Читать книгу Hilary Mantel Collection - Hilary Mantel - Страница 22

He arrives early at York Place. The baited gulls, penned in their keeping yards, are crying out to their free brothers on the river, who wheel screaming and diving over the palace walls. The carmen are pushing up from the river goods incoming, and the courts smell of baking bread. Some children are bringing fresh rushes, tied in bundles, and they greet him by name. For their civility, he gives each of them a coin, and they stop to talk. ‘So, you are going to the evil lady. She has bewitched the king, you know? Do you have a medal or a relic, master, to protect you?’

‘I had a medal. But I lost it.’

‘You should ask our cardinal,’ one child says. ‘He will give you another.’

The scent of the rushes is sharp and green; the morning is fine. The rooms of York Place are familiar to him, and as he passes through them towards the inner chambers he sees a half-familiar face and says, ‘Mark?’

The boy detaches himself from the wall where he is leaning. ‘You're about early. How are you?’

A sulky shrug.

‘It must feel strange to be back here at York Place, now the world is so altered.’

‘No.’

‘You don't miss my lord cardinal?’

‘No.’

‘You are happy?’

‘Yes.’

‘My lord will be pleased to know.’ To himself he says, as he moves away, you may never think of us, Mark, but we think of you. Or at least I do, I think of you calling me a felon and predicting my death. It is true that the cardinal always says, there are no safe places, there are no sealed rooms, you may as well stand on Cheapside shouting out your sins as confess to a priest anywhere in England. But when I spoke to the cardinal of killing, when I saw a shadow on the wall, there was no one to hear; so if Mark reckons I'm a murderer, that's only because he thinks I look like one.

Eight anterooms: in the last, where the cardinal should be, he finds Anne Boleyn. Look, there are Solomon and Sheba, unrolled again, back on the wall. There is a draught; Sheba eddies towards him, rosy, round, and he acknowledges her: Anselma, lady made of wool, I thought I'd never see you again.

He had sent word back to Antwerp, applied discreetly for news; Anselma was married, Stephen Vaughan said, and to a younger man, a banker. So if he drowns or anything, he said, let me know. Vaughan writes back: Thomas, come now, isn't England full of widows? And fresh young girls?

Sheba makes Anne look bad: sallow and sharp. She stands by the window, her fingers tugging and ripping at a sprig of rosemary. When she sees him, she drops it, and her hands dip back into her trailing sleeves.

In December, the king gave a banquet, to celebrate her father's elevation to be Earl of Wiltshire. The queen was elsewhere, and Anne sat where Katherine should sit. There was frost on the ground, frost in the atmosphere. They only heard of it, in the Wolsey household. The Duchess of Norfolk (who is always furious about something) was furious that her niece should have precedence. The Duchess of Suffolk, Henry's sister, refused to eat. Neither of these great ladies spoke to Boleyn's daughter. Nevertheless, Anne had taken her place as the first lady of the kingdom.

But now it's the end of Lent, and Henry has gone back to his wife; he hasn't the face to be with his concubine as we move towards the week of Christ's Passion. Her father is abroad, on diplomatic business; so is her brother George, now Lord Rochford; so is Thomas Wyatt, the poet whom she tortures. She's alone and bored at York Place; and she's reduced to sending for Thomas Cromwell, to see if he offers any amusement.

A flurry of little dogs – three of them – run away from her skirts, yapping, darting towards him. ‘Don't let them out,’ Anne says, and with practised and gentle hands he scoops them up – they are the kind of dogs, Bellas, with ragged ears and tiny wafting tails, that any merchant's wife would keep, across the Narrow Sea. By the time he has given them back to her, they have nibbled his fingers and his coat, licked his face and yearned towards him with goggling eyes: as if he were someone they had so much longed to meet.

Two of them he sets gently on the floor; the smallest he hands back to Anne. ‘Vous êtes gentil,’ she says, ‘and how my babies like you! I could not love, you know, those apes that Katherine keeps. Les singes enchaînés. Their little hands, their little necks fettered. My babies love me for myself.’

She's so small. Her bones are so delicate, her waist so narrow; if two law students make one cardinal, two Annes make one Katherine. Various women are sitting on low stools, sewing or rather pretending to sew. One of them is Mary Boleyn. She keeps her head down, as well she might. One of them is Mary Shelton, a bold pink-and-white Boleyn cousin, who looks him over, and – quite obviously – says to herself, Mother of God, is that the best Lady Carey thought she could get? Back in the shadows there is another girl, who has her face turned away, trying to hide. He does not know who she is, but he understands why she's looking fixedly at the floor. Anne seems to inspire it; now that he's put the dogs down, he's doing the same thing.

‘Alors,’ Anne says softly, ‘suddenly, everything is about you. The king does not cease to quote Master Cromwell.’ She pronounces it as if she can't manage the English: Cremuel. ‘He is so right, he is at all points correct … Also, let us not forget, Maître Cremuel makes us laugh.’

‘I see the king does sometimes laugh. But you, madame? In your situation? As you find yourself?’

A black glance, over her shoulder. ‘I suppose I seldom. Laugh. If I think. But I had not thought.’

‘This is what your life has come to.’

Dusty fragments, dried leaves and stems, have fallen down her skirts. She stares out at the morning.

‘Let me put it this way,’ he says. ‘Since my lord cardinal was reduced, how much progress have you seen in your cause?’

‘None.’

‘No one knows the workings of Christian countries like my lord cardinal. No one is more intimate with kings. Think how bound to you he would be, Lady Anne, if you were the means of erasing these misunderstandings and restoring him to the king's grace.’

She doesn't answer.

‘Think,’ he says. ‘He is the only man in England who can obtain for you what you need.’

‘Very well. Make his case. You have five minutes.’

‘Otherwise, I can see you're really busy.’

Anne looks at him with dislike, and speaks in French. ‘What do you know of how I occupy my hours?’

‘My lady, are we having this conversation in English or French? Your choice entirely. But let's make it one or the other, yes?’

He sees a movement from the corner of his eye; the half-hidden girl has raised her face. She is plain and pale; she looks shocked.

‘You are indifferent?’ Anne says.

‘Yes.’

‘Very well. In French.’

He tells her again: the cardinal is the only man who can deliver a good verdict from the Pope. He is the only man who can deliver the king's conscience, and deliver it clean.

She listens. He will say that for her. He has always wondered how well women can hear, beneath the muffling folds of their veils and hoods, but Anne does give the impression that she is hearing what he has said. She waits him out, at least; she doesn't interrupt, until at last she does: so, she says, if the king wants it, and the cardinal wants it, he who was formerly the chief subject in the kingdom, then I must say, Master Cremuel, it is all taking a marvellous long while to come to pass!

From her corner her sister adds, barely audible, ‘And she's not getting any younger.’

Not a stitch have the women added to their sewing since he has been in the room.

‘One may resume?’ he asks, persuading her. ‘There is a moment left?’

‘Oh yes,’ Anne says. ‘But a moment only: in Lent I ration my patience.’

He tells her to dismiss the slanderers who claim that the cardinal obstructed her cause. He tells her how it distresses the cardinal that the king should not have his heart's desire, which was ever the cardinal's desire too. He tells her how all the king's subjects repose their hopes in her, for an heir to the throne; and how he is sure they are right to do so. He reminds her of the many gracious letters she has written to the cardinal in times past: all of which he has on file.

‘Very nice,’ she says, when he stops. ‘Very nice, Master Cremuel, but try again. One thing. One simple thing we asked of the cardinal, and he would not. One simple thing.’

‘You know it was not simple.’

‘Perhaps I am a simple person,’ Anne says. ‘Do you feel I am?’

‘You may be. I hardly know you.’

The reply incenses her. He sees her sister smirk. You may go, Anne says: and Mary jumps up, and follows him out.

Once again Mary's cheeks are flushed, her lips are parted. She's brought her sewing with her, which he thinks is strange; but perhaps, if she leaves it behind, Anne pulls the stitches out. ‘Out of breath again, Lady Carey?’

‘We thought she might run up and slap you. Will you come again? Shelton and I can't wait.’

‘She can stand it,’ he says, and Mary says, indeed, she likes a skirmish with someone on her own level. What are you working there? he asks, and she shows him. It is Anne's new coat of arms. On everything, I suppose, he says, and she smiles broadly, oh yes, her petticoats, her handkerchiefs, her coifs and her veils; she has garments that no one ever wore before, just so she can have her arms sewn on, not to mention the wall hangings, the table napkins …

‘And how are you?’

She looks down, glance swivelling away from him. ‘Worn down. Frayed a little, you might say. Christmas was …’

‘They quarrelled. So one hears.’

‘First he quarrelled with Katherine. Then he came here for sympathy. Anne said, what! I told you not to argue with Katherine, you know you always lose. If he were not a king,’ she says with relish, ‘one could pity him. For the dog's life they lead him.’

‘There have been rumours that Anne –’

‘Yes, but she's not. I would be the first to know. If she thickened by an inch, it would be me who let out her clothes. Besides, she can't, because they don't. They haven't.’

‘She'd tell you?’

‘Of course – out of spite!’ Still Mary will not meet his eyes. But she seems to feel she owes him information. ‘When they are alone, she lets him unlace her bodice.’

‘At least he doesn't call you to do it.’

‘He pulls down her shift and kisses her breasts.’

‘Good man if he can find them.’

Mary laughs; a boisterous, unsisterly laugh. It must be audible within, because almost at once the door opens and the small hiding girl manoeuvres herself around it. Her face is grave, her reserve complete; her skin is so fine that it is almost translucent. ‘Lady Carey,’ she says, ‘Lady Anne wants you.’

She speaks their names as if she is making introductions between two cockroaches.

Mary snaps, oh, by the saints! and turns on her heel, whipping her train behind her with the ease of long practice.

To his surprise, the small pale girl catches his glance; behind the retreating back of Mary Boleyn, she raises her own eyes to Heaven.

Walking away – eight antechambers back to the rest of his day – he knows that Anne has stepped forward to a place where he can see her, the morning light lying along the curve of her throat. He sees the thin arch of her eyebrow, her smile, the turn of her head on her long slender neck. He sees her speed, intelligence and rigour. He didn't think she would help the cardinal, but what do you lose by asking? He thinks, it is the first proposition I have put to her; probably not the last.

There was a moment when Anne gave him all her attention: her skewering dark glance. The king, too, knows how to look; blue eyes, their mildness deceptive. Is this how they look at each other? Or in some other way? For a second he understands it; then he doesn't. He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn't. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

In Lent, there are butchers who will sell you red meat, if you know where to go. At Austin Friars he goes down to talk to his kitchen staff, and says to his chief man, ‘The cardinal is sick, he is dispensed from Lent.’

His cook takes off his hat. ‘By the Pope?’

‘By me.’ He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, ‘Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?’

A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, ‘At this moment, master, I would have to say …’

‘No, but suppose I were making my way to Gray's Inn … Can you picture to yourself? Carrying a folio of papers and an inkhorn?’

‘I do suppose a clerk would be carrying those.’

‘So you can't picture it?’

Thurston takes off his hat again, and turns it inside out. He looks at it as if his brains might be inside it, or at least some prompt as to what to say next. ‘I see how you would look like a lawyer. Not like a murderer, no. But if you will forgive me, master, you always look like a man who knows how to cut up a carcase.’

He has the kitchen make beef olives for the cardinal, stuffed with sage and marjoram, neatly trussed and placed side by side in trays, so that the cooks at Richmond need do nothing but bake them. Show me where it says in the Bible, a man shall not eat beef olives in March.

He thinks of Lady Anne, her unslaked appetite for a fight; the sad ladies about her. He sends those ladies some flat baskets of small tarts, made of preserved oranges and honey. To Anne herself he sends a dish of almond cream. It is flavoured with rose-water and decorated with the preserved petals of roses, and with candied violets. He is above riding across the country, carrying food himself; but not that much above it. It's not so many years since the Frescobaldi kitchen in Florence; or perhaps it is, but his memory is clear, exact. He was clarifying calf's-foot jelly, chatting away in his mixture of French, Tuscan and Putney, when somebody shouted, ‘Tommaso, they want you upstairs.’ His movements were unhurried as he nodded to a kitchen child, who brought him a basin of water. He washed his hands, dried them on a linen cloth. He took off his apron and hung it on a peg. For all he knows, it is there still.

He saw a young boy – younger than him – on hands and knees, scrubbing the steps. He sang as he worked:

‘Scaramella va alla guerra Colla lancia et la rotella La zombero boro borombetta, La boro borombo …’

‘If you please, Giacomo,’ he said. To let him pass, the boy moved aside, into the curve of the wall. A shift of the light wiped the curiosity from his face, blanking it, fading his past into the past, washing the future clean. Scaramella is off to war … But I've been to war, he thought.

He had gone upstairs. In his ears the roll and stutter of the song's military drum. He had gone upstairs and never come down again. In a corner of the Frescobaldi counting house, a table was waiting for him. Scaramella fa la gala, he hummed. He had taken his place. Sharpened a quill. His thoughts bubbled and swirled, Tuscan, Putney, Castilian oaths. But when he committed his thoughts to paper they came out in Latin and perfectly smooth.

Even before he walks in from the kitchens at Austin Friars, the women of the house know that he has been to see Anne.

‘So,’ Johane demands. ‘Tall or short?’

‘Neither.’

‘I'd heard she was very tall. Sallow, is she not?’

‘Yes, sallow.’

‘They say she is graceful. Dances well.’

‘We did not dance.’

Mercy says, ‘But what do you think? A friend to the gospel?’

He shrugs. ‘We did not pray.’

Alice, his little niece: ‘What was she wearing?’

Ah, I can tell you that; he prices and sources her, hood to hem, foot to fingertip. For her headdress Anne affects the French style, the round hood flattering the fine bones of her face. He explains this, and though his tone is cool, mercantile, the women somehow do not appreciate it.

‘You don't like her, do you?’ Alice says, and he says it's not for him to have an opinion; or you either, Alice, he says, hugging her and making her giggle. The child Jo says, our master is in a good mood. This squirrel trim, Mercy says, and he says, Calabrian. Alice says, oh, Calabrian, and wrinkles her nose; Johane remarks, I must say, Thomas, it seems you got close.

