Читать книгу Hilary Mantel Collection - Hilary Mantel - Страница 26

Time now to consider the compacts that hold the world together: the compact between ruler and ruled, and that between husband and wife. Both these arrangements rest on a sedulous devotion, the one to the interests of the other. The master and husband protect and provide; the wife and servant obey. Above masters, above husbands, God rules all. He counts up our petty rebellions, our human follies. He reaches out his long arm, hand bunched into a fist.

Imagine debating these matters with George, Lord Rochford. He is as witty a young man as any in England, polished and well read; but today what fascinates him is the flame-coloured satin that is pulled through his slashed velvet over-sleeve. He keeps coaxing the little puffs of fabric with a fingertip, pleating and nudging them and encouraging them to grow bigger, so that he looks like one of those jugglers who run balls down their arms.

It is time to say what England is, her scope and boundaries: not to count and measure her harbour defences and border walls, but to estimate her capacity for self-rule. It is time to say what a king is, and what trust and guardianship he owes his people: what protection from foreign incursions moral or physical, what freedom from the pretensions of those who would like to tell an Englishman how to speak to his God.

Parliament meets mid-January. The business of the early spring is breaking the resistance of the bishops to Henry's new order, putting in place legislation that – though for now it is held in suspension – will cut revenues to Rome, make his supremacy in the church no mere form of words. The Commons drafts a petition against the church courts, so arbitrary in their proceedings, so presumptuous in their claimed jurisdiction; it questions their jurisdiction, their very existence. The papers pass through many hands, but finally he himself works through the night with Rafe and Call-Me-Risley, scribbling amendments between the lines. He is flushing out the opposition: Gardiner, although he is the king's Secretary, feels obliged to lead his fellow prelates into the charge.

The king sends for Master Stephen. When he goes in, the hair on his neck is bristling and he is shrinking inside his skin like a mastiff being led towards a bear. The king has a high voice, for a big man, and it rises when he is angry to an ear-throbbing shriek. Are the clergy his subjects, or only half his subjects? Perhaps they are not his subjects at all, for how can they be, if they take an oath to obey and support the Pope? Should they not, he yells, be taking an oath to me?

When Stephen comes out he leans against the painted panelling. At his back a troupe of painted nymphs are frisking in a glade. He takes out a handkerchief but seems to have forgotten why; he twists it in his great paw, wrapping it around his knuckles like a bandage. Sweat trickles down his face.

He, Cromwell, calls for assistance. ‘My lord the bishop is ill.’ They bring a stool and Stephen glares at it, glares at him, then sits down with caution, as if he is not able to trust the joinery. ‘I take it you heard him?’

Every word. ‘If he does lock you up, I'll make sure you have some small comforts.’

Gardiner says, ‘God damn you, Cromwell. Who are you? What office do you hold? You're nothing. Nothing.’

We have to win the debate, not just knock our enemies down. He has been to see Christopher St German, the aged jurist, whose word is respected all over Europe. The old man entertains him civilly at his house. There is no man in England, he says, who does not believe our church is in need of reform which grows more urgent by the year, and if the church cannot do it, then the king in Parliament must, and can. This is the conclusion I have come to, after some decades of studying the subject.

Of course, the old man says, Thomas More does not agree with me. Perhaps his time has passed. Utopia, after all, is not a place one can live.

When he meets the king, Henry rages about Gardiner: disloyalty, he shouts, ingratitude. Can he remain my Secretary, when he has set himself up in direct opposition to me? (This is the man whom Henry himself praised as a stout controversialist.) He sits quietly, watching Henry, trying by stillness to defuse the situation; to wrap the king in a blanketing silence, so that he, Henry, can listen to himself. It is a great thing, to be able to divert the wrath of the Lion of England. ‘I think …’ he says softly, ‘with Your Majesty's permission, what I think … The Bishop of Winchester, as we know, likes arguing. But not with his king. He would not dare to do that for sport.’ He pauses. ‘So his views, though mistaken, are honestly held.’

‘Indeed, but –’ The king breaks off. Henry has heard his own voice, the voice he used to the cardinal when he brought him down. Gardiner is not Wolsey – if only in the sense that, if he is sacrificed, few will remember him with regret. And yet it suits him, for the moment, to have the snarling bishop still in his post; he has a care for Henry's reputation in Europe, and he says, ‘Majesty, Stephen has served you as an ambassador to the limit of his powers, and it would be better to reconcile him, by honest persuasion, than to force his hand by the weight of your displeasure. It is the more pleasant course, and there is more honour in it.’

He watches Henry's face. He is alive to anything that concerns honour.

‘Is that the advice you would always give?’

He smiles. ‘No.’

‘You are not wholly determined I should govern in a spirit of Christian meekness?’

‘No.’

‘I know you dislike Gardiner.’

‘That is why Your Majesty should consider my advice.’

He thinks, you owe me, Stephen. The bill will come in by and by.

At his own house he meets with parliamentarians and gentlemen from the Inns of Court and the city livery companies; with Thomas Audley who is Mr Speaker, and his protégé Richard Riche, a golden-haired young man, pretty as a painted angel, who has an active, quick and secular mind; with Rowland Lee, a robust outspoken cleric, the least priestly man you would find in a long day's march. In these months, the ranks of his city friends are thinned by sickness and unnatural death. Thomas Somer, whom he has known for years, has died just after release from the Tower, where he was shut up for distributing the gospel in English; fond of fine clothes and fast horses, Somer was a man of irrepressible spirits, till at last he had his reckoning with the Lord Chancellor. John Petyt has been released but he is too sick to take any more part in the Commons. He visits him; he is confined to his chamber now. It is painful to hear him fighting for breath. The spring of 1532, the year's first warm weather, does nothing to ease him. I feel, he says, as if there is an iron hoop around my chest, and they are drawing it tighter. He says, Thomas, will you look after Luce when I die?

Sometimes, if he walks in the gardens with the burgesses or with Anne's chaplains, he feels the absence of Dr Cranmer at his right-hand side. He has been away since January, as the king's ambassador to the Emperor; on his travels, he will visit scholars in Germany to canvass support for the king's divorce. He had said to him, ‘What shall I do if, while you are away, the king has a dream?’

Cranmer had smiled. ‘You worked it by yourself, last time. I was only there to nod it through.’

He sees the animal Marlinspike, his paws hanging as he drapes himself from a black bough. He points him out. ‘Gentlemen, that was the cardinal's cat.’ At the sight of the visitors Marlinspike darts along the boundary wall, and with a whisk of his tail disappears, into the unknown territory beyond.

Down in the kitchens at Austin Friars, the garzoni are learning to make spiced wafers. The process involves a good eye, exact timing and a steady hand. There are so many points at which it can go wrong. The mixture must have the right dropping consistency, the plates of the long-handled irons must be well greased and hot. When you press the plates together there is an animal shriek as they meet, and steam hisses into the air. If you panic and release the pressure you will have a claggy mess to scrape away. You must wait till the steam dies down, and then you start counting. If you miss a beat the smell of scorching permeates the air. A second divides the successes from the failures.

When he brings into the Commons a bill to suspend the payment of annates to Rome, he suggests a division of the House. This is far from usual, but amid shock and grumbling the members comply: for the bill to this side, against the bill to the other side. The king is present; he watches, he learns who is for him and who against, and at the end of the process he gives his councillor a grim nod of approval. In the Lords this tactic will not serve. The king has to go in person, three times, and argue his own case. The old aristocracy – proud families like the Exeter clan, with their own claim to the throne – are for Pope and Katherine and are not afraid to say so: or not yet. But he is identifying his enemies and, where he can, splitting them.

Once the kitchen boys have made a single commendable wafer, Thurston has them turn out a hundred more. It becomes second nature, the flick of the wrist with which one rolls the half-set wafer on to the handle of a wooden spoon and then flips it on to the drying rack to crisp. The successes – with time, they should all be successes – are stamped with the badges of the Tudors, and stacked by the dozen in the pretty inlaid boxes in which they will come to the table, each frail golden disk perfumed with rosewater. He sends a batch to Thomas Boleyn.

As father of the queen-to-be, Wiltshire thinks he deserves some special title, and has let it be known it would not be disagreeable to him to be known as Monseigneur. He confers with him, his son and their friends, then walks to see Anne, through the chambers at Whitehall. Month by month her state is greater, but he goes through with a bow from her people. At court and in the offices of Westminster he dresses not a whit above his gentleman's station, in loose jackets of Lemster wool so fine they flow like water, in purples and indigos so near black that it looks as if the night has bled into them; his cap of black velvet sits on his black hair, so that the only points of light are his darting eyes and the gestures of his solid, fleshy hands; those, and flashes of fire from Wolsey's turquoise ring.

At Whitehall – York Place, as it was – the builders are still in. For Christmas, the king had given Anne a bedroom. He led her to it himself, to see her gasp at the wall hangings, which were of cloth of silver and cloth of gold, the carved bed hung with crimson satin embroidered with images of flowers and children. Henry Norris had reported to him that Anne had failed to gasp; she had just looked around the room slowly, smiled, blinked. Then she had remembered what she ought to do; she pretended to feel faint at the honour, and it was only when she swayed and the king locked his arms around her that the gasp came. I do devoutly hope, Norris had said, that we shall all at least once in our lives cause a woman to utter that sound.

When Anne had expressed her thanks, kneeling, Henry had to leave, of course; to leave the shimmering room, trailing her by the hand, and go back to the New Year feast, to the public scrutiny of his expression: in the certainty that news of it would be conveyed all over Europe, by land and sea, in and out of cipher.

When at the end of his walk through the cardinal's old rooms he finds Anne sitting with her ladies, she already knows, or seems to know, what her father and brother have said. They think they are fixing her tactics, but she is her own best tactician, and able to think back and judge what has gone wrong; he admires anyone who can learn from mistakes. One day, the windows open to the wing-beats of nest-building birds, she says, ‘You once told me that only the cardinal could set the king free. Do you know what I think now? I think Wolsey was the last person to do it. Because he was so proud, because he wanted to be Pope. If he had been more humble, Clement would have obliged him.’

‘There may be something in that.’

‘I suppose we should take a lesson,’ Norris says.

They turn together. Anne says, ‘Really, should we?’ and he says, ‘What lesson would that be?’

Norris is at a loss.

‘None of us are likely to be cardinals,’ Anne says. ‘Even Thomas, who aspires to most things, would not aspire to that.’

‘Oh? I wouldn't put money on it.’ Norris slouches off, as only a silken gentleman can slouch, and leaves him behind with the women.

‘So, Lady Anne,’ he says, ‘when you are reflecting on the late cardinal, do you take time to pray for his soul?’

‘I think God has judged him, and my prayers, if I make them or if I do not, are of no effect.’

Mary Boleyn says, gently, ‘He is teasing you, Anne.’

‘If it were not for the cardinal, you would be married to Harry Percy.’

‘At least,’ she snaps, ‘I would occupy the estate of wife, which is an honourable estate, but now –’

‘Oh, but cousin,’ Mary Shelton says, ‘Harry Percy has gone mad. Everybody knows it. He is spending all his money.’

Mary Boleyn laughs. ‘So he is, and my sister supposes it is his disappointment over her that is to blame.’

‘My lady,’ he turns to Anne, ‘you would not like to be in Harry Percy's country. For you know he would do as those northern lords do, and keep you in a freezing turret up a winding stair, and only let you come down for your dinner. And just as you are seated, and they are bringing in a pudding made of oatmeal mixed with the blood of cattle they have got in a raid, my lord comes thundering in, swinging a sack – oh, sweetheart, you say, a present for me? and he says, aye, madam, if it please you, and opens the sack and into your lap rolls the severed head of a Scot.’

‘Oh, that is horrible,’ Mary Shelton whispers. ‘Is that what they do?’ Anne puts her hand to her mouth, laughing.

