errant!’

At once the ambassador apologises: whilst smiling around, as if bemused, at the success of his joke.

Sit down, sit down, says Bonvisi, and the servants bustle, the cloths are swept away, the company rearranges itself more informally, except for the Lord Chancellor, who goes on sitting where he's sitting. Preserved autumn fruits come in, and spiced wine, and Chapuys takes a place of honour beside More.

‘We will speak French, gentlemen,’ says Bonvisi.

French, as it happens, is the first language of the ambassador of the Empire and Spain; and like any other diplomat, he will never take the trouble to learn English, for how will that help him in his next posting? So kind, so kind, he says, as he eases himself back in the carved chair their host has vacated; his feet do not quite touch the floor. More rouses himself then; he and the ambassador put their heads together. He watches them; they glance back at him resentfully; but looking is free.

In a tiny moment when they pause, he cuts in. ‘Monsieur Chapuys? You know, I was talking with the king recently about those events, so regrettable, when your master's troops plundered the Holy City. Perhaps you can advise us? We don't understand them even now.’

Chapuys shakes his head. ‘Most regrettable events.’

‘Thomas More thinks it was the secret Mohammedans in your army who ran wild – oh, and my own people, of course, the wandering Jews. But before this, he has said it was the Germans, the Lutherans, who raped the poor virgins and desecrated the shrines. In all cases, as the Lord Chancellor says, the Emperor must blame himself; but to whom should we attach blame? Are you able to help us out?’

‘My dear Sir Chancellor!’ The ambassador is shocked. His eyes turn towards Thomas More. ‘Did you speak so, of my imperial master?’ A glance flicked over his shoulder, and he drops into Latin.

The company, linguistically agile, sit and smile at him. He advises, pleasantly, ‘If you wish to be half-secret, try Greek. Allez, Monsieur Chapuys, rattle away! The Lord Chancellor will understand you.’

The party breaks up soon after, the Lord Chancellor rising to go; but before he does, he makes a pronouncement to the company, in English. ‘Master Cromwell's position,’ he says, ‘is indefensible, it seems to me. He is no friend to the church, as we all know, but he is friend to one priest. And that priest the most corrupt in Christendom.’

With the curtest of nods he takes his leave. Even Chapuys does not warrant more. The ambassador looks after him, dubious, biting his lip: as if to say, I looked for more help and friendship there. Everything Chapuys does, he notices, is like something an actor does. When he thinks, he casts his eyes down, places two fingers to his forehead. When he sorrows, he sighs. When he is perplexed, he wags his chin, he half-smiles. He is like a man who has wandered inadvertently into a play, who has found it to be a comedy, and decided to stay and see it through.

The supper is over; the company dwindle away, into the early dusk. ‘Perhaps sooner than you would have liked?’ he says, to Bonvisi.

‘Thomas More is my old friend. You should not come here and bait him.’

‘Oh, have I spoiled your party? You invited Monmouth; was that not to bait him?’

‘No, Humphrey Monmouth is my friend too.’

‘And I?’

‘Of course.’

They have slid back naturally into Italian. ‘Tell me something that intrigues me,’ he says. ‘I want to know about Thomas Wyatt.’ Wyatt went to Italy, having attached himself to a diplomatic mission, rather suddenly: three years ago now. He had a disastrous time there, but that's for another evening; the question is, why did he run away from the English court in such haste?

‘Ah. Wyatt and Lady Anne,’ Bonvisi says. ‘An old story, I'd have thought?’

Well, perhaps, he says, but he tells him about the boy Mark, the musician, who seems sure Wyatt's had her; if the story's bouncing around Europe, among servants and menials, what are the odds the king hasn't heard?

‘A part of the art of ruling, I suppose, is to know when to shut your ears. And Wyatt is handsome,’ Bonvisi says, ‘in the English style, of course. He is tall, he is blond, my countrymen marvel at him; where do you breed such people? And so assured, of course. And a poet!’

He laughs at his friend because, like all the Italians, he can't say ‘Wyatt’: it comes out ‘Guiett’, or something like that. There was a man called Hawkwood, a knight of Essex, used to rape and burn and murder in Italy, in the days of chivalry; the Italians called him Acuto, The Needle.