‘Are her teeth good?’ Mercy says.

‘For God's sake, woman: when she sinks them into me, I'll let you know.’

When the cardinal had heard that the Duke of Norfolk was coming out to Richmond to tear him with his teeth, he had laughed and said, ‘Marry, Thomas, time to be going.’

But to go north, the cardinal needs funding. The problem is put to the king's council, who fall out, and continue the quarrel in his hearing. ‘After all,’ Charles Brandon says, ‘one can't let an archbishop creep away to his enthronement like a servant who's stolen the spoons.’

‘He's done more than steal the spoons,’ Norfolk says. ‘He's eaten the dinner that would have fed all England. He's filched the tablecloth, by God, and drunk the cellar dry.’

The king can be elusive. One day when he thinks he has an appointment to meet Henry, he gets Master Secretary instead. ‘Sit down,’ Gardiner says. ‘Sit down and listen to me. Contain yourself in patience, while I put you straight on a few matters.’

He watches him ranging to and fro, Stephen the noonday devil. Gardiner is a man with bones loose-jointed, his lines flowing with menace; he has great hairy hands, and knuckles which crack when he folds his right fist into his left palm.

He takes away the menace conveyed, and the message. Pausing in the doorway, he says mildly, ‘Your cousin sends greetings.’

Gardiner stares at him. His eyebrows bristle, like a dog's hackles. He thinks that Cromwell presumes –

‘Not the king,’ he says soothingly. ‘Not His Majesty. I mean your cousin Richard Williams.’

Aghast, Gardiner says, ‘That old tale!’

‘Oh, come,’ he says. ‘It's no disgrace to be a royal bastard. Or so we think, in my family.’

‘In your family? What grasp have they on propriety? I have no interest in this young person, recognise no kinship with him, and I will do nothing for him.’

‘Truly, you don't need to. He calls himself Richard Cromwell now.’ As he is going – really going, this time – he adds, ‘Don't let it keep you awake, Stephen. I have been into the matter. You may be related to Richard, but you are not related to me.’

He smiles. Inside, he is beside himself with rage, running with it, as if his blood were thin and full of dilute venom like the uncoloured blood of a snake. As soon as he gets home to Austin Friars, he hugs Rafe Sadler and makes his hair stand up in spikes. ‘Heaven direct me: boy or hedgehog? Rafe, Richard, I am feeling penitent.’

‘It is the season,’ Rafe says.

‘I want,’ he says, ‘to become perfectly calm. I want to be able to get into the coop without ruffling the chickens' feathers. I want to be less like Uncle Norfolk, and more like Marlinspike.’

He has a long soothing talk in Welsh with Richard, who laughs at him because old words are fading from his memory, and he is forever sliding through bits of English, with a sly borderlands intonation. He gives his little nieces the pearl and coral bracelets he bought them weeks ago, but forgot to give. He goes down to the kitchen and makes suggestions, all of them cheerful.

He calls his household staff together, his clerks. ‘We need to plan it,’ he says, ‘how the cardinal will be made comfortable on the road north. He wants to go slowly so the people can admire him. He needs to arrive in Peterborough for Holy Week, and from there shift by stages to Southwell, where he will plan his further progress to York. The archbishop's palace at Southwell has good rooms, but still we may need to get builders in …’

George Cavendish has told him that the cardinal has taken to spending time in prayer. There are some monks at Richmond whose company he has sought; they spell out to him the value of thorns in the flesh and salt in the wound, the merits of bread and water and the sombre delights of self-flagellation. ‘Oh, that settles it,’ he says, annoyed. ‘We have to get him on the road. He'd be better off in Yorkshire.’

He says to Norfolk, ‘Well, my lord, how shall we do this? Do you want him gone or not? Yes? Then come to the king with me.’

Norfolk grunts. Messages are sent. A day or so later, they find themselves together in an antechamber. They wait. Norfolk paces. ‘Oh, by St Jude!’ the duke says. ‘Shall we get some fresh air? Or don't you lawyers need it?’

They stroll in the gardens; or, he strolls, the duke stamps. ‘When do the flowers come out?’ the duke says. ‘When I was a boy, we never had flowers. It was Buckingham, you know, who brought in this knot garden sort of stuff. Oh dear, it was fancy!’

The Duke of Buckingham, keen gardener, had his head cut off for treason. That was 1521: less than ten years ago. It seems sad to mention it now, in the presence of the spring: singing from every bush, every bough.

A summons is received. As they proceed to their interview, the duke baulks and jibs; his eye rolls and his nostrils distend, his breath comes short. When the duke lays a hand on his shoulder, he is forced to slow his pace, and they scuffle along – he resisting his impulse to pull away – like two war veterans in a beggars' procession. Scaramella va alla guerra … Norfolk's hand is trembling.

But it is only when they get into the presence that he fully understands how it rattles the old duke to be in a room with Henry Tudor. The gilded ebullience makes him shrink inside his clothes. Henry greets them cordially. He says it is a wonderful day and pretty much a wonderful world. He spins around the room, arms wide, reciting some verses of his own composition. He will talk about anything except the cardinal. Frustrated, Norfolk turns a dusky red, and begins to mutter. Dismissed, they are backing out. Henry calls, ‘Oh, Cromwell …’

He and the duke exchange glances. ‘By the Mass …’ mutters the duke.

Hand behind his back, he indicates, be gone, my lord Norfolk, I'll catch up with you later.

Henry stands with arms folded, eyes on the ground. He says nothing till he, Cromwell, has come close. ‘A thousand pounds?’ Henry whispers.

It is on the tip of his tongue to say, that will be a start on the ten thousand which, to the best of my knowledge and belief, you have owed the Cardinal of York for a decade now.

He doesn't say it, of course. At such moments, Henry expects you to fall to your knees – duke, earl, commoner, light and heavy, old and young. He does it; scar tissue pulls; few of us, by our forties, are not carrying injuries.

The king signals, you can get up. He adds, his tone curious, ‘The Duke of Norfolk shows you many marks of friendship and favour.’

The hand on the shoulder, he means: the minute and unexpected vibration of ducal palm against plebeian muscle and bone. ‘The duke is careful to preserve all distinctions of rank.’ Henry seems relieved.

An unwelcome thought creeps into his head: what if you, Henry Tudor, were to be taken ill and fall at my feet? Am I allowed to pick you up, or must I send for an earl to do it? Or a bishop?

Henry walks away. He turns and says, in a small voice, ‘Every day I miss the Cardinal of York.’ There is a pause. He whispers, take the money with our blessing. Don't tell the duke. Don't tell anyone. Ask your master to pray for me. Tell him it is the best I can do.

The thanks he makes, still from his kneeling situation, is eloquent and extensive. Henry looks at him bleakly and says, dear God, Master Cromwell, you can talk, can't you?

He goes out, face composed, fighting the impulse to smile broadly. Scaramella fa la gala … ‘Every day I miss the Cardinal of York.’

Norfolk says, what, what, what did he say? Oh, nothing, he says. Just some special hard words he wants me to convey to the cardinal.

The itinerary is drawn up. The cardinal's effects are put on coastal barges, to be taken to Hull and go overland from there. He himself has beaten the bargees down to a reasonable rate.

He tells Richard, you know, a thousand pounds isn't much when you have a cardinal to move. Richard asks, ‘How much of your own money is sunk in this enterprise?’

Some debts should never be tallied, he says. ‘I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.’

To Cavendish he says, ‘How many servants is he taking?’

‘Only a hundred and sixty.’

‘Only.’ He nods. ‘Right.’

Hendon. Royston. Huntingdon. Peterborough. He has men riding ahead, with precise instructions.

That last night, Wolsey gives him a package. Inside it is a small and hard object, a seal or ring. ‘Open it when I'm gone.’

People keep walking in and out of the cardinal's private chamber, carrying chests and bundles of papers. Cavendish wanders through, holding a silver monstrance.

‘You will come north?’ the cardinal says.

‘I'll come to fetch you, the minute the king summons you back.’ He believes and does not believe that this will happen.

The cardinal gets to his feet. There is a constraint in the air. He, Cromwell, kneels for a blessing. The cardinal holds out a hand to be kissed. His turquoise ring is missing. The fact does not evade him. For a moment, the cardinal's hand rests on his shoulder, fingers spread, thumb in the hollow of his collarbone.

It is time he was gone. So much has been said between them that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral. This is not the occasion to embrace. If the cardinal has no more eloquence to offer, he surely has none. Before he has reached the door of the room the cardinal has turned back to the fireplace. He pulls his chair to the blaze, and raises a hand to shield his face; but his hand is not between himself and the fire, it is between himself and the closing door.

He makes for the courtyard. He falters; in a smoky recess where the light has extinguished itself, he leans against the wall. He is crying. He says to himself, let George Cavendish not come by and see me, and write it down and make it into a play.

He swears softly, in many languages: at life, at himself for giving way to its demands. Servants walk past, saying, ‘Master Cromwell's horse is here for him! Master Cromwell's escort at the gate!’ He waits till he is in command of himself, and exits, disbursing coins.

When he gets home, the servants ask him, are we to paint out the cardinal's coat of arms? No, by God, he says. On the contrary, repaint it. He stands back for a look. ‘The choughs could look more lively. And we need a better scarlet for the hat.’

He hardly sleeps. He dreams of Liz. He wonders if she would know him, the man he vows that soon he will be: adamant, mild, a keeper of the king's peace.

Towards dawn, he dozes; he wakes up thinking, the cardinal just now will be mounting his horse; why am I not with him? It is 5 April. Johane meets him on the stairs; chastely, she kisses his cheek.

‘Why does God test us?’ she whispers.

He murmurs, ‘I do not feel we will pass.’

He says, perhaps I should go up to Southwell myself? I'll go for you, Rafe says. He gives him a list. Have the whole of the archbishop's palace scrubbed out. My lord will be bringing his own bed. Draft in kitchen staff from the King's Arms. Check the stabling. Get in musicians. Last time I passed through I noticed some pigsties up against the palace wall. Find out the owner, pay him off and knock them down. Don't drink in the Crown; the ale is worse than my father's.

Richard says, ‘Sir … it is time to let the cardinal go.’

‘This is a tactical retreat, not a rout.’

They think he's gone but he's only gone into a back room. He skulks among the files. He hears Richard say, ‘His heart is leading him.’

‘It is an experienced heart.’

‘But can a general organise a retreat when he doesn't know where the enemy is? The king is so double in this matter.’

‘One could retreat straight into his arms.’

‘Jesus. You think our master is double too?’

‘Triple at least,’ Rafe says. ‘Look, there was no profit for him, ever, in deserting the old man – what would he get but the name of deserter? Perhaps something is to be got by sticking fast. For all of us.’

‘Off you go then, swine-boy. Who else would think about the pigsties? Thomas More, for instance, would never think about them.’

‘Or he would be exhorting the pig-keeper, my good man, Easter approacheth –’

‘– hast thou prepared to receive Holy Communion?’ Rafe laughs. ‘By the way, Richard, hast thou?’

Richard says, ‘I can get a piece of bread any day in the week.’

During Holy Week, reports come in from Peterborough: more people have crowded in to look at Wolsey than have been in that town in living memory. As the cardinal moves north he follows him on the map of these islands he keeps in his head. Stamford, Grantham, Newark; the travelling court arrives in Southwell on 28 April. He, Cromwell, writes to soothe him, he writes to warn him. He is afraid that the Boleyns, or Norfolk, or both, have found some way of implanting a spy in the cardinal's retinue.

The ambassador Chapuys, hurrying away from an audience with the king, has touched his sleeve, drawn him aside. ‘Monsieur Cremuel, I thought to call at your house. We are neighbours, you know.’

‘I should like to welcome you.’

‘But people inform me you are often with the king now, which is pleasant, is it not? Your old master, I hear from him every week. He has become solicitous about the queen's health. He asks if she is in good spirits, and begs her to consider that soon she will be restored to the king's bosom. And bed.’ Chapuys smiles. He is enjoying himself. ‘The concubine will not help him. We know you have tried with her and failed. So now he turns back to the queen.’

He is forced to ask, ‘And the queen says?’

‘She says, I hope God in his mercy finds it possible to forgive the cardinal, for I never can.’ Chapuys waits. He does not speak. The ambassador resumes: ‘I think you are sensible of the tangle of wreckage that will be left if this divorce is granted, or, shall we say, somehow extorted from His Holiness? The Emperor, in defence of his aunt, may make war on England. Your merchant friends will lose their livelihoods, and many will lose their lives. Your Tudor king may go down, and the old nobility come into their own.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘I am telling all Englishmen.’

‘Door-to-door?’

He is meant to pass to the cardinal this message: that he has come to the end of his credit with the Emperor. What will that do but drive him into an appeal to the French king? Either way, treason lies.

He imagines the cardinal among the canons at Southwell, in his chair in the chapter house, presiding beneath the high vaulting like a prince at his ease in some forest glade, wreathed by carvings of leaves and flowers. They are so supple that it is as if the columns, the ribs have quickened, as if stone has burst into florid life; the capitals are decked with berries, finials are twisted stems, roses entangle the shafts, flowers and seeds flourish on one stalk; from the foliage, faces peers, the faces of dogs, of hares, of goats. There are human faces, too, so lifelike that perhaps they can change their expression; perhaps they stare down, astonished, at the portly scarlet form of his patron; and perhaps in the silence of the night, when the canons are sleeping, the stone men whistle and sing.

In Italy he learned a memory system and furnished it with pictures. Some are drawn from wood and field, from hedgerow and copse: shy hiding animals, eyes bright in the undergrowth. Some are foxes and deer, some are griffins, dragons. Some are men and women: nuns, warriors, doctors of the church. In their hands he puts unlikely objects, St Ursula a crossbow, St Jerome a scythe, while Plato bears a soup ladle and Achilles a dozen damsons in a wooden bowl. It is no use hoping to remember with the help of common objects, familiar faces. One needs startling juxtapositions, images that are more or less peculiar, ridiculous, even indecent. When you have made the images, you place them about the world in locations you choose, each one with its parcel of words, of figures, which they will yield you on demand. At Greenwich, a shaven cat may peep at you from behind a cupboard; at the palace of Westminster, a snake may leer down from a beam and hiss your name.