‘And you know,’ he says, ‘that for your dinner you would prefer a lightly poached breast of chicken, sliced into a cream sauce with tarragon. And also a fine aged cheese imported by the ambassador of Spain, which he intended no doubt for the queen, but which somehow found its way to my house.’

‘How could I be better served?’ Anne asks. ‘A band of men on the highway, waylaying Katherine's cheese.’

‘Well, having staged such a coup, I must go …’ he gestures to the lute-player in the corner, ‘and leave you with your goggle-eyed lover.’

Anne darts a look at the boy Mark. ‘He does goggle. True.’

‘Shall I send him off? The place is full of musicians.’

‘Leave him,’ Mary says. ‘He's a sweet boy.’

Mary Boleyn stands up. ‘I'll just …’

‘Now Lady Carey is going to have one of her conferences with Master Cromwell,’ Mary Shelton says, in a tone of giving agreeable information.

Jane Rochford: ‘She is going to offer him her virtue again.’

‘Lady Carey, what can you not say before us all?’ But Anne nods. He may go. Mary may go. Presumably Mary is to carry messages that she, Anne, is too delicate to convey direct.

Outside: ‘Sometimes I need to breathe.’ He waits. ‘Jane and our brother George, you know they hate each other? He won't go to bed with her. If he is not with some other woman he sits up at night with Anne in her rooms. They play cards. They play Pope Julius till the dawn comes. Did you know the king pays her gambling debts? She needs more income, and a house of her own, a retreat, not too far from London, somewhere on the river –’

‘Whose house has she in mind?’

‘I don't think she means to turn anyone out.’

‘Houses tend to belong to somebody.’ Then a thought strikes him. He smiles.

She says, ‘I told you to stay away from her, once. But now we cannot do without you. Even my father and my uncle say so. Nothing is done, nothing, without the king's favour, without his constant company, and nowadays when you are not with Henry he wants to know where you are.’ She steps back, appraises him for a moment as if he were a stranger. ‘My sister, too.’

‘I want a job, Lady Carey. It isn't enough to be a councillor. I need an official place in the household.’

‘I'll tell her.’

‘I want a post in the Jewel House. Or the Exchequer.’

She nods. ‘She made Tom Wyatt a poet. She made Harry Percy a madman. I'm sure she has some ideas about what to make you.’

A few days before Parliament met, Thomas Wyatt had come to apologise for getting him out of bed before dawn on New Year's Day. ‘You have every right to be angry with me, but I've come to ask you not to be. You know how it is at New Year. Toasts are drunk, and the bowl goes round, and you must drain the bowl.’ He watches Wyatt as he walks about the room, too curious and restless and half-shy to sit down and make his amends face-to-face. He turns the painted globe of the world, and rests his forefinger on England. He stops to look at pictures, at a little altarpiece, and he turns, questioning; it was my wife's, he says, I keep it for her sake. Master Wyatt wears a jacket of a stiffened cream brocade trimmed with sables, which he probably cannot afford; he wears a doublet of tawny silk. He has tender blue eyes and a mane of golden hair, thinning now. Sometimes he puts his fingertips to his head, tentative, as if he still has his New Year headache; really, he is checking his hairline, to see if it has receded in the last five minutes. He stops and looks at himself in the mirror; he does this very often. Dear God, he says. Rolling about the streets with that crowd. I'm too old for such behaviour. But too young to lose my hair. Do you think women care about it? Much? Do you think if I grew a beard it would distract … No, probably not. But perhaps I will anyway. The king's beard looks well, does it not?

He says, ‘Didn't your father give you any advice?’

‘Oh yes. Drink off a bowl of milk before you go out. Stewed quinces in honey – do you think that works?’

He is trying not to laugh. He wants to take it seriously, his new post as Wyatt's father. He says, ‘I mean, did he never advise you to stay away from women in whom the king is interested?’

‘I did stay away. You remember I went to Italy? After that I was in Calais for a year. How much staying away can a man do?’

A question from his own life; he recognises it. Wyatt sits down on a small stool. He props his elbows on his knees. He holds his head, fingertips on his temples. He is listening to his own heartbeat; he is thinking; perhaps he is composing a verse? He looks up. ‘My father says that now Wolsey is dead you're the cleverest man in England. So can you understand this, if I say it just once? If Anne is not a virgin, that's none of my doing.’

He pours him a glass of wine. ‘Strong,’ Wyatt says, after he has downed it. He looks into the depth of the glass, at his own fingers holding it. ‘I must say more, I think.’

‘If you must, say it here, and just once.’

‘Is anyone hiding behind the arras? Somebody told me there are servants at Chelsea who report to you. No one's servants are safe, these days, there are spies everywhere.’

‘Tell me in what day there were not spies,’ he says. ‘There was a child in More's house, Dick Purser, More took him in out of guilt after he was orphaned – I cannot say More killed the father outright, but he had him in the pillory and in the Tower, and it broke his health. Dick told the other boys he did not believe God was in the Communion host, so More had him whipped before the whole household. Now I have brought him here. What else could I do? I will take in any others he ill-treats.’

Smiling, Wyatt passes his hand over the Queen of Sheba: that is to say, over Anselma. The king has given him Wolsey's fine tapestry. Early in the year, when he went in to speak to him at Greenwich, the king had seen him raise his eyes to her in greeting, and had said, with a sideways smile, do you know this woman? I used to, he said, explaining himself, excusing himself; the king said, no matter, we all have our follies in youth, and you can't marry everyone, can you … He had said in a low voice, I have in mind that this belonged to the Cardinal of York, and then, more briskly, when you go home make a place for her; I think she should come to live with you.

He gives himself a glass of wine, and another to Wyatt; says, ‘Gardiner has people outside the gate, watching who comes and goes. This is a city house, it is not a fortress – but if anybody's here who shouldn't be, my household does enjoy kicking them out. We quite like fighting. I'd prefer to put my past behind me, but I'm not allowed to. Uncle Norfolk keeps reminding me I was a common soldier, and not even in his army.’

‘You call him that?’ Wyatt laughs. ‘Uncle Norfolk?’

‘Between ourselves. But I don't need to remind you of what the Howards think is due to them. And you've grown up Thomas Boleyn's neighbour, so you know not to cross him, whatever you feel about his daughter. I hope you don't feel anything – do you?’

‘For two years,’ Wyatt says, ‘I was sick to my soul to think of any other man touching her. But what could I offer? I am a married man, and not the duke or prince she was fishing for, either. She liked me, I think, or she liked to have me in thrall to her, it amused her. We would be alone, she would let me kiss her, and I always thought … but that is Anne's tactic, you see, she says yes, yes, yes, then she says no.’

‘And of course, you are such a gentleman.’

‘What, I should have raped her? If she says stop she means it – Henry knows that. But then another day would come and again she would let me kiss her. Yes, yes, yes, no. The worst of it is her hinting, her boasting almost, that she says no to me but yes to others –’

‘Who are?’

‘Oh, names, names would spoil her pastime. It must be so arranged that every man you see, at court or down in Kent, you think, is he the one? Is it him, or him? So you are continually asking yourself why you've fallen short, why you can never please her, why you never get the chance.’

‘I should think you write the best poems. You can comfort yourself there. His Majesty's verses can be a little repetitive, not to say self-centred.’

‘That song of his, “Pastime With Good Company.” When I hear it there is something inside me, like a little dog, that wants to howl.’

‘True, the king is past forty. It is melancholy to hear him sing of the days when he was young and stupid.’ He watches Wyatt. The young man looks dazed, as if he has a persistent pain between his eyes. He is claiming that Anne no longer torments him, but that's not how it looks. He says, brutal as a butcher, ‘So how many lovers do you think she has had?’

Wyatt looks down at his feet. He looks at the ceiling. He says, ‘A dozen? Or none? Or a hundred? Brandon tried to tell Henry she was soiled goods. But he sent Brandon away from court. Imagine if I tried. I doubt I'd get out of the room alive. Brandon forced himself to speak, because he thinks, come the day she gives in to Henry, what then? Will he not know?’

‘Give her credit. She must have thought of that. Besides, the king is no judge of maidenheads. He admits as much. With Katherine, it took him twenty years to puzzle out his brother had been there before him.’

Wyatt laughs. ‘When the day comes, or the night, Anne can hardly say that to him.’

‘Listen. This is my view of the case. Anne does not concern herself with her wedding night because there is no cause for concern.’ He wants to say, because Anne is not a carnal being, she is a calculating being, with a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes. ‘I believe any woman who can say no to the King of England and keep on saying it, has the wit to say no to any number of men, including you, including Harry Percy, including anyone else she may choose to torment for her own sport while she is arranging her career in the way it suits her. So I think, yes, you've been made into a fool, but not quite in the way you thought.’

‘That is meant as consolation?’

‘It should console you. If you'd really been her lover I would fear for you. Henry believes in her virginity. What else can he believe? But he will prove jealous, once they're married.’

‘As they will be? Married?’

‘I am working hard with Parliament, believe me, and I think I can break the bishops. And after that, God knows … Thomas More says that in the reign of King John when England was placed under an interdict by the Pope, the cattle didn't breed, the corn ceased to ripen, the grass stopped growing and birds fell out of the air. But if that starts to happens,’ he smiles, ‘I'm sure we can reverse our policy.’

‘Anne has asked me: Cromwell, what does he really believe?’

‘So you have conversations? And about me? Not just yes, yes, yes, no? I'm flattered.’

Wyatt looks unhappy. ‘You couldn't be wrong? About Anne?’

‘It's possible. For the moment I take her at her own valuation. It suits me. It suits us both.’

As Wyatt is leaving: ‘You must come back soon. My girls have heard how handsome you are. You can keep your hat on, if you think they might be disillusioned.’

Wyatt is the king's regular tennis partner. Therefore he knows about humbled pride. He fetches up a smile.

‘Your father told us all about the lion. The boys have made a play out of it. Perhaps you would like to come one day and take your own role?’

‘Oh, the lion. Nowadays, I think back on it, and it doesn't seem to me like a thing I would do. Stand still, in the open, and draw it on.’ He pauses. ‘More like something you would do, Master Cromwell.’

Thomas More comes to Austin Friars. He refuses food, he refuses drink, though he looks in need of both.

The cardinal would not have taken no for an answer. He would have made him sit down and eat syllabub. Or, if it were the season, given him a large plate of strawberries and a very small spoon.

More says, ‘In these last ten years the Turks have taken Belgrade. They have lit their campfires in the great library at Buda. It is only two years since they were at the gates of Vienna. Why would you want to make another breach in the walls of Christendom?’

‘The King of England is not an infidel. Nor am I.’

‘Are you not? I hardly know whether you pray to the god of Luther and the Germans, or some heathen god you met with on your travels, or some English deity of your own invention. Perhaps your faith is for purchase. You would serve the Sultan if the price was right.’

Erasmus says, did nature ever create anything kinder, sweeter or more harmonious than the character of Thomas More?

He is silent. He sits at his desk – More has caught him at work – with his chin propped on his fists. It is a pose that shows him, probably, to some combative advantage.

The Lord Chancellor looks as if he might rend his garments: which could only improve them. One could pity him, but he decides not to. ‘Master Cromwell, you think because you are a councillor you can negotiate with heretics, behind the king's back. You are wrong. I know about your letters that come and go to Stephen Vaughan, I know he has met with Tyndale.’

‘Are you threatening me? I'm just interested.’

‘Yes,’ More says sadly. ‘Yes, that is precisely what I am doing.’

He sees that the balance of power has shifted between them: not as officers of state, but as men.

When More leaves, Richard says to him, ‘He ought not. Threaten you, I mean. Today, because of his office, he walks away, but tomorrow, who knows?’

He thinks, I was a child, nine or so, I ran off into London and saw an old woman suffer for her faith. The memory floods into his body and he walks away as if he sails on its tide, saying over his shoulder, ‘Richard, see if the Lord Chancellor has his proper escort. If not, give him one, and try to put him on a boat back to Chelsea. We cannot have him wandering about London, haranguing anyone at whose gate he may arrive.’