‘Yes, but Anne …’ He senses, from his glimpses of her, that she is unlikely to be moved by anything so impermanent as beauty. ‘These few years she has needed a husband, more than anything: a name, an establishment, a place from which she can stand and negotiate with the king. Now, Wyatt's married. What could he offer her?’

‘Verses?’ says the merchant. ‘It wasn't diplomacy took him out of England. It was that she was torturing him. He no longer dared be in the same room with her. The same castle. The same country.’ He shakes his head. ‘Aren't the English odd?’

‘Christ, aren't they?’ he says.

‘You must take care. The Lady's family, they are pushing a little against the limit of what can be done. They are saying, why wait for the Pope? Can we not make a marriage contract without him?’

‘It would seem to be the way forward.’

‘Try one of these sugared almonds.’

He smiles. Bonvisi says, ‘Tommaso, I may give you some advice? The cardinal is finished.’

‘Don't be so sure.’

‘Yes, and if you did not love him, you would know it was true.’

‘The cardinal has been nothing but good to me.’

‘But he must go north.’

‘The world will chase him. You ask the ambassadors. Ask Chapuys. Ask them who they report to. We have them at Esher, at Richmond. Toujours les dépêches. That's us.’

‘But that is what he is accused of! Running a country within the country!’

He sighs. ‘I know.’

‘And what will you do about it?’

‘Ask him to be more humble?’

Bonvisi laughs. ‘Ah, Thomas. Please, you know when he goes north you will be a man without a master. That is the point. You are seeing the king, but it is only for now, while he works out how to give the cardinal a pay-off that will keep him quiet. But then?’

He hesitates. ‘The king likes me.’

‘The king is an inconstant lover.’

‘Not to Anne.’

‘That is where I must warn you. Oh, not because of Guiett … not because of any gossip, any light thing said … but because it must all end soon … she will give way, she is just a woman … think how foolish a man would have been if he had linked his fortunes to those of the Lady's sister, who came before her.’

‘Yes, just think.’

He looks around the room. That's where the Lord Chancellor sat. On his left, the hungry merchants. On his right, the new ambassador. There, Humphrey Monmouth the heretic. There, Antonio Bonvisi. Here, Thomas Cromwell. And there are ghostly places set, for the Duke of Suffolk large and bland, for Norfolk jangling his holy medals and shouting ‘By the Mass!’ There is a place set for the king, and for the doughty little queen, famished in this penitential season, her belly quaking inside the stout armour of her robes. There is a place set for Lady Anne, glancing around with her restless black eyes, eating nothing, missing nothing, tugging at the pearls around her little neck. There is a place for William Tyndale, and one for the Pope; Clement looks at the candied quinces, too coarsely cut, and his Medici lip curls. And there sits Brother Martin Luther, greasy and fat: glowering at them all, and spitting out his fishbones.

A servant comes in. ‘Two young gentlemen are outside, master, asking for you by name.’

He looks up. ‘Yes?’

‘Master Richard Cromwell and Master Rafe. With servants from your household, waiting to take you home.’

He understands that the whole purpose of the evening has been to warn him: to warn him off. He will remember it, the fatal placement: if it proves fatal. That soft hiss and whisper, of stone destroying itself; that distant sound of walls sliding, of plaster crumbling, of rubble crashing on to fragile human skulls? That is the sound of the roof of Christendom, falling on the people below.

Bonvisi says, ‘You have a private army, Tommaso. I suppose you have to watch your back.’

‘You know I do.’ His glance sweeps the room: one last look. ‘Good night. It was a good supper. I liked the eels. Will you send your cook to see mine? I have a new sauce to brighten the season. One needs mace and ginger, some dried mint leaves chopped –’

His friend says, ‘I beg of you. I implore you to be careful.’

‘– a little, but a very little garlic –’

‘Wherever you dine next, pray do not –’

‘– and of breadcrumbs, a scant handful …’

‘– sit down with the Boleyns.’