Some of these images are flat, and you can walk on them. Some are clothed in skin and walk around in a room, but perhaps they are men with their heads on backwards, or with tufted tails like the leopards in coats of arms. Some scowl at you like Norfolk, or gape at you, like my lord Suffolk, with bewilderment. Some speak, some quack. He keeps them, in strict order, in the gallery of his mind's eye.

Perhaps it is because he is used to making these images that his head is peopled with the cast of a thousand plays, ten thousand interludes. It is because of this practice that he tends to glimpse his dead wife lurking in a stairwell, her white face upturned, or whisking around a corner of the Austin Friars, or the house at Stepney. Now the image is beginning to merge with that of her sister Johane, and everything that belonged to Liz is beginning to belong to her: her half-smile, her questioning glance, her way of being naked. Till he says, enough, and scrubs her out of his mind.

Rafe rides up the country with messages to Wolsey too secret to put into letters. He would go himself, but though Parliament is prorogued he cannot get away, because he is afraid of what might be said about Wolsey if he is not there to defend him; and at short notice the king might want him, or Lady Anne. ‘And although I am not with you in person,’ he writes, ‘yet be assured I am, and during my life shall be, with your grace in heart, spirit, prayer and service …’

The cardinal replies: he is ‘mine own good, trusty and most assured refuge in this my calamity’. He is ‘mine own entirely beloved Cromwell’.

He writes to ask for quails. He writes to ask for flower seeds. ‘Seeds?’ Johane says. ‘He is planning to take root?’

Twilight finds the king melancholy. Another day of regress, in his campaign to be a married man again; he denies, of course, that he is married to the queen. ‘Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I need to find my way to ownership of those …’ He looks sidelong, not wishing to say what he means. ‘I understand there are legal difficulties. I do not pretend to understand them. And before you begin, I do not want them explained.’

The cardinal has endowed his Oxford college, as also the school at Ipswich, with land that will produce an income in perpetuity. Henry wants their silver and gold plate, their libraries, their yearly revenues and the land that produces the revenues; and he does not see why he should not have what he wants. The wealth of twenty-nine monasteries has gone into those foundations – suppressed by permission of the Pope, on condition that the proceeds were used for the colleges. But do you know, Henry says, I am beginning to care very little about the Pope and his permissions?

It is early summer. The evenings are long and the grass, the air, scented. You would think that a man like Henry, on a night like this, could go to whichever bed he pleases. The court is full of eager women. But after this interview he will walk in the garden with Lady Anne, her hand resting on his arm, deep in conversation; then he will go to his empty bed, and she, one presumes, to hers.

When the king asks him what he hears from the cardinal, he says that he misses the light of His Majesty's countenance; that preparations for his enthronement at York are in hand. ‘Then why doesn't he get to York? It seems to me he delays and delays.’ Henry glares at him. ‘I will say this for you. You stick by your man.’

‘I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness. Why would I not?’

‘And you have no other master,’ the king says. ‘My lord Suffolk asks me, where does the fellow spring from? I tell him there are Cromwells in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire – landed people, or once they were. I suppose you are from some unfortunate branch of that family?’

‘No.’

‘You may not know your own forebears. I shall ask the heralds to look into it.’

‘Your Majesty is kind. But they will have scant success.’

The king is exasperated. He is failing to take advantage of what is on offer: a pedigree, however meagre. ‘My lord cardinal told me you were an orphan. He told me you were brought up in a monastery.’

‘Ah. That was one of his little stories.’

‘He told me little stories?’ Several expressions chase each other across the king's face: annoyance, amusement, a wish to call back times past. ‘I suppose he did. He told me that you had a loathing of those in the religious life. That was why he found you diligent in his work.’

‘That was not the reason.’ He looks up. ‘May I speak?’ ‘Oh, for God's sake,’ Henry cries. ‘I wish someone would.’ He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that's nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war. Now that Wolsey's gone, there's not much scope for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe. And if you send for a priest, what does it come back to? To love; to Anne; to what you want and can't have.

‘If you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing than buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct. Nor do I take the monasteries to be the repositories of learning some believe they are. Was Grocyn a monk, or Colet, or Linacre, or any of our great scholars? They were university men. The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don't even teach them dog Latin. I don't grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness – their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.’

Henry appears to look straight through him, to the wall behind. He waits. Henry says, ‘Dogholes, then?’

He smiles.

Henry says, ‘Our history … As you know, I am gathering evidence. Manuscripts. Opinions. Comparisons, with how matters are ordered in other countries. Perhaps you would consult with those learned gentlemen. Put a little direction into their efforts. Talk to Dr Cranmer – he will tell you what is needed. I could make good use of the money that flows yearly to Rome. King François is richer by far than I am. I do not have a tenth of his subjects. He taxes them as he pleases. For my part, I must call Parliament. If I do not, there are riots.’ He adds, bitterly, ‘And riots if I do.’

‘Take no lessons from King François,’ he says. ‘He likes war too much, and trade too little.’

Henry smiles faintly. ‘You do not think so, but to me that is the remit of a king.’

‘There is more tax to be raised when trade is good. And if taxes are resisted, there may be other ways.’

Henry nods. ‘Very well. Begin with the colleges. Sit down with my lawyers.’

Harry Norris is there to show him out of the king's private rooms. Not smiling for once, rather stern, he says, ‘I wouldn't be his tax collector.’

He thinks, are the most remarkable moments of my life to be spent under the scrutiny of Henry Norris?

‘He killed his father's best men. Empson, Dudley. Didn't the cardinal get one of their houses?’

A spider scuttles from under a stool and presents him with a fact. ‘Empson's house on Fleet Street. Granted the ninth of October, the first year of this reign.’

‘This glorious reign,’ Norris says: as if he were issuing a correction.

Gregory is fifteen as summer begins. He sits a horse beautifully, and there are good reports of his swordsmanship. His Greek … well, his Greek is where it was.

But he has a problem. ‘People in Cambridge are laughing at my greyhounds.’

‘Why?’ The black dogs are a matched pair. They have curving muscled necks and dainty feet; they keep their eyes lowered, mild and demure, till they sight prey.

‘They say, why would you have dogs that people can't see at night? Only felons have dogs like that. They say I hunt in the forests, against the law. They say I hunt badgers, like a churl.’

‘What do you want?’ he asks. ‘White ones, or some spots of colour?’

‘Either would be correct.’

‘I'll take your black dogs.’ Not that he has time to go out, but Richard or Rafe will use them.

‘But what if people laugh?’

‘Really, Gregory,’ Johane says. ‘This is your father. I assure you, no one will dare laugh.’

When the weather is too wet to hunt, Gregory sits poring over The Golden Legend; he likes the lives of the saints. ‘Some of these things are true,’ he says, ‘some not.’ He reads Le Morte d'Arthur, and because it is the new edition they crowd around him, looking over his shoulder at the title page. ‘Here beginneth the first book of the most noble and worthy prince King Arthur sometime King of Great Britain …’ In the forefront of the picture, two couples embrace. On a high-stepping horse is a man with a mad hat, made of coiled tubes like fat serpents. Alice says, sir, did you wear a hat like that when you were young, and he says, I had a different colour for each day in the week, but mine were bigger.

Behind this man, a woman rides pillion. ‘Do you think this represents Lady Anne?’ Gregory asks. ‘They say the king does not like to be parted from her, so he perches her up behind him like a farmer's wife.’ The woman has big eyes, and looks sick from jolting; it might just be Anne. There is a small castle, not much taller than a man, with a plank for a drawbridge. The birds, circling above, look like flying daggers. Gregory says, ‘Our king takes his descent from this Arthur. He was never really dead but waited in the forest biding his time, or possibly in a lake. He is several centuries old. Merlin is a wizard. He comes later. You will see. There are twenty-one chapters. If it keeps on raining I mean to read them all. Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.’

When the king next calls him to court, he wants a message sent to Wolsey. A Breton merchant whose ship was seized by the English eight years ago is complaining he has not had the compensation promised. No one can find the paperwork. It was the cardinal who handled the case – will he remember it? ‘I'm sure he will,’ he says. ‘That will be the ship with powdered pearls for ballast, the hold packed with unicorns' horns?’

God forbid! says Charles Brandon; but the king laughs and says, ‘That will be the one.’

‘If the sums are in doubt, or indeed the whole case, may I look after it?’

The king hesitates. ‘I'm not sure you have a locus standi in the matter.’

It is at this moment that Brandon, quite unexpectedly, gives him a testimonial. ‘Harry, let him. When this fellow has finished, the Breton will be paying you.’

Dukes revolve in their spheres. When they confer, it is not for pleasure in each other's society; they like to be surrounded by their own courts, by men who reflect them and are subservient to them. For pleasure, they are as likely to be found with a kennel-man as another duke; so it is that he spends an amiable hour with Brandon, looking over the king's hounds. It is not yet the season for hunting the hart, so the running dogs are well fed in their kennels; their musical barking rises into the evening air, and the tracking dogs, silent as they are trained to be, rise on their hind legs and watch, dripping saliva, the progress of their suppers. The kennel children are carrying baskets of bread and bones, buckets of offal and basins of pigs'-blood pottage. Charles Brandon inhales, appreciative: like a dowager in a rose garden.

A huntsman calls forward a favourite bitch, white patched with chestnut, Barbada, four years old. He straddles her and pulls back her head to show her eyes, clouded with a fine film. He will hate to kill her, but he doubts she will be much use this season. He, Cromwell, cups the bitch's jaw in his hand. ‘You can draw off the membrane with a curved needle. I've seen it done. You need a steady hand and to be quick. She doesn't like it, but then she won't like to be blind.’ He runs his hand over her ribs, feels the panicked throb of her little animal heart. ‘The needle must be very fine. And just this length.’ He shows them, between finger and thumb. ‘Let me talk to your smith.’

Suffolk looks sideways at him. ‘You're a useful sort of man.’

They walk away. The duke says, ‘Look here. The problem is my wife.’ He waits. ‘I have always wanted Henry to have what he wants, I have always been loyal to him. Even when he was talking about cutting my head off because I'd married his sister. But now, what am I to do? Katherine is the queen. Surely? My wife was always a friend of hers. She's beginning to talk of, I don't know, I'd give my life for the queen, that sort of thing. And for Norfolk's niece to have precedence over my wife, who was Queen of France – we can't live with it. You see?’

He nods. I see. ‘Besides,’ the duke says, ‘I hear Wyatt is due back from Calais.’ Yes, and? ‘I wonder if I ought to tell him. Tell Henry, I mean. Poor devil.’

‘My lord, leave it alone,’ he says. The duke lapses into what, in another man, you would call silent thought.

Summer: the king is hunting. If he wants him, he has to chase him, and if he is sent for, he goes. Henry visits, on his summer progress, his friends in Wiltshire, in Sussex, in Kent, or stays at his own houses, or the ones he has taken from the cardinal. Sometimes, even now, the queen in her stout little person rides out with a bow, when the king hunts within one of his great parks, or in some lord's park, where the deer are driven to the archers. Lady Anne rides too – on separate occasions – and enjoys the pursuit. But there is a season to leave the ladies at home, and ride into the forest with the trackers and the running hounds; to rise before dawn when the light is clouded like a pearl; to consult with the huntsman, and then unharbour the chosen stag. You do not know where the chase will end, or when.

Harry Norris says to him, laughing, your turn soon, Master Cromwell, if he continues to favour you as he does. A word of advice: as the day begins, and you ride out, pick a ditch. Picture it in your mind. When he has worn out three good horses, when the horn is blowing for another chase, you will be dreaming of that ditch, you will imagine lying down in it: dead leaves and cool ditch-water will be all you desire.

He looks at Norris: his charming self-deprecation. He thinks, you were with my cardinal at Putney, when he fell on his knees in the dirt; did you offer the pictures in your head to the court, to the world, to the students of Gray's Inn? For if not you, then who?

In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment, before you don't recognise her, you will think she is someone you know.

At Austin Friars, there is little chance to be alone, or alone with just one person. Every letter of the alphabet watches you. In the counting house there is young Thomas Avery, whom you are training up to take a grip on your private finances. Midway through the letters comes Marlinspike, strolling in the garden with his observant golden eyes. Towards the end of the alphabet comes Thomas Wriothesley pronounced Risley. He is a bright young man, twenty-five or so and well connected, son of York Herald, nephew to Garter King-at-Arms. In Wolsey's household he worked under your direction, then was carried away by Gardiner, as Master Secretary, to work for him. Now he is sometimes at court, sometimes at Austin Friars. He's Stephen's spy, the children say – Richard and Rafe.

Master Wriothesley is tall, with red-blond hair, but without the propensity of others of that complexion – the king, let's say – to grow pink when gratified, or mottled when crossed; he is always pale and cool, always his handsome self, always composed. At Trinity Hall he was a great actor in the students' plays, and he has certain affectations, a consciousness of himself, of how he appears; they mimic him behind his back, Richard and Rafe, and say, ‘My name is Wri-oth-es-ley, but as I wish to spare you effort, you can call me Risley.’ They say, he only complicates his name like that so he can come here and sign things, and use up our ink. They say, you know Gardiner, he is too angry to use long names, Gardiner just calls him ‘you’. They are pleased with this joke and for a while, every time Mr W appears, they shout, ‘It's you!’

Have mercy, he says, on Master Wriothesley. Cambridge men should have our respect.

He would like to ask them, Richard, Rafe, Master Wriothesley call me Risley: do I look like a murderer? There is a boy who says I do.

This year, there has been no summer plague. Londoners give thanks on their knees. On St John's Eve, the bonfires burn all night. At dawn, white lilies are carried in from the fields. The city daughters with shivering fingers weave them into drooping wreaths, to pin on the city's gates, and on city doors.

He thinks about that little girl like a white flower; the girl with Lady Anne, who manoeuvred herself around the door. It would have been easy to find out her name, except he didn't, because he was busy finding out secrets from Mary. Next time he sees her … but what's the use of thinking of it? She will come of some noble house. He had meant to write to Gregory and say, I have seen such a sweet girl, I will find out who she is and, if I steer our family adroitly in the next few years, perhaps you can marry her.