He says the last bit in French, he does not know why. He thinks of Anne, her hand outstretched, drawing him towards her: Maître Cremuel, à moi.

He cannot remember the year but he remembers the late April weather, fat raindrops dappling the pale new leaves. He cannot remember the reason for Walter's temper, but he can remember the fear he felt in the pith of his being, and his heart banging against his ribs. In those days if he couldn't hide out with his uncle John at Lambeth he would get himself into the town and see who he could pick up with – see if he could earn a penny by running errands up and down to the quays, by carrying baskets or loading barrows. If you whistled for him, he came; lucky, he knows now, not to have got in with low-lifes who would lead him to be branded or whipped, or to be one of the small corpses fished out of the river. At that age you have no judgement. If somebody said, good sport over there, he followed the pointing finger. He had nothing against the old woman, but he had never seen a burning.

What's her crime? he said, and they said, she is a Loller. That's one who says the God on the altar is a piece of bread. What, he said, bread like the baker bakes? Let this child forward, they said. Let him be instructed, it will do him good to see up close, so he always goes to Mass after this and obeys his priest. They pushed him to the front of the crowd. Come here, sweetheart, stand with me, a woman said. She had a broad smile and wore a clean white cap. You get a pardon for your sins just for watching it, she said. Any that bring faggots to the burning, they get forty days' release from Purgatory.

When the Loller was led out between the officers the people jeered and shouted. He saw that she was a grandmother, perhaps the oldest person he had ever seen. The officers were nearly carrying her. She had no cap or veil. Her hair seemed to be torn out of her head in patches. People behind him said, no doubt she did that herself, in desperation at her sin. Behind the Loller came two monks, parading like fat grey rats, crosses in their pink paws. The woman in the clean cap squeezed his shoulder: like a mother might do, if you had one. Look at her, she said, eighty years old, and steeped in wickedness. A man said, not much fat on her bones, it won't take long unless the wind changes.

But what's her sin? he said.

I told you. She says the saints are but wooden posts.

Like that post they're chaining her to?

Aye, just like that.

The post will burn too.

They can get another next time, the woman said. She took her hand from his shoulder. She balled her two hands into fists and punched them in the air, and from the depth of her belly she let loose a scream, a halloo, in a shrill voice like a demon. The press of people took up the cry. They seethed and pushed forward for a view, they catcalled and whistled and stamped their feet. At the thought of the horrible thing he would see he felt hot and cold. He twisted to look up into the face of the woman who was his mother in this crowd. You watch, she said. With the gentlest brush of her fingers she turned his face to the spectacle. Pay attention now. The officers took chains and bound the old person to the stake.

The stake was on top of a pile of stones, and some gentlemen came, and priests, bishops perhaps, he did not know. They called out to the Loller to put off her heresies. He was close enough to see her lips moving but he could not hear what she said. What if she changes her mind now, will they let her go? Not they, the woman chuckled. Look, she is calling on Satan to help her. The gentlemen withdrew. The officers banked up wood and bales of straw around the Loller. The woman tapped him on the shoulder; let's hope it's damp, eh? This is a good view, last time I was at the back. The rain had stopped, the sun broken through. When the executioner came with a torch, it was pale in the sunshine, barely more than a slick movement, like the movement of eels in a bag. The monks were chanting and holding up a cross to the Loller, and it was only when they skipped backwards, at the first billow of smoke, that the crowd knew the fire was set.

They surged forward, roaring. Officers made a barrier with staves and shouted in great deep voices, back, back, back, and the crowd shrieked and fell back, and then came on again, roaring and chanting, as if it were a game. Eddies of smoke spoiled their view, and the crowd beat it aside, coughing. Smell her! they cried. Smell the old sow! He had held his breath, not to breathe her in. In the smoke the Loller was screaming. Now she calls on the saints! they said. The woman bent down and said in his ear, do you know that in the fire they bleed? Some people think they just shrivel up, but I've seen it before and I know.

By the time the smoke cleared and they could see again, the old woman was well ablaze. The crowd began cheering. They had said it would not take long but it did take long, or so it seemed to him, before the screaming stopped. Does nobody pray for her, he said, and the woman said, what's the point? Even after there was nothing left to scream, the fire was stoked. The officers trod around the margins, stamping out any wisps of straw that flew off, kicking back anything bigger.

When the crowd drifted home, chattering, you could tell the ones who'd been on the wrong side of the fire, because their faces were grey with wood-ash. He wanted to go home but again he thought of Walter, who had said that morning he was going to kill him by inches. He watched the officers strike with their iron bars at the human debris that was left. The chains retained the remnants of flesh, sucking and clinging. Approaching the men, he asked, how hot must the fire be, to burn bone? He expected them to have knowledge in the matter. But they didn't understand his question. People who are not smiths think all fires are the same. His father had taught him the colours of red: sunset red, cherry red, the bright yellow-red with no name unless its name is scarlet.

The Loller's skull was left on the ground, the long bones of her arms and legs. Her broken ribcage was not much bigger than a dog's. A man took an iron bar and thrust it through the hole where the woman's left eye had been. He scooped up the skull and positioned it on the stones, so it was looking at him. Then he hefted his bar and brought it down on the crown. Even before the blow landed he knew it was false, skewed. Shattered bone, like a star, flew away into the dirt, but the most part of the skull was intact. Jesus, the man said. Here, lad, do you want a go? One good swipe will stove her in.

Usually he said yes to any invitation. But now he backed away, his hands behind his back. God's blood, the man said, I wish I could afford to be choosy. Soon after that it came on to rain. The men wiped their hands, blew their noses and walked off the job. They threw down their iron bars amid what was left of the Loller. It was just splinters of bone now, and thick sludgy ash. He picked up one of the iron bars, in case he needed a weapon. He fingered its tapered end, which was cut like a chisel. He did not know how far he was from home, and whether Walter might come for him. He wondered how you kill a person by inches, whether by burning them or cutting them up. He should have asked the officers while they were here, for being servants of the city they would know.

The stink of the woman was still in the air. He wondered if she was in Hell now, or still about the streets, but he was not afraid of ghosts. They had put up a stand for the gentlemen, and though the canopy was taken down, it was high enough off the ground to crouch underneath for shelter. He prayed for the woman, thinking it could do no harm. He moved his lips as he prayed. Rainwater gathered above him and fell in great drops through the planking. He counted the time between drops and caught them in his cupped hand. He did this just for a pastime. Dusk fell. If it were an ordinary day he would have been hungry by now and gone looking for food.

In the twilight certain men came, and women too; he knew, because there were women, that they were not officers or people who would hurt him. They drew together, making a loose circle around the stake on its pile of stones. He ducked out from under the stand and approached them. You will be wondering what has happened here, he said. But they did not look up or speak to him.

They fell to their knees and he thought they were praying. I have prayed for her too, he said.

Have you? Good lad, one of the men said. He didn't even glance up. If he looks at me, he thought, he will see that I am not good, but a worthless boy who goes off with his dog and forgets to make the brine bath for the forge, so when Walter shouts where's the fucking slake-tub it's not there. With a sick lurch of his stomach he remembered what he'd not done and why he was to be killed. He almost cried out. As if he were in pain.

He saw now that the men and women were not praying. They were on their hands and knees. They were friends of the Loller, and they were scraping her up. One of the women knelt, her skirts spread, and held out an earthenware pot. His eyes were sharp even in the gloom, and out of the sludge and muck he picked a fragment of bone. Here's some, he said. The woman held out the bowl. Here's another.

One of the men stood apart, some way off. Why does he not help us? he said.

He is the watchman. He will whistle if the officers come.

Will they take us up?

Hurry, hurry, another man said.

When they had got a bowlful, the woman who was holding it said, ‘Give me your hand.’

Trusting, he held it out to her. She dipped her fingers into the bowl. She placed on the back of his hand a smear of mud and grit, fat and ash. ‘Joan Boughton,’ she said.

Now, when he thinks back on this, he wonders at his own faulty memory. He has never forgotten the woman, whose last remnants he carried away as a greasy smudge on his own skin, but why is it that his life as a child doesn't seem to fit, one bit with the next? He can't remember how he got back home, and what Walter did instead of killing him by inches, or why he'd run off in the first place without making the brine. Perhaps, he thinks, I spilled the salt and I was too frightened to tell him. That seems likely. One fear creates a dereliction, the offence brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing.

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past – within reason – but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself. Chapuys comes to dinner very often and sits beside him, teasing out bits of his life story as he teases tender flesh from the bone.

Some tell me your father was Irish, Eustache says. He waits, poised.

It is the first I have heard of it, he says, but I grant you, he was a mystery even to himself. Chapuys sniffs; the Irish are a very violent people, he says. ‘Tell me, is it true you fled from England at fifteen, having escaped from prison?’

‘For sure,’ he says. ‘An angel struck off my chains.’

That will give him something to write home. ‘I put the allegation to Cremuel, who answered me with a blasphemy, unfit for your Imperial ear.’ Chapuys is never stuck for something to put in dispatches. If news is scant he sends the gossip. There is the gossip he picks up, from dubious sources, and the gossip he feeds him on purpose. As Chapuys doesn't speak English, he gets his news in French from Thomas More, in Italian from the merchant Antonio Bonvisi, and in God knows what – Latin? – from Stokesley, the Bishop of London, whose table he also honours. Chapuys is peddling the idea to his master the Emperor that the people of England are so disaffected by their king that, given encouragement by a few Spanish troops, they will rise in revolt. Chapuys is, of course, deeply misled. The English may favour Queen Katherine – broadly, it seems they do. They may mislike or fail to understand recent measures in the Parliament. But instinct tells him this; they will knit together against foreign interference. They like Katherine because they have forgotten she is Spanish, because she has been here for a long time. They are the same people who rioted against foreigners, on Evil May Day; the same people, narrow-hearted, stubborn, attached to their patch of ground. Only overwhelming force – a coalition, say, of Francis and the Emperor – will budge them. We cannot, of course, rule out the possibility that such a coalition may occur.

When dinner is over, he walks Chapuys back to his people, to his big solid boys, bodyguards, who lounge about, chatting in Flemish, often about him. Chapuys knows he has been in the Low Countries; does he think he doesn't understand the language? Or is this some elaborate double-bluff?

There were days, not too long past, days since Lizzie died, when he'd woken in the morning and had to decide, before he could speak to anybody, who he was and why. There were days when he'd woken from dreams of the dead and searching for them. When his waking self trembled, at the threshold of deliverance from his dreams.

But those days are not these days.

Sometimes, when Chapuys has finished digging up Walter's bones and making his own life unfamiliar to him, he feels almost impelled to speak in defence of his father, his childhood. But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

On 14 April 1532, the king appoints him Keeper of the Jewel House. From here, Henry Wyatt had said, you are able to take an overview of the king's income and outgoings.

The king shouts, as if to any courtier passing, ‘Why should I not, tell me why should I not, employ the son of an honest blacksmith?’

He hides his smile, at this description of Walter; so much more flattering than any the Spanish ambassador has arrived at. The king says, ‘What you are, I make you. I alone. Everything you are, everything you have, will come from me.’

The thought gives him a pleasure you can hardly grudge. Henry is so well disposed these days, so open-handed and amenable, that you must forgive him the occasional statement of his position, whether it is necessary or not. The cardinal used to say, the English will forgive a king anything, until he tries to tax them. He also used to say, it doesn't really matter what the title of the office is. Let any colleague on the council turn his back, he would turn again to find that I was doing his job.

He is in a Westminster office one day in April when Hugh Latimer walks in, just released from custody at Lambeth Palace. ‘Well?’ Hugh says. ‘You might leave off your scribble, and give me your hand.’

He rises from his desk and embraces him, dusty black coat, sinew, bone. ‘So you made Warham a pretty speech?’