He has not written this. In his present precarious situation, it would be about as useful as the letters Gregory used to write to him: Dear father, I hope you are well. I hope your dog is well. And now no more for lack of time.

Lord Chancellor More says, ‘Come and see me, and we'll talk about Wolsey's colleges. I feel sure the king will do something for the poor scholars. Do come. Come and see my roses before the heat spoils them. Come and see my new carpet.’

It is a muted, grey day; when he arrives at Chelsea, Master Secretary's barge is tied up, the Tudor flag limp in the sultry air. Beyond the gatehouse, the red-brick house, new-built, offers its bright facade to the river. He strolls towards it, through the mulberry trees. Standing in the porch, under the honeysuckle, Stephen Gardiner. The grounds at Chelsea are full of small pet animals, and as he approaches, and his host greets him, he sees that the Chancellor of England is holding a lop-eared rabbit with snowy fur; it hangs peacefully in his hands, like ermine mittens.

‘Is your son-in-law Roper with us today?’ Gardiner asks. ‘A pity. I hoped to see him change his religion again. I wanted to witness it.’

‘A garden tour?’ More offers.

‘I thought that we might see him sit down a friend of Luther, as formerly he was, yet come back to the church by the time they bring in the currants and gooseberries.’

‘Will Roper is now settled,’ More says, ‘in the faith of England and of Rome.’

He says, ‘It's not really a good year for soft fruit.’

More looks at him out of the tail of his eye; he smiles. He chats genially as he leads them into the house. Lolloping after them comes Henry Pattinson, a servant of More's he sometimes calls his fool, and to whom he allows licence. The man is a great brawler; normally you take in a fool to protect him, but in Pattinson's case it's the rest of the world needs protection. Is he really simple? There's something sly in More, he enjoys embarrassing people; it would be like him to have a fool that wasn't. Pattinson's supposed to have fallen from a church steeple and hit his head. At his waist, he wears a knotted string which he sometimes says is his rosary; sometimes he says it is his scourge. Sometimes he says it is the rope that should have saved him from his fall.

Entering the house, you meet the family hanging up. You see them painted life-size before you meet them in the flesh; and More, conscious of the double effect it makes, pauses, to let you survey them, to take them in. The favourite, Meg, sits at her father's feet with a book on her knee. Gathered loosely about the Lord Chancellor are his son John; his ward Anne Cresacre, who is John's wife; Margaret Giggs, who is also his ward; his aged father, Sir John More; his daughters Cicely and Elizabeth; Pattinson, with goggle eyes; and his wife Alice, with lowered head and wearing a cross, at the edge of the picture. Master Holbein has grouped them under his gaze, and fixed them for ever: as long as no moth consumes, no flame or mould or blight.

In real life there is something fraying about their host, a suspicion of unravelling weave; being at his leisure, he wears a simple wool gown. The new carpet, for their inspection, is stretched out on two trestle tables. The ground is not crimson but a blush colour: not rose madder, he thinks, but a red dye mixed with whey. ‘My lord cardinal liked turkey carpets,’ he murmurs. ‘The Doge once sent him sixty.’ The wool is soft wool from mountain sheep, but none of them were black sheep; where the pattern is darkest the surface has already a brittle feel, from patchy dyeing, and with time and use it may flake away. He turns up the corner, runs his fingertips over the knots, counting them by the inch, in an easy accustomed action. ‘This is the Ghiordes knot,’ he says, ‘but the pattern is from Pergamon – you see there within the octagons, the eight-pointed star?’ He smooths down the corner, and walks away from it, turns back, says ‘there’ – he walks forward, puts a tender hand on the flaw, the interruption in the weave, the lozenge slightly distorted, warped out of true. At worst, the carpet is two carpets, pieced together. At best, it has been woven by the village's Pattinson, or patched together last year by Venetian slaves in a backstreet workshop. To be sure, he needs to turn the whole thing over. His host says, ‘Not a good buy?’

It's beautiful, he says, not wanting to spoil his pleasure. But next time, he thinks, take me with you. His hand skims the surface, rich and soft. The flaw in the weave hardly matters. A turkey carpet is not on oath. There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. He is both these kinds of person. He would not allow, for example, a careless ambiguity in a lease, but instinct tells him that sometimes a contract need not be drawn too tight. Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read, and each person reads them by the light of self-interest. More says, ‘What do you think, gentlemen? Walk on it, or hang it on the wall?’

‘Walk on it.’

‘Thomas, your luxurious tastes!’ And they laugh. You would think they were friends.

They go out to the aviary; they stand deep in talk, while finches flit and sing. A small grandchild toddles in; a woman in an apron shadows him, or her. The child points to the finches, makes sounds expressive of pleasure, flaps its arms. It eyes Stephen Gardiner; its small mouth turns down. The nurse swoops in, before tears ensue; how must it be, he asks Stephen, to have such effortless power over the young? Stephen scowls.

More takes him by the arm. ‘Now, about the colleges,’ he says. ‘I have spoken to the king, and Master Secretary here has done his best – truly, he has. The king may refound Cardinal College in his name, but for Ipswich I see no hope, after all it is only … I am sorry to say this, Thomas, but it is only the birthplace of a man now disgraced, and so has no special claim on us.’

‘It is a shame for the scholars.’

‘It is, of course. Shall we go in to supper?’

In More's great hall, the conversation is exclusively in Latin, though More's wife Alice is their hostess and does not have a word of it. It is their custom to read a passage of scripture, by way of a grace. ‘It is Meg's turn tonight,’ More says.

He is keen to show off his darling. She takes the book, kissing it; over the interruptions of the fool, she reads in Greek. Gardiner sits with his eyes shut tight; he looks, not holy, but exasperated. He watches Margaret. She is perhaps twenty-five. She has a sleek, darting head, like the head of the little fox which More says he has tamed; all the same, he keeps it in a cage for safety.

The servants come in. It is Alice's eye they catch as they place the dishes; here, madam, and here? The family in the picture don't need servants, of course; they exist just by themselves, floating against the wall. ‘Eat, eat,’ says More. ‘All except Alice, who will burst out of her corset.’

At her name she turns her head. ‘That expression of painful surprise is not native to her,’ More says. ‘It is produced by scraping back her hair and driving in great ivory pins, to the peril of her skull. She believes her forehead is too low. It is, of course. Alice, Alice,’ he says, ‘remind me why I married you.’

‘To keep house, Father,’ Meg says in a low voice.

‘Yes, yes,’ More says. ‘A glance at Alice frees me from stain of concupiscence.’

He is conscious of an oddity, as if time has performed some loop or snared itself in a noose; he has seen them on the wall as Hans froze them, and here they enact themselves, wearing their various expression of aloofness or amusement, benignity and grace: a happy family. He prefers their host as Hans painted him; the Thomas More on the wall, you can see that he's thinking, but not what he's thinking, and that's the way it should be. The painter has grouped them so skilfully that there's no space between the figures for anyone new. The outsider can only soak himself into the scene, as an unintended blot or stain; certainly, he thinks, Gardiner is a blot or stain. The Secretary waves his black sleeves; he argues vigorously with their host. What does St Paul mean when he says Jesus was made a little lower than the angels? Do Hollanders ever make jokes? What is the proper coat of arms of the Duke of Norfolk's heir? Is that thunder in the distance, or will this heat keep up? Just as in the painting, Alice has a little monkey on a gilt chain. In the painting it plays about her skirts. In life, it sits in her lap and clings to her like a child. Sometimes she lowers her head and talks to it, so that no one else can hear.

More takes no wine, though he serves it to his guests. There are several dishes, which all taste the same – flesh of some sort, with a gritty sauce like Thames mud – and then junkets, and a cheese which he says one of his daughters has made – one of his daughters, wards, step-daughters, one of the women of whom the house is full. ‘Because one must keep them employed,’ he says. ‘They cannot always be at their books, and young women are prone to mischief and idleness.’

‘For sure,’ he mutters. ‘They'll be fighting in the streets next.’ His eyes are drawn unwillingly to the cheese; it is pitted and wobbling, like the face of a stable boy after a night out.

‘Henry Pattinson is excitable tonight,’ More says. ‘Perhaps he should be bled. I hope his diet has not been too rich.’

‘Oh,’ says Gardiner, ‘I have no anxieties on that score.’

Old John More – who must be eighty now – has come in for supper, and so they yield the conversation to him; he is fond of telling stories. ‘Did you ever hear of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester and the beggar who claimed to be blind? Did you ever hear of the man who didn't know the Virgin Mary was a Jew?’ Of such a sharp old lawyer one hopes for more, even in his dotage. Then he begins on anecdotes of foolish women, of which he has a vast collection, and even when he falls asleep, their host has more. Lady Alice sits scowling. Gardiner, who has heard all these stories before, is grinding his teeth.

‘Look there at my daughter-in-law Anne,’ More says. The girl lowers her eyes; her shoulders tense, as she waits for what is coming. ‘Anne craved – shall I tell them, my dear? – she craved a pearl necklace. She did not cease to talk about it, you know how young girls are. So when I gave her a box that rattled, imagine her face. Imagine her face again when she opened it. What was inside? Dried peas!’

The girl takes a deep breath. She raises her face. He sees the effort it costs her. ‘Father,’ she says, ‘don't forget to tell the story of the woman who didn't believe the world was round.’

‘No, that's a good one,’ More says.

When he looks at Alice, staring at her husband with painful concentration, he thinks, she still doesn't believe it.

After supper they talk about wicked King Richard. Many years ago Thomas More began to write a book about him. He could not decide whether to compose in English or Latin, so he has done both, though he has never finished it, or sent any part of it to the printer. Richard was born to be evil, More says; it was written on him from his birth. He shakes his head. ‘Deeds of blood. Kings' games.’

‘Dark days,’ says the fool.

‘Let them never come again.’

‘Amen.’ The fool points to the guests. ‘Let these not come again either.’

There are people in London who say that John Howard, grandfather of the Norfolk that is now, was more than a little concerned in the disappearance of the children who went into the Tower and never came out again. The Londoners say – and he reckons the Londoners know – that it was on Howard's watch that the princes were last seen; though Thomas More thinks it was Constable Brakenbury who handed the keys to the killers. Brakenbury died at Bosworth; he can't come out of his grave and complain.

The fact is, Thomas More is thick with the Norfolk that is now, and keen to deny that his ancestor helped disappear anyone, let alone two children of royal blood. In his mind's eye he frames the present duke: in one dripping, sinewy hand he holds a small golden-haired corpse, and in the other hand the kind of little knife a man brings to table to cut his meat.

He comes back to himself: Gardiner, jabbing the air, is pressing the Lord Chancellor on his evidence. Presently the fool's grumbling and groaning become unbearable. ‘Father,’ Margaret says, ‘please send Henry out.’ More rises to scold him, take him by the arm. All eyes follow him. But Gardiner takes advantage of the lull. He leans in, speaks English in an undertone. ‘About Master Wriothesley. Remind me. Is he working for me, or for you?’

‘For you, I would have thought, now he is made a Clerk of the Signet. They assist Master Secretary, do they not?’

‘Why is he always at your house?’

‘He's not a bound apprentice. He may come and go.’

‘I suppose he's tired of churchmen. He wants to know what he can learn from … whatever it is you call yourself, these days.’

‘A person,’ he says placidly. ‘The Duke of Norfolk says I'm a person.’

‘Master Wriothesley has his eye on his advantage.’

‘I hope we all have that. Or why did God give us eyes?’

‘He thinks of making his fortune. We all know that money sticks to your hands.’

Like the aphids to More's roses. ‘No,’ he sighs. ‘It passes through them, alas. You know, Stephen, how I love luxury. Show me a carpet, and I'll walk on it.’

The fool scolded and ejected, More rejoins them. ‘Alice, I have told you about drinking wine. Your nose is glowing.’ Alice's face grows stiff, with dislike and a kind of fear. The younger women, who understand all that is said, bow their heads and examine their hands, fiddling with their rings and turning them to catch the light. Then something lands on the table with a thud, and Anne Cresacre, provoked into her native tongue, cries, ‘Henry, stop that!’ There is a gallery above with oriel windows; the fool, leaning through one of them, is peppering them with broken crusts. ‘Don't flinch, masters,’ he shouts. ‘I am pelting you with God.’

He scores a hit on the old man, who wakes with a start. Sir John looks about him; with his napkin, he wipes dribble from his chin. ‘Now, Henry,’ More calls up. ‘You have wakened my father. And you are blaspheming. And wasting bread.’

‘Dear Lord, he should be whipped,’ Alice snaps.

He looks around him; he feels something which he identifies as pity, a heavy stirring beneath the breastbone. He believes Alice has a good heart; continues to believe it even when, taking his leave, permitted to thank her in English, she raps out, ‘Thomas Cromwell, why don't you marry again?’

‘No one will have me, Lady Alice.’

‘Nonsense. Your master may be down but you're not poor, are you? Got your money abroad, that's what I'm told. Got a good house, haven't you? Got the king's ear, my husband says. And from what my sisters in the city say, got everything in good working order.’

‘Alice!’ More says. Smiling, he takes her wrist, shakes her a little. Gardiner laughs: his deep bass chuckle, like laughter through a crack in the earth.

When they go out to Master Secretary's barge, the scent of the gardens is heavy in the air. ‘More goes to bed at nine o'clock,’ Stephen says.

‘With Alice?’

‘People say not.’

‘You have spies in the house?’

Stephen doesn't answer.

It is dusk; lights bob in the river. ‘Dear God, I am hungry,’ Master Secretary complains. ‘I wish I had kept back one of the fool's crusts. I wish I had laid hands on the white rabbit; I'd eat it raw.’

He says, ‘You know, he daren't make himself plain.’

‘Indeed he dare not,’ Gardiner says. Beneath the canopy, he sits hunched into himself, as if he were cold. ‘But we all know his opinions, which I think are fixed and impervious to argument. When he took office, he said he would not meddle with the divorce, and the king accepted that, but I wonder how long he will accept it.’

‘I didn't mean, make himself plain to the king. I meant, to Alice.’

Gardiner laughs. ‘True, if she understood what he said about her she'd send him down to the kitchens and have him plucked and roasted.’

‘Suppose she died? He'd be sorry then.’

‘He'd have another wife in the house before she was cold. Someone even uglier.’

He broods: foresees, vaguely, an opportunity for placing bets. ‘That young woman,’ he says. ‘Anne Cresacre. She is an heiress, you know? An orphan?’

‘There was some scandal, was there not?’

‘After her father died her neighbours stole her, for their son to marry. The boy raped her. She was thirteen. This was in York-shire … that's how they go on there. My lord cardinal was furious when he heard of it. It was he who got her away. He put her under More's roof because he thought she'd be safe.’

‘So she is.’

Not from humiliation. ‘Since More's son married her, he lives off her lands. She has a hundred a year. You'd think she could have a string of pearls.’

‘Do you think More is disappointed in his boy? He shows no talent for affairs. Still, I hear you have a boy like that. You'll be looking for an heiress for him soon.’ He doesn't reply. It's true; John More, Gregory Cromwell, what have we done to our sons? Made them into idle young gentlemen – but who can blame us for wanting for them the ease we didn't have? One thing about More, he's never idled for an hour, he's passed his life reading, writing, talking towards what he believes is the good of the Christian commonwealth. Stephen says, ‘Of course you may have other sons. Aren't you looking forward to the wife Alice will find you? She is warm in your praises.’

He feels afraid. It is like Mark, the lute player: people imagining what they cannot know. He is sure he and Johane have been secret. He says, ‘Don't you ever think of marrying?’

A chill spreads over the waters. ‘I am in holy orders.’

‘Oh, come on, Stephen. You must have women. Don't you?’

The pause is so long, so silent, that he can hear the oars as they dip into the Thames, the little splash as they rise; he can hear the ripples in their wake. He can hear a dog barking, from the southern shore. The Secretary asks, ‘What kind of Putney enquiry is that?’

The silence lasts till Westminster. But on the whole, not too bad a trip. As he mentions, disembarking, neither of them has thrown the other in the river. ‘I'm waiting till the water's colder,’ Gardiner says. ‘And till I can tie weights to you. You have a trick of resurfacing, don't you? By the way, why am I bringing you to Westminster?’

‘I am going to see Lady Anne.’

Gardiner is affronted. ‘You didn't say so.’

‘Should I report all my plans to you?’

He knows that is what Gardiner would prefer. The word is that the king is losing patience with his council. He shouts at them, ‘The cardinal was a better man than any of you, for managing matters.’ He thinks, if my lord cardinal comes back – which by a caprice of the king's he may, any time now – then you're all dead, Norfolk, Gardiner, More. Wolsey is a merciful man, but surely: only up to a point.

Mary Shelton is in attendance; she looks up, simpers. Anne is sumptuous in her nightgown of dark silk. Her hair is down, her delicate feet bare inside kidskin slippers. She is slumped in a chair, as if the day has beaten the spirit out of her. But still, as she looks up, her eyes are sparkling, hostile. ‘Where've you been?’

‘Utopia.’

‘Oh.’ She is interested. ‘What passed?’

‘Dame Alice has a little monkey that sits on her knee at table.’

‘I hate them.’

‘I know you do.’

He walks about. Anne lets him treat her fairly normally, except when she has a sudden, savage seizure of I-who-will-be-Queen, and slaps him down. She examines the toe of her slipper. ‘They say that Thomas More is in love with his own daughter.’

‘I think they may be right.’

Anne's sniggering laugh. ‘Is she a pretty girl?’

‘No. Learned though.’

‘Did they talk about me?’

‘They never mention you in that house.’ He thinks, I should like to hear Alice's verdict.

‘Then what was the talk?’

‘The vices and follies of women.’

‘I suppose you joined it? It's true, anyway. Most women are foolish. And vicious. I have seen it. I have lived among the women too long.’

He says, ‘Norfolk and my lord your father are very busy seeing ambassadors. France, Venice, the Emperor's man – just in these last two days.’

He thinks, they are working to entrap my cardinal. I know it.

‘I did not think you could afford such good information. Though they say you have spent a thousand pounds on the cardinal.’

‘I expect to get it back. From here and there.’

‘I suppose people are grateful to you. If they have received grants out of the cardinal's lands.’

He thinks, your brother George, Lord Rochford, your father Thomas, Earl of Wiltshire, haven't they got rich from the cardinal's fall? Look at what George is wearing these days, look at the money he spends on horses and girls; but I don't see much sign of gratitude from the Boleyns. He says, ‘I just take my conveyancer's fee.’

She laughs. ‘You look well on it.’

‘Do you know, there are ways and ways … Sometimes people just tell me things.’

It is an invitation. Anne drops her head. She is on the verge of becoming one of those people. But perhaps not tonight. ‘My father says, one can never be sure of that person, one can never tell who he's working for. I should have thought – but then I am only a woman – that it is perfectly obvious that you're working for yourself.’

That makes us alike, he thinks: but does not quite say.

Anne yawns, a little catlike yawn. ‘You're tired,’ he says. ‘I shall go. By the way, why did you send for me?’

‘We like to know where you are.’

‘So why does your lord father not send for me, or your brother?’

She looks up. It may be late, but not too late for Anne's knowing smile. ‘They do not think you would come.’

August: the cardinal writes to the king, a letter full of complaint, saying that he is being hounded by his creditors, ‘wrapped in misery and dread’ – but the stories that come back are different. He is holding dinners, and inviting all the local gentry. He is dispensing charity on his old princely scale, settling lawsuits, and sweet-talking estranged husbands and wives into sharing a roof again.

Call-Me-Risley was up in Southwell in June, with William Brereton of the king's privy chamber: getting the cardinal's signature on a petition Henry is circulating, which he means to send to the Pope. It's Norfolk's idea, to get the peers and bishops to sign up to this letter asking Clement to let the king have his freedom. It contains certain murky, unspecific threats, but Clement's used to being threatened – no one's better at spinning a question out, setting one party against the other, playing ends against the middle.

The cardinal looks well, according to Wriothesley. And his building work, it seems, has gone beyond repairs and a few renovations. He has been scouring the country for glaziers, joiners, and for plumbers; it is ominous when my lord decides to improve the sanitation. He never had a parish church but he built the tower higher; never lodged anywhere where he did not draw up drainage plans. Soon there will be earthworks, culverts and pipes laid. Next he will be installing fountains. Wherever he goes he is cheered by the people.

‘The people?’ Norfolk says. ‘They'd cheer a Barbary ape. Who cares what they cheer? Hang 'em all.’

‘But then who will you tax?’ he says, and Norfolk looks at him fearfully, unsure if he's made a joke.

Rumours of the cardinal's popularity don't make him glad, they make him afraid. The king has given Wolsey a pardon, but if he was offended once, he can be offended again. If they could think up forty-four charges, then – if fantasy is unconstrained by truth – they can think up forty-four more.

He sees Norfolk and Gardiner with their heads together. They look up at him; they glare and don't speak.

Wriothesley stays with him, in his shadow and footsteps, writes his most confidential letters, those to the cardinal and the king. He never says, I am too tired. He never says, it is late. He remembers all that he is required to remember. Even Rafe is not more perfect.

It is time to bring the girls into the family business. Johane complains of her daughter's poor sewing, and it seems that, transferring the needle surreptitiously into her wrong hand, the child has devised an awkward little backstitch which you would be hard-pushed to imitate. She gets the job of sewing up his dispatches for the north.

September 1530: the cardinal leaves Southwell, travelling by easy stages to York. The next part of his progress becomes a triumphal procession. People from all over the countryside flock to him, ambushing him at wayside crosses so that he can lay his magical hands on their children; they call it ‘confirmation’, but it seems to be some older sacrament. They pour in by the thousand, to gape at him; and he prays for them all.

‘The council has the cardinal under observation,’ Gardiner says, swishing past him. ‘They have had the ports closed.’

Norfolk says, ‘Tell him if I ever see him again, I will chew him up, bones, flesh and gristle.’ He writes it down just so and sends it up-country: ‘bones, flesh and gristle.’ He can hear the crunch and snap of the duke's teeth.

On 2 October the cardinal reaches his palace at Cawood, ten miles from York. His enthronement is planned for 7 November. News comes that he has called a convocation of the northern church; it is to meet at York the day after his enthronement. It is a signal of his independence; some may think it is a signal of revolt. He has not informed the king, he has not informed old Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury; he can hear the cardinal's voice, soft and amused, saying, now, Thomas, why do they need to know?

Norfolk calls him in. His face is crimson and he froths a little at the mouth as he starts to shout. He has been seeing his armourer for a fitting, and is still wearing sundry parts – his cuirass, his garde-reins – so that he looks like an iron pot wobbling to the boil. ‘Does he think he can dig in up there and carve himself a kingdom? Cardinal's hat not enough for him, only a crown will do for Thomas bloody Wolsey the bleeding butcher's boy, and I tell you, I tell you …’

He drops his gaze in case the duke should stop to read his thoughts. He thinks, my lord would have made such an excellent king; so benign, so sure and suave in his dealings, so equitable, so swift and so discerning. His rule would have been the best rule, his servants the best servants; and how he would have enjoyed his state.

His glance follows the duke as he bobs and froths; but to his surprise, when the duke turns, he smites his own metalled thigh, and a tear – at the pain, or something else – bubbles into his eye. ‘Ah, you think me a hard man, Cromwell. I am not such a hard man that I don't see how you are left. Do you know what I say? I say I don't know one man in England who would have done what you have done, for a man disgraced and fallen. The king says so. Even him, Chapuys, the Emperor's man, he says, you cannot fault what's-he-called. I say, it's a pity you ever saw Wolsey. It's a pity you don't work for me.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘we all want the same thing. For your niece to be queen. Can we not work together?’

Norfolk grunts. There is something amiss, in his view, with that word ‘together’, but he cannot articulate what it is. ‘Do not forget your place.’

He bows. ‘I am mindful of your lordship's continuing favour.’

‘Look here, Cromwell, I wish you would come down and see me at home at Kenninghall, and talk to my lady wife. She's a woman of monstrous demands. She thinks I shouldn't keep a woman in the house, for my pleasant usage, you know? I say, where else should she be? Do you want me to disturb myself on a winter's night and venture out on the icy roads? I don't seem to be able to express myself correctly to her; do you think you could come down and put my case?’ He says, hastily, ‘Not now, of course. No. More urgent … see my niece …’

‘How is she?’

‘In my view,’ Norfolk says, ‘Anne's out for bloody murder. She wants the cardinal's guts in a dish to feed her spaniels, and his limbs nailed over the city gates of York.’

It is a dark morning and your eyes naturally turn towards Anne, but something shadowy is bobbing about, on the fringes of the circle of light. Anne says, ‘Dr Cranmer is just back from Rome. He brings us no good news, of course.’

They know each other; Cranmer has worked from time to time for the cardinal, as indeed who has not? Now he is active in the king's case. They embrace cautiously: Cambridge scholar, person from Putney.

He says, ‘Master, why would you not come to our college? To Cardinal College, I mean? His Grace was very sorry you would not. We would have made you comfortable.’

‘I think he wanted more permanence,’ Anne says, sneering.

‘But with respect, Lady Anne, the king has almost said to me that he will take over the Oxford foundation himself.’ He smiles. ‘Perhaps it can be called after you?’

This morning Anne wears a crucifix on a gold chain. Sometimes her fingers pull at it impatiently, and then she tucks her hands back in her sleeves. It is so much a habit with her that people say she has something to hide, a deformity; but he thinks she is a woman who doesn't like to show her hand. ‘My uncle Norfolk says Wolsey goes about with eight hundred armed men at his back. They say he has letters from Katherine – is that true? They say Rome will issue a decree telling the king to separate from me.’

‘That would be a clear mistake on Rome's part,’ Cranmer says.

‘Yes it would. Because he won't be told. Is he some parish clerk, the King of England? Or some child? This would not happen in France; their king keeps his churchmen under his hand. Master Tyndale says, “One king, one law, is God's ordinance in every realm.” I have read his book, The Obedience of a Christian Man. I myself have shown it to the king and marked the passages that touch on his authority. The subject must obey his king as he would his God; do I have the sense of it? The Pope will learn his place.’

Cranmer looks at her with a half-smile; she's like a child who you're teaching to read, who dazzles you by sudden aptitude.

‘Wait,’ she says, ‘I have something to show you.’ She darts a look. ‘Lady Carey …’

‘Oh, please,’ Mary says. ‘Do not give it currency.’

Anne snaps her fingers. Mary Boleyn moves forward into the light, a flash of blonde hair. ‘Give it,’ Anne says. It is a paper, which she unfolds. ‘I found this in my bed, would you believe? As it happened, it was a night when that sickly milk-faced creeper had turned down the sheet, and of course I could not get any sense out of her, she cries if you look at her sideways. So I cannot know who put it there.’

She unfolds a drawing. There are three figures. The central figure is the king. He is large and handsome, and to make sure you don't miss him he is wearing a crown. On either side of him is a woman; the one on the left has no head. ‘That's the queen,’ she says, ‘Katherine. And that's me.’ She laughs. ‘Anne sans tête.’

Dr Cranmer holds out his hand for the paper. ‘Give it to me, I'll destroy it.’

She crumples it in her fist. ‘I can destroy it myself. There is a prophecy that a queen of England will be burned. But a prophecy does not frighten me, and even if it is true, I will run the risk.’

Mary stands, like a statue, in the position where Anne left her; her hands are joined, as if the paper were still between them. Oh, Christ, he thinks, to see her out of here; to take her to somewhere she could forget she is a Boleyn. She asked me once. I failed her. If she asked me again, I would fail her again.

Anne turns against the light. Her cheeks are hollow – how thin she is now – her eyes are alight. ‘Ainsi sera,’ she says. ‘Never mind who grudges it, it will happen. I mean to have him.’

On their way out, he and Dr Cranmer do not speak, till they see the little pale girl coming towards them, the sickly milk-faced creeper, carrying folded linen.

‘I think this is the one who cries,’ he says. ‘So do not look at her sideways.’

‘Master Cromwell,’ she says, ‘this may be a long winter. Send us some more of your orange tarts.’

‘I haven't seen you for so long … What have you been doing, where have you been?’

‘Sewing mostly.’ She considers each question separately. ‘Where I'm sent.’

‘And spying, I think.’