‘I made it extempore, in my fashion. It came fresh from my mouth as from the mouth of a babe. Perhaps the old fellow is losing his appetite for burnings now his own end is so near. He is shrivelling like a seedpod in the sun, when he moves you can hear his bones rattle. Anyway, I cannot account for it, but here you see me.’

‘How did he keep you?’

‘Bare walls my library. Fortunately, my brain is furnished with texts. He sent me off with a warning. Told me if I did not smell of the fire then I smelled of the frying pan. It has been said to me before. It must be ten years now, since I came up for heresy before the Scarlet Beast.’ He laughs. ‘But Wolsey, he gave me my preacher's licence back. And the kiss of peace. And my dinner. So? Are we any nearer a queen who loves the gospel?’

A shrug. ‘We – they – are talking to the French. There is a treaty in the air. Francis has a gaggle of cardinals who might lend us their voices in Rome.’

Hugh snorts. ‘Still waiting on Rome.’

‘That is how it must be.’

‘We will turn Henry. We will turn him to the gospel.’

‘Perhaps. Not suddenly. A little and a little.’

‘I am going to ask Bishop Stokesley to allow me to visit our brother Bainham. Will you come?’

Bainham is the barrister who was taken up by More last year and tortured. Just before Christmas he came before the Bishop of London. He abjured, and was free by February. He is a natural man; he wanted to live, how not? But once he was free his conscience would not let him sleep. One Sunday he walked into a crowded church and stood up before all the people, Tyndale's Bible in his hand, and spoke a profession of his faith. Now he is in the Tower waiting to know the date of his execution.

‘So?’ Latimer says. ‘You will or you won't?’

‘I should not give ammunition to the Lord Chancellor.’

I might sap Bainham's resolve, he thinks. Say to him, believe anything, brother, swear to it and cross your fingers behind your back. But then, it hardly matters what Bainham says now. Mercy will not operate for him, he must burn.

Hugh Latimer lopes away. The mercy of God operates for Hugh. The Lord walks with him, and steps with him into a wherry, to disembark under the shadow of the Tower; this being so, there is no need for Thomas Cromwell.

More says it does not matter if you lie to heretics, or trick them into a confession. They have no right to silence, even if they know speech will incriminate them; if they will not speak, then break their fingers, burn them with irons, hang them up by their wrists. It is legitimate, and indeed More goes further; it is blessed.

There is a group from the House of Commons who dine with priests at the Queen's Head tavern. The word comes from them, and spreads among the people of London, that anyone who supports the king's divorce will be damned. So devoted is God to the cause of these gentlemen, they say, that an angel attends the sittings of Parliament with a scroll, noting down who votes and how, and smudging a sooty mark against the names of those who fear Henry more than the Almighty.

At Greenwich, a friar called William Peto, the head in England of his branch of the Franciscan order, preaches a sermon before the king, in which he takes as his text and example the unfortunate Ahab, seventh king of Israel, who lived in a palace of ivory. Under the influence of the wicked Jezebel he built a pagan temple and gave the priests of Baal places in his retinue. The prophet Elijah told Ahab that the dogs would lick his blood, and so it came to pass, as you would imagine, since only the successful prophets are remembered. The dogs of Samaria licked Ahab's blood. All his male heirs perished. They lay unburied in the streets. Jezebel was thrown out of a window of her palace. Wild dogs tore her body into shreds.

Anne says, ‘I am Jezebel. You, Thomas Cromwell, are the priests of Baal.’ Her eyes are alight. ‘As I am a woman, I am the means by which sin enters this world. I am the devil's gateway, the cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man, whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me. Well, that is their view of the situation. My view is that there are too many priests with scant learning and smaller occupation. And I wish the Pope and the Emperor and all Spaniards were in the sea and drowned. And if anyone is to be thrown out of a palace window … alors, Thomas, I know who I would like to throw. Except the child Mary, the wild dogs would not find a scrap of flesh to gnaw, and Katherine, she is so fat she would bounce.’

When Thomas Avery comes home, he lowers to the flagstones the travelling chest in which he carries everything he owns, and rises with open arms to hug his master like a child. News of his government promotion has reached Antwerp. It seems Stephen Vaughan turned brick-red with pleasure and drank off a whole cup of wine without cutting it with water.

Come in, he says, there are fifty people here to see me but they can wait, come and tell me how is everyone across the sea. Thomas Avery starts talking at once. But inside the doorway of his room, he stops. He is looking at the tapestry given by the king. His eyes search it, then turn to his master's face, and then back to the tapestry. ‘Who is that lady?’

‘You can't guess?’ He laughs. ‘It is Sheba visiting Solomon. The king gave it to me. It was my lord cardinal's. He saw I liked it. And he likes to give presents.’

‘It must be worth a fair sum.’ Avery looks at it with respect, like the keen young accountant he is.

‘Look,’ he says to him, ‘I have another present, what do you think of this? It is perhaps the only good thing ever to come out of a monastery. Brother Luca Pacioli. It took him thirty years to write.’

The book is bound in deepest green with a tooled border of gold, and its pages are edged in gilt, so that it blazes in the light. Its clasps are studded with blackish garnets, smooth, translucent. ‘I hardly dare open it,’ the boy says.

‘Please. You will like it.’

It is Summa de Arithmetica. He unclasps it to find a woodcut of the author with a book before him, and a pair of compasses. ‘This is a new printing?’

‘Not quite, but my friends in Venice have just now remembered me. I was a child, of course, when Luca wrote it, and you were not even thought of.’ His fingertips barely touch the page. ‘Look, here he treats of geometry, do you see the figures? Here is where he says you don't go to bed until the books balance.’

‘Master Vaughan quotes that maxim. It has caused me to sit up till dawn.’

‘And I.’ Many nights in many cities. ‘Luca, you know, he was a poor man. He came out of Sansepulcro. He was a friend of artists and he became a perfect mathematician in Urbino, which is a little town up in the mountains, where Count Federigo the great condottiere had his library of over a thousand books. He was magister at the university in Perugia, later in Milan. I wonder why such a man would remain a monk, but of course there have been practitioners of algebra and geometry who have been thrown into dungeons as magicians, so perhaps he thought the church would protect him … I heard him lecture in Venice, it will be more than twenty years ago now, I was your age, I suppose. He spoke about proportion. Proportion in building, in music, in paintings, in justice, in the commonwealth, the state; about how rights should be balanced, the power of a prince and his subjects, how the wealthy citizen should keep his books straight and say his prayers and serve the poor. He spoke about how a printed page should look. How a law should read. Or a face, what makes it beautiful.’

‘Will he tell me in this book?’ Thomas Avery glances up again at the Queen of Sheba. ‘I suppose they knew, who made the tapestry.’

‘How is Jenneke?’

The boy turns the leaves with reverent fingers. ‘It is a beautiful book. Your friends in Venice must admire you very much.’

So Jenneke is no more, he thinks. She is dead or she is in love with someone else. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘my friends in Italy send me new poems, but I think all the poems are in here … Not that a page of figures is a verse, but anything that is precise is beautiful, anything that balances in all its parts, anything that is proportionate … do you think so?’

He wonders at the power Sheba has to draw the boy's eyes. It is impossible he should have seen Anselma, ever met her, heard of her. I told Henry about her, he thinks. One of those afternoons when I told my king a little, and he told me a lot: how he shakes with desire when he thinks of Anne, how he has tried other women, tried them as an expedient to take the edge off lust, so that he can think and talk and act as a reasoning man, but how he has failed with them … A strange admission, but he thinks it justifies him, he thinks it verifies the rightness of his pursuit, for I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘we will put this book on your desk. So that you can be consoled by it when nothing seems to add up at all.’

He has great hopes of Thomas Avery. It's easy to employ some child who will total the columns and push them under your nose, get them initialled and then lock them in a chest. But what's the point of that? The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It's not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it's there to open your heart to possibility. It's like the scriptures: it's there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbour. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.

The date of James Bainham's execution is fixed for 30 April. He cannot go to the king, not with any hope of a pardon. Long ago Henry was given the title of Defender of the Faith; he is keen to show he deserves it still.

At Smithfield in the stand put up for the dignitaries he meets the Venetian ambassador, Carlo Capello. They exchange a bow. ‘In what capacity are you here, Cromwell? As friend of this heretic, or by virtue of your position? In fact, what is your position? The devil alone knows.’

‘And I am sure he will tell Your Excellency, when you next have a private talk.’

Wrapped in his sheet of flames, the dying man calls out, ‘The Lord forgive Sir Thomas More.’

On 15 May, the bishops sign a document of submission to the king. They will not make new church legislation without the king's licence, and will submit all existing laws to a review by a commission which will include laymen – members of Parliament and the king's appointees. They will not meet in Convocation without the king's permission.

Next day, he stands in a gallery at Whitehall, which looks down on an inner court, a garden, where the king waits, and the Duke of Norfolk busies to and fro. Anne is in the gallery beside him. She is wearing a dark red gown of figured damask, so heavy that her tiny white shoulders seem to droop inside it. Sometimes – in a kind of fellowship of the imagination – he imagines resting his hand upon her shoulder and following with his thumb the scooped hollow between her collarbone and her throat; imagines with his forefinger tracking the line of her breast as it swells above her bodice, as a child follows a line of print.

She turns her head and half-smiles. ‘Here he comes. He is not wearing the Lord Chancellor's chain. What can he have done with it?’

Thomas More looks round-shouldered and despondent. Norfolk looks tense. ‘My uncle has been trying to arrange this for months,’ Anne says. ‘But the king will not be brought to it. He doesn't want to lose More. He wants to please everybody. You know how it is.’

‘He knew Thomas More when he was young.’

‘When I was young I knew sin.’

They turn, and smile at each other. ‘Look now,’ Anne says. ‘Do you suppose that is the Seal of England, that he has got in that leather bag?’

When Wolsey gave up the Great Seal, he dragged out the process for two days. But now the king, in the private paradise below, is waiting with open hand.

‘So who now?’ Anne says. ‘Last night he said, my Lord Chancellors are nothing but grief to me. Perhaps I shall do without one.’

‘The lawyers will not like that. Somebody must rule the courts.’

‘Then who do you say?’

‘Put it in his mind to appoint Mr Speaker. Audley will do an honest job. Let the king try him in the role pro tem, if he will, and then if he does not like him he need not confirm it. But I think he will like him. Audley is a good lawyer and he is his own man, but he understands how to be useful. And he understands me, I think.’

‘To think that someone does! Shall we go down?’

‘You cannot resist it?’

‘No more can you.’

They go down the inner staircase. Anne places her fingertips lightly on his arm. In the garden below, nightingales are hung in cages. Struck mute, they huddle against the sunlight. A fountain pit-patters into a basin. A scent of thyme rises from the herb-beds. From inside the palace, an unseen someone laughs. The sound is cut off as if a door had closed. He stoops and picks a sprig of the herb, bruises its scent into his palm. It takes him to another place, far from here. More makes his bow to Anne. She barely nods. She curtseys deeply to Henry, and arranges herself by his side, her eyes on the ground. Henry clutches her wrist; he wants to tell her something, or just be alone with her.

‘Sir Thomas?’ He offers his hand. More turns away. Then he thinks better of it; he turns back and takes it. His fingertips are ashy cold.

‘What will you do now?’

‘Write. Pray.’

‘My recommendation would be write only a little, and pray a lot.’

‘Now, is that a threat?’ More is smiling.

‘It may be. My turn, don't you think?’

When the king saw Anne, his face had lit up. His heart is ardent; in his councillor's hand, it burns to the touch.

He catches Gardiner at Westminster, in one of those smoky back courts where the sunlight never reaches. ‘My lord bishop?’

Gardiner draws together his beetle brows.

‘Lady Anne has asked me to think about a country house for her.’

‘What is that to me?’

‘Let me unfold to you,’ he says, ‘the way my thoughts proceed. It should be somewhere near the river, convenient for Hampton Court, and for her barge to Whitehall and Greenwich. Somewhere in good repair, as she has no patience, she will not wait. Somewhere with pretty gardens, well established … Then I think, what about Stephen's manor at Hanworth, that the king leased him when he became Master Secretary?’