She nods. ‘I'm not very good at it.’

‘I don't know. You're very small and unnoticeable.’

He means it as a compliment; she blinks, in acknowledgement. ‘I don't speak French. So don't you, if you please. It gives me nothing to report.’

‘Who are you spying for?’

‘My brothers.’

‘Do you know Dr Cranmer?’

‘No,’ she says; she thinks it's a real question.

‘Now,’ he instructs her, ‘you must say who you are.’

‘Oh. I see. I'm John Seymour's daughter. From Wolf Hall.’

He is surprised. ‘I thought his daughters were with Queen Katherine.’

‘Yes. Sometimes. Not now. I told you. I go where I'm sent.’

‘But not where you are appreciated.’

‘I am, in the one way. You see, Lady Anne will not refuse any of the queen's ladies who want to spend time with her.’ She raises her eyes, a pale momentary brightness. ‘Very few do.’

Every rising family needs information. With the king considering himself a bachelor, any little girl can hold the key to the future, and not all his money is on Anne. ‘Well, good luck,’ he says. ‘I'll try to keep it in English.’

‘I would be obliged.’ She bows. ‘Dr Cranmer.’

He turns to watch her as she patters off in the direction of Anne Boleyn. A small suspicion enters his mind, about the paper in the bed. But no, he thinks. That is not possible.

Dr Cranmer says, smiling, ‘You have a wide acquaintance among the court ladies.’

‘Not very wide. I still don't know which daughter that was, there are three at least. And I suppose Seymour's sons are ambitious.’

‘I hardly know them.’

‘The cardinal brought Edward up. He's sharp. And Tom Seymour is not such a fool as he pretends.’

‘The father?’

‘Stays in Wiltshire. We never see him.’

‘One could envy him,’ Dr Cranmer murmurs.

Country life. Rural felicity. A temptation he has never known. ‘How long were you at Cambridge, before the king called you up?’

Cranmer smiles. ‘Twenty-six years.’

They are both dressed for riding. ‘You are going back to Cambridge today?’

‘Not to stay. The family’ – the Boleyns, he means – ‘want to have me at hand. And you, Master Cromwell?’

‘A private client. I can't make a living from Lady Anne's black looks.’

Boys wait with their horses. From various folds of his garments Dr Cranmer produces objects wrapped in cloth. One of them is a carrot cut carefully lengthways, and another a wizened apple, quartered. As if he were a child, fair-minded with a treat, he gives him two slices of carrot and half the apple, to feed to his own horse; as he does so, he says, ‘You owe much to Anne Boleyn. More than perhaps you think. She has formed a good opinion of you. I'm not sure she cares to be your sister-in-law, mind …’

The beasts bend their necks, nibbling, their ears flicking in appreciation. It is a moment of peace, like a benediction. He says, ‘There are no secrets, are there?’

‘No. No. Absolutely none.’ The priest shakes his head. ‘You asked why I would not come to your college.’

‘I was making conversation.’

‘Still … as we heard it in Cambridge, you performed such labours for the foundation … the students and Fellows all commend you … no detail escapes Master Cromwell. Though to be sure, this comfort on which you pride yourselves …’ His tone, smooth and unemphatic, doesn't change. ‘In the fish cellar? Where the students died?’

‘My lord cardinal did not take that lightly.’

Cranmer says, lightly, ‘Nor did I.’

‘My lord was never a man to ride down another for his opinions. You would have been safe.’

‘I assure you he would have found no heresy in me. Even the Sorbonne could not fault me. I have nothing to be afraid of.’ A wan smile. ‘But perhaps … ah well … perhaps I'm just a Cambridge man at heart.’

He says to Wriothesley, ‘Is he? At all points orthodox?’

‘It's hard to say. He doesn't like monks. You should get on.’

‘Was he liked at Jesus College?’

‘They say he was a severe examiner.’

‘I suppose he doesn't miss much. Although. He thinks Anne is a virtuous lady.’ He sighs. ‘And what do we think?’

Call-Me-Risley snorts. He has just married – a connection of Gardiner's – but his relations with women are not, on the whole, gentle.

‘He seems a melancholy sort of man,’ he says. ‘The kind who wants to live retired from the world.’

Wriothesley's fair eyebrows rise, almost imperceptibly. ‘Did he tell you about the barmaid?’

When Cranmer comes to the house, he feeds him the delicate meat of the roe deer; they take supper privately, and he gets his story from him, slowly, slowly and easily. He asks the doctor where he comes from, and when he says, nowhere you know, he says, try me, I've been to most places.

‘If you had been to Aslockton, you wouldn't know you were there. If a man goes fifteen miles to Nottingham, let him only spend the night away, and it vanishes clear from his mind.’ His village has not even a church; only some poor cottages and his father's house, where his family has lived for three generations.

‘Your father is a gentleman?’

‘He is indeed.’ Cranmer sounds faintly shocked: what else could he be? ‘The Tamworths of Lincolnshire are among my connections. The Cliftons of Clifton. The Molyneux family, of whom you will have heard. Or have you?’

‘And you have much land?’

‘If I had thought, I would have brought the ledgers.’

‘Forgive me. We men of business …’

Eyes rest on him, assessing. Cranmer nods. ‘A small acreage. And I am not the eldest. But he brought me up well. Taught me horsemanship. He gave me my first bow. He gave me my first hawk to train.’

Dead, he thinks, the father long dead: still looking for his hand in the dark.

‘When I was twelve he sent me to school. I suffered there. The master was harsh.’

‘To you? Or others as well?’

‘If I am honest, I only thought of myself. I was weak, no doubt. I suppose he sought out weakness. Schoolmasters do.’

‘Could you not complain to your father?’

‘I wonder now why I did not. But then he died. I was thirteen. Another year and my mother sent me to Cambridge. I was glad of the escape. To be from under his rod. Not that the flame of learning burnt bright. The east wind put it out. Oxford – Magdalen especially, where your cardinal was – it was everything in those days.’

He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you: the touch of warm terracotta, the night sky of another climate, alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people's saints. But if you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no further.

‘A man from my college,’ Dr Cranmer says tentatively, ‘was told by the cardinal that as an infant you were stolen by pirates.’

He stares at him for a moment, then smiles in slow delight. ‘How I miss my master. Now he has gone north, there is no one to invent me.’

Dr Cranmer, cautious: ‘So it is not true? Because I wondered if there was doubt over whether you were baptised. I fear it could be a question, in such an event.’

‘But the event never took place. Really. Pirates would have given me back.’

Dr Cranmer frowns. ‘You were an unruly child?’

‘If I'd known you then, I could have knocked down your schoolmaster for you.’

Cranmer has stopped eating; not that he has tasted much. He thinks, at some level of his being this man will always believe I am a heathen; I will never disabuse him now. He says, ‘Do you miss your studies? Your life has been disrupted since the king made you an ambassador and had you tossed on the high seas.’

‘In the Bay of Biscay, when I was coming from Spain, we had to bale out the ship. I heard the sailors' confessions.’

‘They must have been something to hear.’ He laughs. ‘Shouted over the noise of the storm.’

After that strenuous journey – though the king was pleased with his embassy – Cranmer might have dropped back into his old life, except that he had mentioned, meeting Gardiner in passing, that the European universities might be polled on the king's case. You've tried the canon lawyers; now try the theologians. Why not? the king said; bring me Dr Cranmer and put him in charge of it. The Vatican said it had nothing against the idea, except that the divines should not be offered money: a merry caveat, coming from a Pope with the surname of de' Medici. To him, this initiative seems nearly futile – but he thinks of Anne Boleyn, he thinks of what her sister had said: she's not getting any younger. ‘Look, you've found a hundred scholars, at a score of universities, and some say the king is right –’

‘Most –’

‘And if you find two hundred more, what will it matter? Clement isn't open to persuasion now. Only to pressure. And I don't mean moral pressure.’

‘But it's not Clement we have to persuade of the king's case. It's all of Europe. All Christian men.’

‘I'm afraid the Christian women may be harder still.’

Cranmer drops his eyes. ‘I could never persuade my wife of anything. I would never have thought to try.’ He pauses. ‘We are two widowers, I think, Master Cromwell, and if we are to become colleagues, I must not leave you wondering, or at the mercy of stories that people will bring to you.’

The light is fading around them while he talks, and his voice, each murmur, each hesitation, trails away into the dusk. Outside the room where they sit, where the house is going on its nightly course, there is a banging and scraping, as if trestles were being moved, and a faint sound of cheering and whooping. But he ignores it, settles his attention on the priest. Joan, an orphan, he says, servant in a gentleman's house where he used to visit; no people of her own, no marriage portion; he pitied her. A whisper in a panelled room raises spirits from the fens, fetches the dead: Cambridge twilights, damp seeping from the marshes and rush lights burning in a bare swept room where an act of love takes place. I could not help but marry her, Dr Cranmer says, and indeed, how can a man help marrying? His college took away his fellowship, of course, you cannot have married fellows. And naturally she had to leave her place, and not knowing what else to do with her, he lodged her at the Dolphin, which is kept by some connections of his, some – he confesses, not without a downward glance – some relations of his, yes it is true that some of his people keep the Dolphin.

‘It's nothing to be ashamed of. The Dolphin is a good house.’

Ah, you know it: and he bites his lip.

He studies Dr Cranmer: his way of blinking, the cautious finger he lays to his chin, his eloquent eyes and his pale praying hands. So Joan was not, he says, she was not, you see, a barmaid, whatever people say, and I know what they do say. She was a wife with a child in her belly, and he a poor scholar, preparing to live with her in honest poverty, but that didn't happen, in the event. He thought he might find a position as secretary to some gentleman, or as a tutor, or that he might earn a living by his pen, but all that scheming was to no avail. He thought they might move from Cambridge, even from England, but they didn't have to, in the end. He hoped some connection of his would do something for him, before the child was born: but when Joan died in labour, no one could do anything for him, not any more. ‘If the child had lived I would have salvaged something. As it was, no one knew what to say to me. They did not know whether to condole with me on losing my wife, or congratulate me because Jesus College had taken me back. I took holy orders; why not? All that, my marriage, the child I thought I would have, my colleagues seemed to regard it as some sort of miscalculation. Like losing your way in the woods. You get home and never think of it again.’

‘There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think. Saving your presence. Training themselves out of natural feeling. They mean it for the best, of course.’

‘It was not a mistake. We did have a year. I think of her every day.’

The door opens; it is Alice bringing in lights. ‘This is your daughter?’

Rather than explain his family, he says, ‘This is my lovely Alice. This is not your job, Alice?’

She bobs, a small genuflection to a churchman. ‘No, but Rafe and the others want to know what you are talking about so long. They are waiting to know if there will be a dispatch to the cardinal tonight. Jo is standing by with her needle and thread.’

‘Tell them I will write in my own hand, and we will send it tomorrow. Jo may go to bed.’

‘Oh, we are not going to bed. We are running Gregory's greyhounds up and down the hall and making a noise fit to wake the dead.’

‘I can see why you don't want to break off.’

‘Yes, it is excellent,’ Alice says. ‘We have the manners of scullery maids and no one will ever want to marry us. If our aunt Mercy had behaved like us when she was a girl, she would have been knocked round the head till she bled from the ears.’

‘Then we live in happy times,’ he says.

When she has gone, and the door is closed behind her, Cranmer says, ‘The children are not whipped?’

‘We try to teach them by example, as Erasmus suggests, though we all like to race the dogs up and down and make a noise, so we are not doing very well in that regard.’ He does not know if he should smile; he has Gregory; he has Alice, and Johane and the child Jo, and in the corner of his eye, at the periphery of his vision, the little pale girl who spies on the Boleyns. He has hawks in his mews who move towards the sound of his voice. What has this man?

‘I think of the king's advisers,’ Dr Cranmer says. ‘The sort of men who are about him now.’

And he has the cardinal, if the cardinal still thinks well of him after all that has passed. If he dies, he has his son's sable hounds to lie at his feet.

‘They are able men,’ Cranmer says, ‘who will do anything he wants, but it seems to me – I do not know how it seems to you – that they are utterly lacking in any understanding of his situation … any compunction or kindness. Any charity. Or love.’

‘It is what makes me think he will bring the cardinal back.’

Cranmer studies his face. ‘I am afraid that cannot happen now.’

He has a wish to speak, to express the bottled rage and pain he feels. He says, ‘People have worked to make misunderstandings between us. To persuade the cardinal that I am not working for his interests, only for my own, that I have been bought out, that I see Anne every day –’

‘Of course, you do see her …’

‘How else can I know how to move next? My lord cannot know, he cannot understand, what it's like here now.’

Cranmer says gently, ‘Should you not go to him? Your presence would dispel any doubt.’

‘There is no time. The snare is set for him and I dare not move.’

There is a chill in the air; the summer birds have flown, and black-winged lawyers are gathering for the new term in the fields of Lincoln's Inn and Gray's. The hunting season – or at least, the season when the king hunts every day – will soon be over. Whatever is happening elsewhere, whatever deceits and frustrations, you can forget them in the field. The hunter is among the most innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure. When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want to read documents. His miseries, his perplexities have receded, and they will stay away, provided – after food and wine, laughter and exchange of stories – he gets up at dawn to do it all over again.

But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about his conscience. He will begin to think about his pride. He will begin to prepare the prizes for those who can deliver him results.

It is an autumn day, whitish sun flitting behind the loosening, flickering leaves. They go into the butts. The king likes to do more than one thing at once: talk, direct arrows at a target. ‘Here we will be alone,’ he says, ‘and I will be free to open my mind to you.’

In fact, the population of a small village – as it might be, Aslockton – is circulating around them. The king does not know what ‘alone’ means. Is he ever by himself, even in his dreams? ‘Alone’ means without Norfolk clattering after him. ‘Alone’ means without Charles Brandon, who in a summer fit of fury the king advised to make himself scarce and not come within fifty miles of the court. ‘Alone’ means just with my yeoman of the bow and his menials, alone with my gentlemen of the privy chamber, who are my select and private friends. Two of these gentlemen, unless he is with the queen, sleep at the foot of his bed; so they have been on duty for some years now.

When he sees Henry draw his bow, he thinks, I see now he is royal. At home or abroad, in wartime or peacetime, happy or aggrieved, the king likes to practise several times in the week, as an Englishman should; using his height, the beautiful trained muscles of his arms, shoulders and chest, he sends his arrows snapping straight to the eye of the target. Then he holds out his arm, for someone to unstrap and restrap the royal armguard; for someone to change his bow, and bring him a choice. A cringing slave hands a napkin, to mop his forehead, and picks it up from where the king has dropped it; and then, exasperated, one shot or two falling wide, the King of England snaps his fingers, for God to change the wind.

The king shouts, ‘From various quarters I receive the advice that I should consider my marriage dissolved in the eyes of Christian Europe, and may remarry as I please. And soon.’

He doesn't shout back.

‘But others say …’ The breeze blows, his words are carried off, towards Europe.

‘I am one of the others.’

‘Dear Jesus,’ Henry says. ‘I will be unmanned by it. How long do you suppose my patience lasts?’

He hesitates to say, you are still living with your wife. You share a roof, a court, wherever you move together, she on the queen's side, you on the king's; you told the cardinal she was your sister not your wife, but if today you do not shoot well, if the breeze is not in your favour or you find your eyes blurred by sudden tears, it is only sister Katherine whom you can tell; you can admit no weakness or failure to Anne Boleyn.

He has studied Henry through his practice round. He has taken up a bow at his invitation, which causes some consternation in the ranks of the gentlemen who stud the grass and lean against trees, wearing their fallen-fruit silks of mulberry, gold and plum. Though Henry shoots well, he has not the action of a born archer; the born archer lays his whole body into the bow.

Compare him with Richard Williams, Richard Cromwell as he is now. His grandfather ap Evan was an artist with the bow. He never saw him, but you can bet he had muscles like cords and every one in use from the heels up. Studying the king, he is satisfied that his great-grandfather was not the archer Blaybourne, as the story says, but Richard, Duke of York. His grandfather was royal; his mother was royal; he shoots like a gentleman amateur, and he is king through and through.

The king says, you have a good arm, a good eye. He says disparagingly, oh, at this distance. We have a match every Sunday, he says, my household. We go to Paul's for the sermon and then out to Moorfields, we meet up with our fellow guilds-men and destroy the butchers and the grocers, and then we have a dinner together. We have grudge matches with the vintners …

Henry turns to him, impulsive: what if I came with you one week? If I came in disguise? The commons would like it, would they not? I could shoot for you. A king should show himself, sometimes, don't you feel? It would be amusing, yes?

Not very, he thinks. He cannot swear to it, but he thinks there are tears in Henry's eyes. ‘For sure we would win,’ he says. It is what you would say to a child. ‘The vintners would be roaring like bears.’

It begins to drizzle, and as they walk towards a sheltering clump of trees, a pattern of leaves shadows the king's face. He says, Nan threatens to leave me. She says that there are other men and she is wasting her youth.

Norfolk, panicking, that last week of October 1530: ‘Listen. This fellow here,’ he jerks his thumb, rudely, at Brandon – who is back at court, of course he is back – ‘this fellow here, a few years ago, he charged at the king in the lists, and nearly killed him. Henry had not put his visor down, God alone knows why – but these things happen. My lord here ran his lance – bam! – into the king's headpiece, and the lance shattered – an inch, one inch, from his eye.’

Norfolk has hurt his right hand, by the force of his demonstration. Wincing, but furious, earnest, he presses on. ‘One year later, Henry is following his hawk – it's that cut-up sort of country, flat, deceptive, you know it – he comes to a ditch, he drives in a pole to help him cross, the infernal instrument breaks, God rot it, and there's His Majesty face down and stunned in a foot of water and mud, and if some servant hadn't clawed him out, well, gentlemen, I shudder to think.’

He thinks, that's one question answered. In case of peril, you may pick him up. Fish him out. Whatever.

‘Suppose he dies?’ Norfolk demands. ‘Supposing a fever carries him away or he comes off his horse and breaks his neck? Then what? His bastard, Richmond? I've nothing against him, he's a fine boy, and Anne says I should get him married to my daughter Mary, Anne's no fool, let's put a Howard everywhere, she says, everywhere the king looks. Now I have no quarrel with Richmond, except he was born out of wedlock. Can he reign? Ask yourselves this. How did the Tudors get the crown? By title? No. By force? Exactly. By God's grace they won the battle. The old king, he had such a fist as you will go many a mile to meet, he had great books into which he entered his grudges and he forgave, when? Never! That's how one rules, masters.’ He turns to his audience, to the councillors waiting and watching and to the gentlemen of the court and the bedchamber; to Henry Norris, to his friend William Brereton, to Master Secretary Gardiner; to, incidentally, as it happens, Thomas Cromwell, who is increasingly where he shouldn't be. He says, ‘The old king bred, and by the help of Heaven he bred sons. But when Arthur died, there were swords sharpened in Europe, and they were sharpened to carve up this kingdom. Henry that is now, he was a child, nine years old. If the old king had not staggered on a few more years, the wars would have been to fight all over again. A child cannot hold England. And a bastard child? God give me strength! And it's November again!’

It's hard to fault what the duke says. He understands it all; even that last cry, wrung from the duke's heart. It's November, and a year has passed since Howard and Brandon walked into York Place and demanded the cardinal's chain of office, and turned him out of his house.

There is a silence. Then someone coughs, someone sighs. Someone – probably Henry Norris – laughs. It is he who speaks. ‘The king has one child born in wedlock.’

Norfolk turns. He flushes, a deep mottled purple. ‘Mary?’ he says. ‘That talking shrimp?’

‘She will grow up.’

‘We are all waiting,’ Suffolk says. ‘She has now reached fourteen, has she not?’

‘But her face,’ Norfolk says, ‘is the size of my thumbnail.’ The duke shows off his digit to the company. ‘A woman on the English throne, it flies in the face of nature.’

‘Her grandmother was Queen of Castile.’

‘She cannot lead an army.’

‘Isabella did.’

Says the duke, ‘Cromwell, why are you here? Listening to the talk of gentlemen?’

‘My lord, when you shout, the beggars on the street can hear you. In Calais.’

Gardiner has turned to him; he is interested. ‘So you think Mary can rule?’

He shrugs. ‘It depends who advises her. It depends who she marries.’

Norfolk says, ‘We have to act soon. Katherine has half the lawyers of Europe pushing paper for her. This dispensation. That dispensation. The other dispensation with the different bloody wording that they say they've got in Spain. It doesn't matter. This has gone beyond paper.’

‘Why?’ Suffolk says. ‘Is your niece in foal?’

‘No! More's the pity. Because if she were, he'd have to do something.’

‘What?’ Suffolk says.

‘I don't know. Grant his own divorce?’

There is a shuffle, a grunt, a sigh. Some look at the duke; some look at their shoes. There's no man in the room who doesn't want Henry to have what he wants. Their lives and fortunes depend on it. He sees the path ahead: a tortuous path through a flat terrain, the horizon deceptively clear, the country intersected by ditches, and the present Tudor, a certain amount of mud bespattering his person and his face, fished gasping into clear air. He says, ‘That good man who pulled the king out of the ditch, what was his name?’

Norfolk says, drily, ‘Master Cromwell likes to hear of the deeds of those of low birth.’

He doesn't suppose any of them will know. But Norris says, ‘I know. His name was Edmund Mody.’

Muddy, more like, Suffolk says. He yells with laughter. They stare at him.

It is All Souls' Day: as Norfolk puts it, November again. Alice and Jo have come to speak to him. They are leading Bella – the Bella that is now – on a ribbon of pink silk. He looks up: may I be of service to you two ladies?

Alice says, ‘Master, it is more than two years since my aunt Elizabeth died, your lady wife. Will you write to the cardinal, and ask him to ask the Pope to let her out of Purgatory?’

He says, ‘What about your aunt Kat? And your little cousins, my daughters?’

The children exchange glances. ‘We don't think they have been there so long. Anne Cromwell was proud of her working of numbers and boasted that she was learning Greek. Grace was vain of her hair and used to state that she had wings, this was a lie.

We think perhaps they must suffer more. But the cardinal could try.’

Don't ask, don't get, he thinks.

Alice says, encouragingly, ‘You have been so active in the cardinal's business that he would not refuse. And although the king does not favour the cardinal any more, surely the Pope favours him?’

‘And I expect,’ says Jo, ‘that the cardinal writes to the Pope every day. Though I do not know who sews his letters. And I suppose the cardinal might send him a present for his trouble. Some money, I mean. Our aunt Mercy says that the Pope does nothing except on cash terms.’

‘Come with me,’ he says. They exchange glances. He sweeps them along before him. Bella's small legs race. Jo drops her lead, but still Bella runs behind.

Mercy and the elder Johane are sitting together. The silence is not companionable. Mercy is reading, murmuring the words to herself. Johane is staring at the wall, sewing in her lap. Mercy marks her place. ‘What's this, an embassy?’

‘Tell her,’ he says. ‘Jo, tell your mother what you have been asking me.’

Jo starts to cry. It is Alice who speaks up and puts their case. ‘We want our aunt Liz to come out of Purgatory.’

‘What have you been teaching them?’ he asks.

Johane shrugs. ‘Many grown persons believe what they believe.’

‘Dear God, what is going on under this roof? These children believe the Pope can go down to the underworld with a bunch of keys. Whereas Richard denies the sacrament –’

‘What?’ Johane's mouth falls open. ‘He does what?’

Mercy says, ‘Richard is right. When the good Lord said, this is my body, he meant, this signifies my body. He did not license priests to be conjurers.’

‘But he said, it is. He did not say, this is like my body, he said, it is. Can God lie? No. He is incapable of it.’

‘God can do anything,’ Alice says.

Johane stares at her. ‘You little minx.’

‘If my mother were here, she would slap you for that.’

‘No fighting,’ he says. ‘Please?’ The Austin Friars is like the world in little. These few years it's been more like a battlefield than a household; or like one of the tented encampments in which the survivors look in despair at their shattered limbs and spoiled expectations. But they are his to direct, these last hardened troops; if they are not to be flattened in the next charge it is he who must teach them the defensive art of facing both ways, faith and works, Pope and new brethren, Katherine and Anne. He looks at Mercy, who is smirking. He looks at Johane, a high colour in her cheeks. He turns away from Johane and his thoughts, which are not precisely theological. He says to the children, ‘You have done nothing wrong.’ But their faces are stricken, and he coaxes them: ‘I shall give you a present, Jo, for sewing the cardinal's letters; and I shall give you a present, Alice, I am sure that we do not need a reason. I shall give you marmosets.’

They look at each other. Jo is tempted. ‘Do you know where to get them?’

‘I think so. I have been to the Lord Chancellor's house, and his wife has such a creature, and it sits on her knee and attends to everything she says.’

Alice says, ‘They are not the fashion now.’

‘Though we thank you,’ says Mercy.

‘Though we thank you,’ Alice repeats. ‘But marmosets are not seen at court since Lady Anne came up. To be fashionable, we should like Bella's puppies.’

‘In time,’ he says. ‘Perhaps.’ The room is full of undercurrents, some of which he does not understand. He picks up his dog, tucks her under his arm and goes off to see how to provide some more money for brother George Rochford. He sits Bella on his desk, to take a nap among his papers. She has been sucking the end of her ribbon, and attempting subtly to undo the knot at her throat.

On 1 November 1530, a commission for the cardinal's arrest is given to Harry Percy, the young Earl of Northumberland. The earl arrives at Cawood to arrest him, forty-eight hours before his planned arrival in York for his investiture. He is taken to Pontefract Castle under guard, from there to Doncaster, and from there to Sheffield Park, the home of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Here at Talbot's house he falls ill. On 26 November the Constable of the Tower arrives, with twenty-four men at arms, to escort him south. From there he travels to Leicester Abbey. Three days later he dies.

What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.

George Cavendish comes to Austin Friars. He cries as he talks. Sometimes he dries his tears and moralises. But mostly he cries. ‘We had not even finished our dinner,’ he says. ‘My lord was taking his dessert when young Harry Percy walked in. He was spattered with mud from the road, and he had the keys in his hands, he had taken them from the porter already, and set sentries on the stairs. My lord rose to his feet, he said, Harry, if I'd known, I'd have waited dinner for you. I fear we've almost finished the fish. Shall I pray for a miracle?

‘I whispered to him, my lord, do not blaspheme. Then Harry Percy came forward: my lord, I arrest you for high treason.’

Cavendish waits. He waits for him to erupt in fury? But he puts his fingers together, joined as if he were praying. He thinks, Anne arranged this, and it must have given her an intense and secret pleasure; vengeance deferred, for herself, for her old lover, once berated by the cardinal and sent packing from the court. He says, ‘How did he look? Harry Percy?’

‘He was shaking from head to foot.’

‘And my lord?’

‘Demanded his warrant, his commission. Percy said, there are items in my instructions you may not see. So, said my lord, if you will not show it, I shall not surrender to you, so here's a pretty state of affairs, Harry. Come, George, my lord said to me, we will go into my rooms, and have some conference. They followed him on his heels, the earl's party, so I stood in the door and I barred the way. My lord cardinal walked into his chamber, mastering himself, and when he turned he said, Cavendish, look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.’

He, Cromwell, walks away so that he does not have to see the man's distress. He looks at the wall, at the panelling, at his new linenfold panelling, and runs his index finger across its grooves. ‘When they took him from the house, the townspeople were assembled outside. They knelt in the road and wept. They asked God to send vengeance on Harry Percy.’

God need not trouble, he thinks: I shall take it in hand.

‘We were riding south. The weather was closing in. At Doncaster it was late when we arrived. In the street the townsfolk were packed shoulder to shoulder, and each person holding up a candle against the dark. We thought they would disperse, but they stood all night in the road. And their candles burned down. And it was daylight, of a sort.’

‘It must have put heart into him. Seeing the crowds.’

‘Yes, but by then – I did not say, I should have told you – he had gone a week without eating.’

‘Why? Why did he do that?’

‘Some say he meant to destroy himself. I cannot believe it, a Christian soul … I ordered him a dish of warden pears, roasted with spices – did I do right?’

‘And he ate?’