Even in the dim light he can see the thoughts chasing each other through Stephen's brain. Oh my moat and my little bridges, my rose gardens and strawberry beds, my herb garden, my beehives, my ponds and orchard, oh my Italianate terracotta medallions, my intarsia, my gilding, my galleries, my seashell fountain, my deer park.

‘It would be graceful in you to offer her the lease, before it becomes a royal command. A good deed to set against the bishops' stubbornness? Oh, come on, Stephen. You have other houses. It isn't as if you'll be sleeping under a haystack.’

‘If I were,’ the bishop says, ‘I should expect one of your boys along with a ratting dog, to dig me out of my dreams.’

Gardiner's rodent pulses jump; his wet black eyes gleam. He is squeaking inside with indignation and stifled fury. But part of him may be relieved, when he thinks about it, that the bill has come in so early, and that he can meet its terms.

Gardiner is still Master Secretary, but he, Cromwell, now sees the king almost every day. If Henry wants advice, he can give it, or if the subject is outside his remit, he will find someone else who can. If the king has a complaint, he will say, leave it with me: if, by your royal favour, I may proceed? If the king is in a good humour he is ready to laugh, and if the king is miserable he is gentle and careful with him. The king has begun a course of dissimulation, which the Spanish ambassador, sharp-eyed as ever, has not failed to notice. ‘He sees you in private, not in his presence chamber,’ he says. ‘He prefers if his nobles do not know how often he consults with you. If you were a smaller man, you could be brought in and out in a laundry basket. As it is, I think those so-spiteful privy chamber gentlemen cannot fail to tell their friends, who will mutter at your success, and circulate slanders against you, and plot to bring you down.’ The ambassador smiles and says, ‘If I may proffer an image which will appeal to you – do I hit the nail on the head?’

In a letter from Chapuys to the Emperor, one which happens to go by way of Mr Wriothesley, he learns of his own character. Call-Me reads it out to him: ‘He says your antecedents are obscure, your youth reckless and wild, that you are a heretic of long standing, a disgrace to the office of councillor; but personally, he finds you a man of good cheer, liberal, open-handed, gracious …’

‘I knew he liked me. I should ask him for a job.’

‘He says that the way you got into the king's confidence, you promised you would make him the richest king England has ever had.’

He smiles.

Late in May, two fish of prodigal size are caught in the Thames, or rather they are washed up, dying, on the muddy shore. ‘Am I expected to do something about it?’ he says, when Johane brings the news in.

‘No,’ she says. ‘At least, I don't think so. It's a portent, isn't it? It's an omen, that's all.’

In late July, he has a letter from Cranmer in Nuremberg. Before this he has written from the Low Countries, asking for advice on his commercial negotiations with the Emperor, matters in which he feels out of his depth; from towns along the Rhine, he has written hopefully that the Emperor must come to an accommodation with the Lutheran princes, as he needs their help against the Turks on the frontier. He writes of how he struggles to become an adept in England's usual diplomatic game: proffering the King of England's friendship, dangling promises of English gold, while actually failing to provide any.

But this letter is different. It is dictated, written in a clerk's hand. It talks of the workings of the holy spirit in the heart. Rafe reads it out to him, and points out, down at the bottom and running up the left margin, a few words in Cranmer's own script: ‘Something has occurred. Not to be trusted to a letter. It may make a stir. Some would say I have been rash. I shall need your advice. Keep this secret.’

‘Well,’ Rafe says, ‘let us run up and down Cheap: “Thomas Cranmer has a secret, we don't know what it is!”’

A week later Hans turns up at Austin Friars. He has rented a house in Maiden Lane and is staying at the Steelyard while it is fixed up for him. ‘Let me see your new picture, Thomas,’ he says, walking in. He stands before it. Folds his arms. Steps back a pace. ‘You know these people? The likeness is good?’

Two Italian bankers, confederates, looking towards the viewer but longing to exchange glances; one in silks, one in fur; a vase of carnations, an astrolabe, a goldfinch, a glass through which the sand has half run; through an arched window, a ship rigged with silk, its sails translucent, drifting in a mirror sea. Hans turns away, pleased. ‘How does he get that expression in the eye, so hard yet so sly?’

‘How is Elsbeth?’

‘Fat. Sad.’

‘Is it surprising? You go home, give her a child, come away again.’

‘I don't reckon to be a good husband. I just send the money home.’

‘How long will you stay with us?’

Hans grunts, downs his cup of wine and talks about what he's left behind: talk about Basle, about the Swiss cantons and cities. Riots and pitched battles. Images, not images. Statues, not statues. It is the body of God, it is not the body of God, it is sort-of the body of God. It is his blood, it is not his blood. Priests may marry, they may not. There are seven sacraments, there are three. The crucifix we creep to on our knees and reverence with our lips, or the crucifix we chop it up and burn it in the public square. ‘I am no Pope-lover but I get tired of it. Erasmus has run off to Freiburg to the papists and now I have run off to you and Junker Heinrich. That's what Luther calls your king. “His Disgrace, the King of England.”’ He wipes his mouth. ‘All I ask is to do some good work and be paid for it. And I prefer not to have my efforts wiped out by some sectary with a pail of whitewash.’

‘You came here looking for peace and ease?’ He shakes his head. ‘Too late.’

‘I was just going over London Bridge and I saw someone had attacked the Madonna's statue. Knocked off the baby's head.’

‘That was done a while back. It would be that devil Cranmer. You know what he is when he's taken a drink.’

Hans grins. ‘You miss him. Who would have thought you would be friends?’

‘Old Warham is not well. If he dies this summer, Lady Anne will ask for Canterbury for my friend.’

Hans is surprised. ‘Not Gardiner?’

‘He's spoiled his chance with the king.’

‘He is his own worst enemy.’

‘I wouldn't say that.’

Hans laughs. ‘It would be a great promotion for Dr Cranmer. He will not want it. Not he. So much pomp. He likes his books.’

‘He will take it. It will be his duty. The best of us are forced against the grain.’

‘What, you?’

‘It is against the grain to have your old patron come and threaten me in my own house, and take it quietly. As I do. Have you been to Chelsea?’

‘Yes. They are a sad household.’

‘It was given out that he was resigning on grounds of ill health. So as not to embarrass anybody.’

‘He says he has a pain here,’ Hans rubs his chest, ‘and it comes on him when he starts to write. But the others look well enough. The family on the wall.’

‘You need not go to Chelsea for commissions now. The king has me at work at the Tower, we are restoring the fortifications. He has builders and painters and gilders in, we are stripping out the old royal apartments and making something finer, and I am going to build a new lodging for the queen. In this country, you see, the kings and queens lie at the Tower the night before they are crowned. When Anne's day comes there will be plenty of work for you. There will be pageants to design, banquets, and the city will be ordering gold and silver plate to present to the king. Talk to the Hanse merchants, they will want to make a show. Get them planning. Secure yourself the work before half the craftsmen in Europe are here.’

‘Is she to have new jewels?’

‘She is to have Katherine's. He has not lost all sense.’

‘I would like to paint her. Anna Bolena.’

‘I don't know. She may not want to be studied.’

‘They say she is not beautiful.’

‘No, perhaps she is not. You would not choose her as a model for a Primavera. Or a statue of the Virgin. Or a figure of Peace.’

‘What then, Eve? Medusa?’ Hans laughs. ‘Don't answer.’

‘She has great presence, esprit … You may not be able to put it in a painting.’

‘I see you think I am limited.’

‘Some subjects resist you, I feel sure.’

Richard comes in. ‘Francis Bryan is here.’

‘Lady Anne's cousin.’ He stands up.

‘You must go to Whitehall. Lady Anne is breaking up the furniture and smashing the mirrors.’

He swears under his breath. ‘Take Master Holbein in to dinner.’

Francis Bryan is laughing so hard that his horse twitches under him, uneasy, and skitters sideways, to the danger of passers-by. By the time they get to Whitehall he has pieced this story together: Anne has just heard that Harry Percy's wife, Mary Talbot, is preparing to petition Parliament for a divorce. For two years, she says, her husband has not shared her bed, and when finally she asked him why, he said he could not carry on a pretence any longer; they were not really married, and never had been, since he was married to Anne Boleyn.

‘My lady is enraged,’ Bryan says. His eyepatch, sewn with jewels, winks as he giggles. ‘She says Harry Percy will spoil everything for her. She cannot decide between striking him dead with one blow of a sword or teasing him apart over forty days of public torture, like they do in Italy.’

‘Those stories are much exaggerated.’

He has never witnessed, or quite believed in, Lady Anne's uncontrolled outbursts of temper. When he is admitted she is pacing, her hands clasped, and she looks small and tense, as if someone has knitted her and drawn the stitches too tight. Three ladies – Jane Rochford, Mary Shelton, Mary Boleyn – are following her with their eyes. A small carpet, which perhaps ought to be on the wall, is crumpled on the floor. Jane Rochford says, ‘We have swept up the broken glass.’ Sir Thomas Boleyn, Monseigneur, sits at a table, a heap of papers before him. George sits by him on a stool. George has his head in his hands. His sleeves are only medium-puffed. The Duke of Norfolk is staring into the hearth, where a fire is laid but not lit, perhaps attempting through the power of his gaze to make the kindling spark.

‘Shut the door, Francis,’ George says, ‘and don't let anybody else in.’

He is the only person in the room who is not a Howard.

‘I suggest we pack Anne's bags and send her down to Kent,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘The king's anger, once roused –’

George: ‘Say no more, or I may strike you.’

‘It is my honest advice.’ Jane Rochford, God protect her, is one of those women who doesn't know when to stop. ‘Master Cromwell, the king has indicated there must be an inquiry. It must come before the council. It cannot be fudged this time. Harry Percy will give testimony unimpeded. The king cannot do all he has done, and all he means to do, for a woman who is concealing a secret marriage.’

‘I wish I could divorce you,’ George says. ‘I wish you had a pre-contract, but Jesus, no chance of that, the fields were black with men running in the other direction.’

Monseigneur holds up a hand. ‘Please.’

Mary Boleyn says, ‘What is the use of calling in Master Cromwell, and not telling him what has already occurred? The king has already spoken to my lady sister.’

‘I deny everything,’ Anne says. It is as if the king is standing before her.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Good.’

‘That the earl spoke to me of love, I allow. He wrote me verse, and I being then a young girl, and thinking no harm of it –’

He almost laughs. ‘Verse? Harry Percy? Do you still have it?’

‘No. Of course not. Nothing written.’

‘That makes it easier,’ he says gently. ‘And of course there was no promise, or contract, or even talk of them.’

‘And,’ Mary says, ‘no consummation of any kind. There could not be. My sister is a notorious virgin.’

‘And how was the king, was he –’

‘He walked out of the room,’ Mary says, ‘and left her standing.’

Monseigneur looks up. He clears his throat. ‘In this exigency, there are a variety, and number of approaches, it seems to me, that one might –’

Norfolk explodes. He pounds up and down on the floor, like Satan in a Corpus Christi play. ‘Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus! While you are selecting an approach, my lord, while you are taking a view, your lady daughter is slandered up and down the country, the king's mind is poisoned, and this family's fortune is unmaking before your eyes.’

‘Harry Percy,’ George says; he holds up his hands. ‘Listen, will you let me speak? As I understand it, Harry Percy was persuaded once to forget his claims, so if he was fixed once –’

‘Yes,’ Anne says, ‘but the cardinal fixed him, and most unfortunately the cardinal is dead.’

There is a silence: a silence sweet as music. He looks, smiling, at Anne, at Monseigneur, at Norfolk. If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it. To prolong the moment, he crosses the room and picks up the fallen hanging. Narrow loom. Indigo ground. Asymmetrical knot. Isfahan? Small animals march stiffly across it, weaving through knots of flowers. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Do you know what these are? Peacocks.’