‘A little. But then he put his hand to his chest. He said, there is something cold inside me, cold and hard like a whetstone. And that was where it began.’ Cavendish gets up. Now he too walks about the room. ‘I called for an apothecary. He made a powder and I had him pour it into three cups. I drank off one. He, the apothecary, he drank another. Master Cromwell, I trusted nobody. My lord took his powder and presently the pain eased, and he said, there, it was wind, and we laughed, and I thought, tomorrow he will be better.’

‘Then Kingston came.’

‘Yes. How could we tell my lord, the Constable of the Tower is here to fetch you? My lord sat down on a packing case. He said, William Kingston? William Kingston? He kept on saying his name.’

And all that time a weight in his chest, a whetstone, a steel, a sharpening knife in his gut.

‘I said to him, now take it cheerfully, my lord. You will come before the king and clear your name. And Kingston said the same, but my lord said, you are leading me into a fool's paradise. I know what is provided for me, and what death is prepared. That night we did not sleep. My lord voided black blood from his bowels. The next morning he was too weak to stand, and so we could not ride. But then we did ride. And so we came to Leicester.

‘The days were very short, the light poor. On Monday morning at eight he woke. I was just then bringing in the small wax lights, and setting them along the cupboard. He said, whose is that shadow that leaps along the wall? And he cried your name. God forgive me, I said you were on the road. He said, the ways are treacherous. I said, you know Cromwell, the devil does not delay him – if he says he is on the road he will be here.’

‘George, make this story short, I cannot bear it.’

But George must have his say: next morning at four, a bowl of chicken broth, but he would not eat it. Is this not a meatless day? He asked for the broth to be taken away. By now he had been ill for eight days, continually voiding his bowels, bleeding and in pain, and he said, believe me, death is the end of this.

Put my lord in a difficulty, and he will find a way; with his craft and cunning, he will find a way, an exit. Poison? If so, then by his own hand.

It was eight next morning when he drew his last breath. Around his bed, the click of rosary beads; outside the restive stamp of horses in their stalls, the thin winter moon shining down on the London road.

‘He died in his sleep?’ He would have wished him less pain. George says, no, he was speaking to the last. ‘Did he speak of me again?’

Anything? A word?

I washed him, George says, laid him out for burial. ‘I found, under his fine holland shirt, a belt of hair … I am sorry to tell you, I know you are not a lover of these practices, but so it was. I think he never did this till he was at Richmond among the monks.’

‘What became of it? This belt of hair?’

‘The monks of Leicester kept it.’

‘God Almighty! They'll make it pay.’

‘Do you know, they could provide nothing better than a coffin of plain boards?’ Only when he says this does George Cavendish give way; only at this point does he swear and say, by the passion of Christ, I heard them knocking it together. When I think of the Florentine sculptor and his tomb, the black marble, the bronze, the angels at his head and foot … But I saw him dressed in his archbishop's robes, and I opened his fingers to put into his hand his crozier, just as I thought I would see him hold it when he was enthroned at York. It was only two days away. Our bags were packed and we were ready for the road; till Harry Percy walked in.

‘You know, George,’ he says, ‘I begged him, be content with what you have clawed back from ruin, go to York, be glad to be alive … In the course of things, he would have lived another ten years, I know he would.’

‘We sent for the mayor and all the city officials, so that they could see him in his coffin, so there could be no false rumours that he was living and escaped to France. Some made remarks about his low birth, by God I wish you had been there –’

‘I too.’

‘For to your face, Master Cromwell, they had not done it, nor would they dare. When the light failed we kept vigil, with the tapers burning around his coffin, till four in the morning, which you know is the canonical hour. Then we heard Mass. At six we laid him in the crypt. There left him.’

Six in the morning, a Wednesday, the feast of St Andrew the Apostle. I, a simple cardinal. There left him and rode south, to find the king at Hampton Court. Who says to George, ‘I would not for twenty thousand pounds that the cardinal had died.’

‘Look, Cavendish,’ he says, ‘when you are asked what the cardinal said in his last days, tell them nothing.’

George raises his eyebrows. ‘I already have. Told them nothing. The king questioned me. My lord Norfolk.’

‘If you tell Norfolk anything, he will twist it into treason.’

‘Still, as he is Lord Treasurer, he has paid me my back wages. I was three-quarters of the year in arrears.’

‘What were you paid, George?’

‘Ten pounds a year.’

‘You should have come to me.’

These are the facts. These are the figures. If the Lord of the Underworld rose up tomorrow in the privy chamber, and offered a dead man back, fresh from the grave, fresh from the crypt, the miracle of Lazarus for £20,000 – Henry Tudor would be pushed to scrape it together. Norfolk as Lord Treasurer? Fine; it doesn't matter who holds the title, who holds the clanking keys to the empty chests.

‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘if the cardinal could say, as he used to say to me, Thomas, what would you like for a New Year's gift, I would say, I would like sight of the nation's accounts.’

Cavendish hesitates; he begins to speak; he stops; he starts again. ‘The king said certain things to me. At Hampton Court. “Three may keep counsel, if two are away.”’

‘It is a proverb, I think.’

‘He said, “If I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire.”’

‘I think that also is a proverb.’

‘He means to say that he will not choose any adviser now: not my lord of Norfolk, nor Stephen Gardiner, or anyone, any person to be close to him, to be so close as the cardinal was.’

He nods. That seems a reasonable interpretation.

Cavendish looks ill. It is the strain of the long sleepless nights, of the vigil around the coffin. He is worried about various sums of money the cardinal had on the journey, which he did not have when he died. He is worried about how to get his own effects from Yorkshire to his home; apparently Norfolk has promised him a cart and a transport allowance. He, Cromwell, talks about this while he thinks about the king, and out of sight of George folds his fingers, one by one, tight into the palm of his hand. Mary Boleyn traced, in his palm, a certain shape; he thinks, Henry, I have your heart in my hand.

When Cavendish has gone, he goes to his secret drawer and takes out the package that the cardinal gave him on the day he began his journey north. He unwinds the thread that binds it. It snags, knots, he works at it patiently; before he had expected it, the turquoise ring rolls into his palm, cold as if it came from the tomb. He pictures the cardinal's hands, long-fingered, white and unscarred, steady for so many years on the wheel of the ship of state; but the ring fits as if it had been made for him.

The cardinal's scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years? Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man's inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore's petticoat.

Another man would go to Leicester to see where he died and talk to the abbot. Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet's ground, the flush of the robin's breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the colour of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.

At Hampton Court in the great hall they perform an interlude; its name is ‘The Cardinal's Descent into Hell’. It takes him back to last year, to Gray's Inn. Under the eye of the officials of the king's household, the carpenters have been working furiously and for bonus rates, erecting frames upon which to drape canvas cloths painted with scenes of torture. At the back of the hall, the screens are entirely hung with flames.

The entertainment is this: a vast scarlet figure, supine, is dragged across the floor, howling, by actors dressed as devils. There are four devils, one for each limb of the dead man. The devils wear masks. They have tridents with which they prick the cardinal, making him twitch and writhe and beg. He had hoped the cardinal died without pain but Cavendish had said no. He died conscious, talking of the king. He had started out of sleep and said, whose is that shadow on the wall?

The Duke of Norfolk walks around the hall chortling, ‘Isn't it good, eh? It's good enough to be printed! By the Mass, that's what I shall do! I shall have it printed, so I can take it home with me, and at Christmas we can play it all over again.’

Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side. Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you would see that his eyes are afraid. The cardinal rolls across the floor, kicking out at the demons, but they harry him, in their woolly suits of black, and cry, ‘Come, Wolsey, we must fetch you to Hell, for our master Beelzebub is expecting you to supper.’

When the scarlet mountain pops up his head and asks, ‘What wines does he serve?’ he almost forgets himself and laughs. ‘I'll have no English wine,’ the dead man declares. ‘None of that cats' piss my lord of Norfolk lays on.’

Anne crows; she points; she points to her uncle; the noise rises high to the roof beams with the smoke from the hearth, the laughing and chanting from the tables, the howling of the fat prelate. No, they assure him, the devil is a Frenchman, and there are catcalls and whistles, and songs break out. The devils now catch the cardinal's head in a noose. They haul him to his feet, but he fights them. The flailing punches are not all fake, and he hears their grunts, as the breath is knocked out of them. But there are four hangmen, and one great scarlet bag of nothingness, who chokes, who claws; the court cries, ‘Let him down! Let him down alive!’

The actors throw up their hands; they prance back and let him fall. When he rolls on the ground, gasping, they thrust their forks into him and wind out lengths of scarlet woollen bowel.

The cardinal utters blasphemies. He utters farts, and fireworks blast out from corners of the hall. From the corner of his eye, he sees a woman run away, a hand over her mouth; but Uncle Norfolk marches about, pointing: ‘Look, there his guts are wound out, as the hangman would draw them! Why, I'd pay to see this!’

Someone calls, ‘Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you'd have sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.’ Heads turn, and his head turns, and nobody knows who has spoken; but he thinks it might be, could it be, Thomas Wyatt? The gentlemen devils have dusted themselves down and got their breath back. Shouting ‘Now!’ they pounce; the cardinal is dragged off to Hell, which is located, it seems, behind the screens at the back of the hall.

He follows them behind the screens. Pages run out with linen towels for the actors, but the satanic influx knocks them aside. At least one of the children gets an elbow in the eye, and drops his bowl of steaming water on his feet. He sees the devils wrench off their masks, and toss them, swearing, into a corner; he watches as they try to claw off their knitted devil-coats. They turn to each other, laughing, and begin to pull them over each other's heads. ‘It's like the shirt of Nessus,’ George Boleyn says, as Norris wrenches him free.

George tosses his head to settle his hair back into place; his white skin has flared from contact with the rough wool. George and Henry Norris are the hand-devils, who seized the cardinal by his forepaws. The two foot-devils are still wrestling each other from their trappings. They are a boy called Francis Weston, and William Brereton, who – like Norris – is old enough to know better. They are so absorbed in themselves – cursing, laughing, calling for clean linen – that they do not notice who is watching them and anyway they do not care. They splash themselves and each other, they towel away their sweat, they rip the shirts from the pages' hands, they drop them over their heads. Still wearing their cloven hooves, they swagger out to take their bow.

In the centre of the space they have vacated, the cardinal lies inert, shielded from the hall by the screens; perhaps he is sleeping.

He walks up to the scarlet mound. He stops. He looks down. He waits. The actor opens one eye. ‘This must be Hell,’ he says. ‘This must be Hell, if the Italian is here.’

The dead man pulls off his mask. It is Sexton, the fool: Master Patch. Master Patch, who screamed so hard, a year ago, when they wanted to part him from his master.

Patch holds out a hand, to be helped to his feet, but he does not take it. The man scrambles up by himself, cursing. He begins to pull off his scarlet, dragging and tearing at the cloth. He, Cromwell, stands with his arms folded, his writing hand tucked into a hidden fist. The fool casts away his padding, fat pillows of wool. His body is scrawny, wasted, his chest furred with wiry hairs. He speaks: ‘Why you come to my country, Italian? Why you no stay in your own country, ah?’

Sexton is a fool, but he's not soft in the head. He knows well he's not an Italian.

‘You should have stayed over there,’ Patch says, in his own London voice. ‘Have your own walled town by now. Have a cathedral. Have your own marzipan cardinal to eat after dinner. Have it all for a year or two, eh, till a bigger brute comes along and knocks you off the trough?’

He picks up the costume Patch has cast off. Its red is the fiery, cheap, quick-fading scarlet of Brazil-wood dye, and it smells of alien sweat. ‘How can you act this part?’

‘I act what part I'm paid to act. And you?’ He laughs: his shrill bark, which passes as mad. ‘No wonder your humour's so bitter these days. Nobody's paying you, eh? Monsieur Cremuel, the retired mercenary.’

‘Not so retired. I can fix you.’

‘With that dagger you keep where once was your waist.’ Patch springs away, he capers. He, Cromwell, leans against the wall; he watches him. He can hear a child sobbing, somewhere out of sight; perhaps it is the little boy who has been hit in the eye, now slapped again for dropping the bowl, or perhaps just for crying. Childhood was like that; you are punished, then punished again for protesting. So, one learns not to complain; it is a hard lesson, but one never lost.

Patch is trying out various postures, obscene gestures; as if preparing for some future performance. He says, ‘I know what ditch you were spawned in, Tom, and it was a ditch not far from mine.’ He turns to the hall where, unseen and beyond the dividing screen, the king, presumably, continues his pleasant day. Patch plants his legs apart, he sticks out his tongue. ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no Pope.’ He turns his head; he grins. ‘Come back in ten years, Master Cromwell, and tell me who's the fool then.’

‘You're wasting your jokes on me, Patch. Wearing out your stock-in-trade.’

‘Fools can say anything.’

‘Not where my writ runs.’

‘And where is that? Not even in the backyard where you were christened in a puddle. Come and meet me here, ten years today, if you're still alive.’

‘You would have a fright if I was dead.’

‘Because I'll stand still, and let you knock me down.’

‘I could crack your skull against the wall now. They'd not miss you.’

‘True,’ Master Sexton says. ‘They would roll me out in the morning and lay me on a dunghill. What's one fool? England is full of them.’

He is surprised there is any daylight left; he had thought it was deepest night. In these courts, Wolsey lingers; he built them. Turn any corner, and you will think you will see my lord, with a scroll of draughtsman's plans in his hands, his glee at his sixty turkey carpets, his hope to lodge and entertain the finest mirror-makers of Venice – ‘Now, Thomas, you will add to your letter some Venetian endearments, some covert phrases that will suggest, in the local dialect and the most delicate way possible, that I pay top rates.’

And he will add that the people of England are welcoming to foreigners and that the climate of England is benign. That golden birds sing on golden branches, and a golden king sits on a hill of coins, singing a song of his own composition.

When he gets home to Austin Friars he walks into a space that feels strange and empty. It has taken hours to get back from Hampton Court and it is late. He looks at the place on the wall where the cardinal's arms blaze out: the scarlet hat, at his request, recently retouched. ‘You can paint them out now,’ he says.

‘And what shall we paint else, sir?’

‘Leave a blank.’

‘We could have a pretty allegory?’

‘I'm sure.’ He turns and walks away. ‘Leave a space.’