Mary Shelton comes to peer over his shoulder. ‘What are those snake things with legs?’

‘Scorpions.’

‘Mother Mary, do they not bite?’

‘Sting.’ He says, ‘Lady Anne, if the Pope cannot stop you becoming queen, and I do not think he can, Harry Percy should not be in your way.’

‘So shift him out of it,’ Norfolk says.

‘I can see why it would not be a good idea for you, as a family –’

‘Do it,’ Norfolk says. ‘Beat his skull in.’

‘Figuratively,’ he says. ‘My lord.’

Anne sits down. Her face is turned away from the women. Her little hands are drawn into fists. Monseigneur shuffles his papers. George, lost in thought, takes off his cap and plays with its jewelled pin, testing the point against the pad of his forefinger.

He has rolled the hanging up, and he presents it gently to Mary Shelton. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers, blushing as if he had proposed something intimate. George squeaks; he has succeeded in pricking himself. Uncle Norfolk says bitterly, ‘You fool of a boy.’

Francis Bryan follows him out.

‘Please feel you can leave me now, Sir Francis.’

‘I thought I would go with you. I want to learn what you do.’

He checks his stride, slaps his hand flat into Bryan's chest, spins him sideways and hears the thud of his skull against the wall. ‘In a hurry,’ he says.

Someone calls his name. Master Wriothesley rounds a corner. ‘Sign of Mark and the Lion. Five minutes' walk.’

Call-Me has had men following Harry Percy since he came to London. His concern has been that Anne's ill-wishers at court – the Duke of Suffolk and his wife, and those dreamers who believe Katherine will come back – have been meeting with the earl and encouraging him in a view of the past that would be useful, from their point of view. But seemingly no meetings have occurred: unless they are held in bath-houses on the Surrey bank.

Call-Me turns sharply down an alley, and they emerge into a dirty inn yard. He looks around; two hours with a broom and a willing heart, and you could make it respectable. Mr Wriothes-ley's handsome red-gold head shines like a beacon. St Mark, creaking above his head, is tonsured like a monk. The lion is small and blue and has a smiling face. Call-Me touches his arm: ‘In there.’ They are about to duck into a side door, when from above there is a shrill whistle. Two women lean out of a window, and with a whoop and a giggle flop their bare breasts over the sill. ‘Jesu,’ he says. ‘More Howard ladies.’

Inside Mark and the Lion, various men in Percy livery are slumped over tables and lying under them. The Earl of Northumberland is drinking in a private room. It would be private, except there is a serving hatch through which faces keep leering. The earl sees him. ‘Oh. I was half expecting you.’ Tense, he runs his hands through his cropped hair, and it stands up in bristles all over his head.

He, Cromwell, goes to the hatch, holds up one finger to the spectators, and slams it in their face. But he is soft-voiced as ever when he sits down with the boy and says, ‘Now, my lord, what is to be done here? How can I help you? You say you can't live with your wife. But she is as lovely a lady as any in this kingdom, if she has faults I never heard of them, so why can you not agree?’

But Harry Percy is not here to be handled like a timid falcon. He is here to shout and weep. ‘If I could not agree with her on our wedding day, how can I agree now? She hates me because she knows we are not properly married. Why has only the king a conscience in the matter, why not I, if he doubts his marriage he shouts about it to the whole of Christendom, but when I doubt mine he sends the lowest man in his employ to sweet-talk me and tell me to go back home and make the best of it. Mary Talbot knows I was pledged to Anne, she knows where my heart lies and always will. I told the truth before, I said we had made a compact before witnesses and therefore neither of us was free. I swore it and the cardinal bullied me out of it; my father said he would strike me out of his line, but my father is dead and I am not afraid to speak the truth any more. Henry may be king but he is stealing another man's wife; Anne Boleyn is rightfully my wife, and how will he stand on the day of judgment, when he comes before God naked and stripped of his retinue?’

He hears him out. The slide and tumble into incoherence … true love … pledges … swore she would give her body to me, allowed me such freedom as only a betrothed woman would allow …

‘My lord,’ he says. ‘You have said what you have to say. Now listen to me. You are a man whose money is almost spent. I am a man who knows how you have spent it. You are a man who has borrowed all over Europe. I am a man who knows your creditors. One word from me, and your debts will be called in.’

‘Oh, and what can they do?’ Percy says. ‘Bankers have no armies.’

‘Neither have you armies, my lord, if your coffers are empty. Look at me now. Understand this. You hold your earldom from the king. Your task is to secure the north. Percys and Howards between them defend us against Scotland. Now suppose Percy cannot do it. Your men will not fight for a kind word –’

‘They are my tenants, it is their duty to fight.’

‘But my lord, they need supply, they need provision, they need arms, they need walls and forts in good repair. If you cannot ensure these things you are worse than useless. The king will take your title away, and your land, and your castles, and give them to someone who will do the job you cannot.’

‘He will not. He respects all ancient titles. All ancient rights.’

‘Then let's say I will.’ Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.

How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

‘I picture you without money and title,’ he says. ‘I picture you in a hovel, wearing homespun, and bringing home a rabbit for the pot. I picture your lawful wife Anne Boleyn skinning and jointing this rabbit. I wish you every happiness.’

Harry Percy slumps over the table. Angry tears spring out of his eyes.

‘You were never pre-contracted,’ he says. ‘Any silly promises you made had no effect in law. Whatever understanding you think you had, you didn't have it. And there is another matter, my lord. If ever you say one more word about Lady Anne's freedom’ – he packs into one word a volume of disgust – ‘then you will answer to me and the Howards and the Boleyns, and George Rochford will have no tender care of your person, and my lord Wiltshire will humble your pride, and as for the Duke of Norfolk, if he hears the slightest imputation against his niece's honour he will drag you out of whatever hole you are cowering in and bite your bollocks off. Now,’ he says, resuming his former amiability, ‘is that clear, my lord?’ He crosses the room and opens the serving hatch again. ‘You can peer in again now.’ Faces appear; or, to be truthful, just bobbing foreheads, and eyes. In the doorway he pauses and turns back to the earl. ‘And I will tell you this, for the avoidance of doubt. If you think Lady Anne loves you, you could not be more mistaken. She hates you. The only service you can do her now, short of dying, is to unsay what you said to your poor wife, and take any oath that is required of you, to clear her path to become Queen of England.’

On the way out he says to Wriothesley, ‘I feel sorry for him really.’ Call-Me laughs so hard he has to lean against the wall.

Next day he is early for the meeting of the king's council. The Duke of Norfolk takes his place at the head of the table, then shifts out of it when word comes that the king himself will preside. ‘And Warham is here,’ someone says: the door opens, nothing happens, then slowly very slowly the ancient prelate shuffles in. He takes his seat. His hands tremble as they rest on the cloth before him. His head trembles on his neck. His skin is parchment-coloured, like the drawing that Hans made of him. He looks around the table with a slow lizard blink.

He crosses the room and stands across the table from Warham, enquiring after his health, by way of a formality; it is clear he is dying. He says, ‘This prophetess you harbour in your diocese. Eliza Barton. How is she getting on?’

Warham barely looks up. ‘What is it you want, Cromwell? My commission found nothing against the girl. You know that.’

‘I hear she is telling her followers that if the king marries Lady Anne he has only a year to reign.’

‘I could not swear to that. I have not heard it with my own ears.’

‘I understand Bishop Fisher has been to see her.’

‘Well … or she to see him. One or the other. Why should he not? She is a blessed young woman.’

‘Who is controlling her?’

Warham's head looks as if it will wobble off his shoulders. ‘She may be unwise. She may be misled. After all, she is a simple country girl. But she has a gift, I am sure of it. When people come into her company, she can tell them at once what is troubling them. What sins are weighing on their conscience.’

‘Indeed? I must go and see her. I wonder if she would know what's troubling me?’

‘Peace,’ Thomas Boleyn says. ‘Harry Percy is here.’

The earl comes in between two of his minders. His eyes are red, and a whiff of stale vomit suggests he has resisted the efforts of his people to scrub him down. The king comes in. It is a warm day and he wears pale silks. Rubies cluster on his knuckles like bubbles of blood. He takes his seat. He rests his flat blue eye on Harry Percy.

Thomas Audley – standing in as Lord Chancellor – leads the earl through his denials. Pre-contracted? No. Promises of any kind? No carnal – I so regret to mention – knowledge? Upon my honour, no, no and no.

‘Sad to say, we shall need more than your word of honour,’ the king says. ‘Matters have gone so far, my lord.’

Harry Percy looks panic-stricken. ‘Then what more must I do?’

He says softly, ‘Approach His Grace of Canterbury, my lord. He is holding out the Book.’

This, anyway, is what the old man is trying to do. Monseigneur tries to assist him, and Warham bats his hands away. Gripping the table, making the cloth slide, he hauls himself to his feet. ‘Harry Percy, you have chopped and changed in this matter, you have asserted it, denied it, asserted it, now you are brought here to deny it again, but this time not only in the sight of men. Now … will you put your hand on this Bible, and swear before me and in the presence of the king and his council that you are free from unlawful knowledge of Lady Anne, and free from any marriage contract with her?’

Harry Percy rubs his eyes. He extends his hand. His voice shakes. ‘I swear.’

‘All done,’ the Duke of Norfolk says. ‘You'd wonder how the whole thing got about in the first place, wouldn't you?’ He walks up to Harry Percy and grips him by the elbow. ‘We shall hear no more of this, boy?’

The king says, ‘Howard, you have heard him take his oath, cease to trouble him now. Some of you assist the archbishop, you see he is not well.’ His mood softened, he smiles around at his councillors. ‘Gentlemen, we will go to my private chapel, and see Harry Percy take Holy Communion to seal his oath. Then Lady Anne and I will spend the afternoon in reflection and prayer. I shall not want to be disturbed.’

Warham shuffles up to the king. ‘Winchester is robing to say Mass for you. I am going home to my diocese.’ With a murmur, Henry leans to kiss his ring. ‘Henry,’ the archbishop says, ‘I have seen you promote within your own court and council persons whose principles and morals will hardly bear scrutiny. I have seen you deify your own will and appetite, to the sorrow and scandal of Christian people. I have been loyal to you, to the point of violation of my own conscience. I have done much for you, but now I have done the last thing I will ever do.’

At Austin Friars, Rafe is waiting for him. ‘Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘So now?’

‘Now Harry Percy can borrow more money, and edge himself nearer his ruin. A progress which I shall be pleased to facilitate.’ He sits down. ‘I think one day I will have that earldom off him.’

‘How would you do that, sir?’ He shrugs: don't know. ‘You would not want the Howards to have more sway in the borders than they do already.’

‘No. No, possibly not.’ He broods. ‘Can you look out the papers about Warham's prophetess?’

While he waits, he opens the window and looks down into the garden. The pink of the roses in his arbours has been bleached out by the sun. I am sorry for Mary Talbot, he thinks; her life will not be easier after this. For a few days, a few days only, she instead of Anne was the talk of the king's court. He thinks of Harry Percy, walking in to arrest the cardinal, keys in his hand: the guard he set, around the dying man's bed.

He leans out of the window. I wonder if peach trees would be possible? Rafe brings in the bundle.

He cuts the tape and straightens out the letters and memoranda. This unsavoury business all started six years ago, at a broken-down chapel on the edge of Kentish marshland, when a statue of the Virgin began to attract pilgrims, and a young woman by name Elizabeth Barton started to put on shows for them. What did the statue do in the first place, to get attention? Move, probably: or weep blood. The girl is an orphan, brought up in the household of one of Warham's land agents. She has a sister, no other family. He says to Rafe, ‘Nobody took any notice of her till she was twenty or so, and then she had some kind of illness, and when she got better she started to have visions, and speak in alien voices. She says she's seen St Peter at the gates of Heaven with his keys. She's seen St Michael weighing souls. If you ask her where your dead relatives are, she can tell you. If it's Heaven, she speaks in a high voice. If it's Hell, in a deep voice.’

‘The effect could be comic,’ Rafe says.

‘Do you think so? What irreverent children I have brought up.’ He reads, then looks up. ‘She sometimes goes without food for nine days. Sometimes she falls suddenly to the ground. Not surprising, is it? She suffers spasms, torsions and trances. It sounds most displeasant. She was interviewed by my lord cardinal, but …’ his hand sifts the papers, ‘nothing here, no record of the meeting. I wonder what happened. Probably he tried to get her to eat her dinner, she wouldn't have liked that. By this …’ he reads, ‘… she is in a convent in Canterbury. The broken-down chapel has got a new roof and money is rolling in to the local clergy. There are cures. The lame walk, the blind see. Candles light by themselves. The pilgrims are thick upon the roads. Why do I feel I have heard this story before? She has a flock of monks and priests about her, who direct the people's eyes heavenwards whilst picking their pockets. And we can presume it is these same monks and priests who have instructed her to hawk around her opinion on the subject of the king's marriage.’

‘Thomas More has met her. As well as Fisher.’

‘Yes, I keep that in mind. Oh, and … look here … Mary Magdalene has sent her a letter, illuminated in gold.’

‘Can she read it?’

‘Yes, it seems she can.’ He looks up. ‘What do you think? The king will endure being called names, if it is by a holy virgin. I suppose he is used to it. Anne berates him often enough.’

‘Possibly he is afraid.’

Rafe has been to court with him; evidently, he understands Henry better than some people who have known him all his life. ‘Indeed he is. He believes in simple maids who can talk to saints. He is disposed to believe in prophecies, whereas I … I think we let it run for a time. See who visits her. Who makes offerings. Certain noble ladies have been in touch with her, wanting their fortunes told and their mothers prayed out of Purgatory.’

‘My lady Exeter,’ Rafe says.

Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, is the king's nearest male relative, being a grandson of old King Edward; hence, useful to the Emperor, when he comes with his troops to boot out Henry and put a new king on the throne. ‘If I were Exeter, I wouldn't let my wife dance attendance on some addle-witted girl who is feeding her fantasies that one day she will be queen.’ He begins to refold the papers. ‘This girl, you know, she claims she can raise the dead.’

At John Petyt's funeral, while the women are upstairs sitting with Lucy, he convenes an impromptu meeting downstairs at Lion's Quay, to talk to his fellow merchants about disorder in the city. Antonio Bonvisi, More's friend, excuses himself and says he will go home; ‘The Trinity bless and prosper you,’ he says, withdrawing and taking with him the mobile island of chill which has followed him since his unexpected arrival. ‘You know,’ he says, turning at the door, ‘if there is a question of help for Mistress Petyt, I shall be glad –’

‘No need. She is left wealthy.’

‘But will the city let her take the business on?’

He cuts him off: ‘I have that in hand.’

Bonvisi nods and goes out. ‘Surprising he should show his face.’ John Parnell, of the Drapers' Company, has a history of clashes with More. ‘Master Cromwell, if you are taking charge of this, does it mean – do you have it in mind to speak to Lucy?’

‘Me? No.’

Humphrey Monmouth says, ‘Shall we have our meeting first, and broker marriages later? We are concerned, Master Cromwell, as you must be, as the king must be … we are all, I think,’ he looks around, ‘we are all, now Bonvisi has left us, friendly to the cause for which our late brother Petyt was, in effect, a martyr, but it is for us to keep the peace, to disassociate ourselves from outbreaks of blasphemy …’

In one city parish last Sunday, at the sacred moment of the elevation of the host, and just as the priest pronounced, ‘hoc est enim corpus meum,’ there was an outbreak of chanting, ‘hoc est corpus, hocus pocus.’ And in an adjacent parish, at the commemoration of the saints, where the priest requires us to remember our fellowship with the holy martyrs, ‘cum Joanne, Stephano, Mathia, Barnaba, Ignatio, Alexandro, Marcellino, Petro …’ some person had shouted out, ‘and don't forget me and my cousin Kate, and Dick with his cockle-barrel on Leadenhall, and his sister Susan and her little dog Posset.’

He puts his hand over his mouth. ‘If Posset needs a lawyer, you know where I am.’

‘Master Cromwell,’ says a crabbed elder from the Skinners' Company, ‘you convened this gathering. Set us an example in gravity.’

‘There are ballads made,’ Monmouth says, ‘about Lady Anne – the words are not repeatable in this company. Thomas Boleyn's servants complain they are called names on the street. Ordure thrown on their livery. Masters must keep a hand on their apprentices. Disloyal talk should be reported.’

‘To whom?’

He says, ‘Try me.’

He finds Johane at Austin Friars. She has made some excuse to stay at home: a summer cold. ‘Ask me what secret I know,’ he says.

For appearances' sake, she polishes the tip of her nose. ‘Let me see. You know to a shilling what the king has in his treasury?’

‘I know to the farthing. Not that. Ask me. Sweet sister.’

When she has guessed enough, he tells her, ‘John Parnell is going to marry Luce.’

‘What? And John Petyt not cold?’ She turns away, to get over whatever she is feeling. ‘Your brethren stick together. Parnell's household is not clean from sectaries. He has a servant in Bishop Stokesley's prison, so I hear.’

Richard Cromwell puts his head around the door. ‘Master. The Tower. Bricks. Five shilling the thousand.’

‘No.’

‘Right.’

‘You'd think she'd marry a safer sort of man.’

He goes to the door. ‘Richard, come back.’ Turns to Johane. ‘I don't think she knows any.’

‘Sir?’

‘Get it down by sixpence, and check every batch. What you should do is choose a few in every load, and take a close interest in them.’

Johane in the room behind him: ‘Anyway, you did the wise thing.’

‘For instance, measure them … Johane, did you think I'd get married out of some sort of inadvertence? By accident?’

‘I'm sorry?’ Richard says.

‘Because if you keep measuring them, it throws brickmakers into a panic, and you'll see by their faces if they're trying any tricks.’

‘I expect you have some lady in view. At court. The king has given you a new office –’

‘Clerk of the Hanaper. Yes. A post in the chancery finances … It hardly signs the flowery trail to a love affair.’ Richard has gone, clattering downstairs. ‘Do you know what I think?’

‘You think you should wait. Till she, that woman, is queen.’

‘I think it's the transport that pushes the cost up. Even by barge. I should have cleared some ground and built my own kilns.’

Sunday, 1 September, at Windsor: Anne kneels before the king to receive the title of Marquess of Pembroke. The Garter knights in their stalls watch her, the noble ladies of England flank her, and (the duchess having refused, and spat out an oath at the suggestion) Norfolk's daughter Mary bears her coronet on a cushion; the Howards and the Boleyns are en fête. Monseigneur caresses his beard, nods and smiles as he receives murmured congratulations from the French ambassador. Bishop Gardiner reads out Anne's new title. She is vivid in red velvet and ermine, and her black hair falls, virgin-style, in snaky locks to her waist. He, Cromwell, has organised the income from fifteen manors to support her dignity.

A Te Deum is sung. A sermon is preached. When the ceremony is over, and the women stoop to pick up her train, he sees a flash of blue, like a kingfisher, and glances up to see John Seymour's little daughter among the Howard ladies. A warhorse raises his head at the sound of trumpets, and great ladies look up and smile; but as the musicians play a flourish, and the procession leaves St George's Chapel, she keeps her pale face down-turned, her eyes on her toes as if she fears tripping.

At the feast Anne sits beside Henry on the dais, and when she turns to speak to him her black lashes brush her cheeks. She is almost there now, almost there, her body taut like a bowstring, her skin dusted with gold, with tints of apricot and honey; when she smiles, which she does often, she shows small teeth, white and sharp. She is planning to commandeer Katherine's royal barge, she tells him, and have the device ‘H&K’ burned away, all Katherine's badges obliterated. The king has sent for Katherine's jewels, so she can wear them on the projected trip to France. He has spent an afternoon with her, two afternoons, three, in the fine September weather, with the king's goldsmith beside her making drawings, and he as master of the jewels adding suggestions; Anne wants new settings made. At first Katherine had refused to give up the jewels. She had said she could not part with the property of the Queen of England and put it into the hands of the disgrace of Christendom. It had taken a royal command to make her hand over the loot.

Anne refers everything to him; she says, laughing, ‘Cromwell, you are my man.’ The wind is set fair and the tide is running for him. He can feel the tug of it under his feet. His friend Audley must surely be confirmed as Chancellor; the king is getting used to him. Old courtiers have resigned, rather than serve Anne; the new comptroller of the household is Sir William Paulet, a friend of his from Wolsey days. So many of the new courtiers are his friends from Wolsey days. And the cardinal didn't employ fools.

After the Mass and Anne's installation, he attends the Bishop of Winchester as he disrobes, gets out of his canonicals into gear more suitable for secular celebrations. ‘Are you going to dance?’ he asks him. He sits on a stone window ledge, half-attentive to what is going on in the courts below, the musicians carrying in pipes and lutes, harps and rebecs, hautboys, viols and drums. ‘You could cut a good figure. Or don't you dance now you're a bishop?’

Stephen's conversation is on a track of its own. ‘You'd think it would be enough for any woman, wouldn't you, to be made a marquess in her own right? She'll give way to him now. Heir in the belly, please God, before Christmas.’

‘Oh, you wish her success?’

‘I wish his temper soothed. And some result out of this. Not to do it all for nothing.’

‘Do you know what Chapuys is saying about you? That you keep two women in your household, dressed up as boys.’

‘Do I?’ He frowns. ‘Better, I suppose, than two boys dressed up as women. Now that would be opprobrious.’ Stephen gives a bark of laughter. They stroll together towards the feast. Trollylolly, the musicians sing. ‘Pastime with good company, I love and shall until I die.’ The soul is musical by nature, the philosophers say. The king calls up Thomas Wyatt to sing with him, and the musician Mark. ‘Alas, what shall I do for love? For love, alas, what shall I do?’

‘Anything he can think of,’ Gardiner says. ‘There is no limit, that I can see.’

He says, ‘The king is good to those who think him good.’ He floats it to the bishop, below the music.

‘Well,’ Gardiner says, ‘if your mind is infinitely flexible. As yours, I see, would have to be.’

He speaks to Mistress Seymour. ‘Look,’ she says. She holds up her sleeves. The bright blue with which she has edged them, that kingfisher flash, is cut from the silk in which he wrapped her present of needlework patterns. How do matters stand now at Wolf Hall, he asks, as tactfully as he can: how do you ask after a family, in the wake of incest? She says in her clear little voice, ‘Sir John is very well. But then Sir John is always very well.’

‘And the rest of you?’

‘Edward angry, Tom restless, my lady mother grinding her teeth and banging the doors. The harvest coming in, the apples on the bough, the maids in the dairy, our chaplain at his prayers, the hens laying, the lutes in tune, and Sir John … Sir John as always is very well. Why don't you make some business in Wiltshire and ride down to inspect us? Oh, and if the king gets a new wife, she will need matrons to attend her, and my sister Liz is coming to court. Her husband is the Governor of Jersey, you know him, Anthony Oughtred? I would rather go up-country to the queen, myself. But they say she is moving again, and her household is being reduced.’

‘If I were your father … no …’ he rephrases it, ‘if I were to advise you, it would be to serve Lady Anne.’

‘The marquess,’ she says. ‘Of course, it is good to be humble. She makes sure we are.’

‘Just now it is difficult for her. I think she will soften, when she has her heart's desire.’ Even as he says it, he knows it is not true.

Jane lowers her head, looks up at him from under her eyelids. ‘That is my humble face. Do you think it will serve?’

He laughs. ‘It would take you anywhere.’

When the dancers are resting, fanning themselves, from the galliards, pavanes and almanes, he and Wyatt sing the little soldiers' air: Scaramella to the war has gone, with his shield, his lance. It is melancholy, as songs are, whatever the words, when the light is failing and the human voice, unaccompanied, fades in the shadows of the room. Charles Brandon asks him, ‘What is it about, that song, is it about a lady?’

‘No, it is just about a boy who goes off to war.’

‘What are his fortunes?’

Scaramella fa la gala. ‘It's all one big holiday to him.’

‘Those were better days,’ the duke says. ‘Soldiering.’

The king sings to the lute, his voice strong, true, plangent: ‘As I Walked the Woods So Wild.’ Some women weep, a little the worse for strong Italian wines.

At Canterbury, Archbishop Warham lies cold on a slab; coins of the realm are laid on his eyelids, as if to seal into his brain for eternity the image of his king. He is waiting to go down under the pavement of the cathedral, in the dank charnel vacancy by Becket's bones. Anne sits still as a statue, her eyes on her lover. Only her restless fingers move; she clutches on her lap one of her little dogs, and her hands run over and over its fur, twisting its curls. As the last note dies, candles are brought in.

October, and we are going to Calais – a train two thousand strong, stretched from Windsor to Greenwich, from Greenwich across the green fields of Kent to Canterbury: to a duke an entourage of forty, to a marquess thirty-five, to an earl twenty-four, while a viscount must scrape by with twenty, and he with Rafe and any clerks he can pack into the ships' rat-holes. The king is to meet his brother France, who intends to oblige him by speaking to the Pope in favour of his new marriage. François has offered to marry one of his three sons – his three sons, how God must love him – to the Pope's niece, Catherine de' Medici; he says he will make it a precondition of the match that Queen Katherine is refused leave to appeal her case to Rome, and that his brother England is allowed to settle his marital affairs in his own jurisdiction, using his own bishops.

These two potent monarchs will see each other for the first time since the meeting called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which the cardinal arranged. The king says the trip must cost less than that occasion, but when he is questioned on specifics he wants more of that and two of those – everything bigger, plusher, more lavish, and with more gilding. He is taking his own cooks and his own bed, his ministers and musicians, his horses, dogs and falcons, and his new marquess, whom Europe calls his concubine. He is taking the possible claimants to the throne, including the Yorkist Lord Montague, and the Lancastrian Nevilles, to show how tame they are and how secure are the Tudors. He is taking his gold plate, his linen, his pastry chefs and poultry-pickers and poison-taster, and he is even taking his own wine: which you might think is superfluous, but what do you know?

Rafe, helping him pack his papers: ‘I understand that King Francis will speak to Rome for the king's cause. But I am not sure what he gets out of this treaty.’

‘Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say.’

It is the processions that matter, the exchange of gifts, the royal games of bowls, the tilts, jousts and masques: these are not preliminaries to the process, they are the process itself. Anne, accustomed to the French court and French etiquette, sets out the difficulties in store. ‘If the Pope were to visit him, then France could advance towards him, perhaps meeting him in a courtyard. But two monarchs meeting, once they are in sight, should take the same number of steps towards each other. And this works, unless one monarch – hélas – were to take very small steps, forcing the other to cover the ground.’

‘By God,’ Charles Brandon bursts out, ‘such a man would be a knave. Would Francis do that?’

Anne looks at him, lids half-lowered. ‘My lord Suffolk, is your lady wife ready for the journey?’

Suffolk reddens. ‘My wife is a former Queen of France.’

‘I am aware of it. François will be pleased to see her again. He thought her very beautiful. Though of course, she was young then.’

‘My sister is beautiful still,’ Henry says, pacific. But a tempest is boiling up inside Charles Brandon, and it breaks with a yell like a crack of thunder: ‘You expect her to wait on you? On Boleyn's daughter? Pass you your gloves, madam, and serve you first at dinner? Make your mind up to it – that day will never come.’

Anne turns to Henry, her hand fastening on his arm. ‘Before your face he humiliates me.’

‘Charles,’ Henry says, ‘leave us now and come back when you are master of yourself. Not a moment before.’ He sighs, makes a sign: Cromwell, go after him.

The Duke of Suffolk is seething and steaming. ‘Fresh air, my lord,’ he suggests.

Autumn has come already; there is a raw wind from the river. It lifts a flurry of sodden leaves, which flap in their path like the flags of some miniature army. ‘I always think Windsor is a cold place. Don't you, my lord? I mean the situation, not just the castle?’ His voice runs on, soothing, low. ‘If I were the king, I would spend more time at the palace in Woking. You know it never snows there? At least, not once in twenty years.’

‘If you were king?’ Brandon stumps downhill. ‘If Anne Boleyn can be queen, why not?’

‘I take that back. I should have used a more humble expression.’

Brandon grunts. ‘She will never appear, my wife, in the train of that harlot.’

‘My lord, you had better think her chaste. We all do.’

‘Her lady mother trained her up, and she was a great whore, let me tell you. Liz Boleyn, Liz Howard as was – she was the first to take Henry to bed. I know these things, I am his oldest friend. Seventeen, and he didn't know where to put it. His father kept him like a nun.’

‘But none of us believe that story now. About Monseigneur's wife.’

‘Monseigneur! Christ in Heaven.’

‘He likes to be called that. It is no harm.’

‘Her sister Mary trained her up, and Mary was trained in a brothel. Do you know what they do, in France? My lady wife told me. Well, not told me, but she wrote it down for me, in Latin. The man has a cock-stand, and she takes it in her mouth! Can you imagine such a thing? A woman who can do such a filthy proceeding, can you call that a virgin?’

‘My lord … if your wife will not go to France, if you cannot persuade her … shall we say that she is ill? It would be something you could do for the king, whom you know is your friend. It would save him from –’ He almost says, from the lady's harsh tongue. But he backs out of that sentence, and says something else. ‘It would save face.’

Brandon nods. They are still heading towards the river, and he tries to check their pace because soon Anne will expect him back with news of an apology. When the duke turns to him, his face is a picture of misery. ‘It's true, anyway. She is ill. Her beautiful little’ – he makes a gesture, his hands cupping the air – ‘all fallen away. I love her anyway. She's as thin as a wafer. I say to her, Mary, I will wake up one day, and I won't be able to find you, I'll take you for a thread in the bed linen.’

‘I am so sorry,’ he says.

He rubs his face. ‘Ah, God. Go back to Harry, will you? Tell him we can't do this.’

‘He will expect you to come to Calais, if your lady wife cannot.’

‘I don't like to leave her, you see?’

‘Anne is unforgiving,’ he says. ‘Hard to please, easy to offend. My lord, be guided by me.’

Brandon grunts. ‘We all are. We must be. You do everything, Cromwell. You are everything now. We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves.’ The duke sniffs. ‘We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer.’

The steaming blood of Christ. It's an oath worthy of Thomas Howard, the senior duke. When did he become the interpreter of dukes, their explainers? He asks himself but he has no bloody answer. When he returns to the king and the queen-to-be, they are looking lovingly into each other's faces. ‘The Duke of Suffolk begs pardon,’ he says. Yes, yes, the king says. I'll see you tomorrow, but not too early. You would think they were already man and wife, a languorous night before them, filled with marital delights. You would think so, except he has Mary Boleyn's word for it that the marquisate has bought Henry only the right to caress her sister's inner thigh. Mary tells him this, and doesn't even put it in Latin. Whenever she spends time alone with the king, Anne reports back to her relations, no detail spared. You have to admire her; her measured exactness, her restraint. She uses her body like a soldier, conserving its resources; like one of the masters in the anatomy school at Padua, she divides it up and names every part, this my thigh, this my breast, this my tongue.

‘Perhaps in Calais,’ he says. ‘Perhaps he will get what he wants then.’

‘She will have to be sure.’ Mary walks away. She stops and turns back, her face troubled. ‘Anne says, Cromwell is my man. I don't like her to say that.’

In ensuing days, other questions emerge to torment the English party. Which royal lady will be hostess to Anne when they meet the French? Queen Eleanor will not – you cannot expect it, as she is the Emperor's sister, and family feeling is touched by His Disgrace's abandonment of Katherine. Francis's sister, the Queen of Navarre, pleads illness rather than receive the King of England's mistress. ‘Is it the same illness that afflicts the poor Duchess of Suffolk?’ Anne asks. Perhaps, Francis suggests, it would be appropriate if the new marquess were to be met by the Duchess of Vendôme, his own maîtresse en titre?

Henry is so angry that it gives him toothache. Dr Butts comes with his chest of specifics. A narcotic seems kindest, but when the king wakes he is still so mortified that for a few hours there seems no solution but to call the expedition off. Can they not comprehend, can they not grasp, that Anne is no man's mistress, but a king's bride-to-be? But to comprehend that is not in Francis's nature. He would never wait more than a week for a woman he wanted. Pattern of chivalry, he? Most Christian king? All he understands, Henry bellows, is rutting like a stag. But I tell you, when his rut is done, the other harts will put him down. Ask any hunter!

It is suggested, finally, that the solution will be to leave the future queen behind in Calais, on English soil where she can suffer no insult, while the king meets Francis in Boulogne. Calais, a small city, should be more easily contained than London, even if people line up at the harbourside to shout ‘Putain!’ and ‘Great Whore of England.’ If they sing obscene songs, we will simply refuse to understand them.

At Canterbury, with the royal party in addition to the pilgrims from all nations, every house is packed from cellars to eaves. He and Rafe are lodged in some comfort and near the king, but there are lords in flea-bitten inns and knights in the back rooms of brothels, pilgrims forced into stables and outhouses and sleeping out under the stars. Luckily, the weather is mild for October. Any year before this, the king would have gone to pray at Becket's shrine and leave a rich offering. But Becket was a rebel against the Crown, not the sort of archbishop we like to encourage at the moment. In the cathedral the incense is still hanging in the air from Warham's interment, and prayers for his soul are a constant drone like the buzz of a thousand hives. Letters have gone to Cranmer, lying somewhere in Germany at the Emperor's travelling court. Anne has begun to refer to him as the Archbishop-Elect. No one knows how long he'll take getting home. With his secret, Rafe says.

Of course, he says, his secret, written down the side of the page.

Rafe visits the shrine. It is his first time. He comes back wide-eyed, saying it is covered in jewels the size of goose eggs.

‘I know. Are they real, do you think?’

‘They show you a skull, they say it's Becket's, it's smashed up by the knights but it's held together with a silver plate. For ready money, you can kiss it. They have a tray of his finger bones. They have his snotty handkerchief. And a bit of his boot. And a vial they shake up for you, they say it's his blood.’

‘At Walsingham, they have a vial of the Virgin's milk.’

‘Christ, I wonder what that is?’ Rafe looks sick. ‘The blood, you can tell it's water with some red soil in it. It floats about in clumps.’

‘Well, pick up that goose quill, plucked from the pinions of the angel Gabriel, and we will write to Stephen Vaughan. We may have to set him on the road, to bring Thomas Cranmer home.’

‘It can't be soon enough,’ Rafe says. ‘Just wait, master, till I wash Becket off my hands.’

Though he will not go to the shrine, the king wants to show himself to the people, Anne by his side. Leaving Mass, against all advice he walks out among the crowds, his guards standing back, his councillors around him. Anne's head darts, on the slender stem of her neck, turning to catch the comments that come her way. People stretch out their hands to touch the king.

Norfolk, at his elbow, stiff with apprehension, eyes everywhere: ‘I don't care for this proceeding, Master Cromwell.’ He himself, having once been quick with a knife, is alert for movements below the eyeline. But the nearest thing to a weapon is an outsize cross, wielded by a bunch of Franciscan monks. The crowd gives way to them, to a huddle of lay priests in their vestments, a contingent of Benedictines from the abbey, and in the midst of them a young woman in the habit of a Benedictine nun.

‘Majesty?’

Henry turns. ‘By God, this is the Holy Maid,’ he says. The guards move in, but Henry holds up a hand. ‘Let me see her.’ She is a big girl, and not so young, perhaps twenty-eight; plain face, dusky, excited, with an urgent flush. She pushes towards the king, and for a second he sees him through her eyes: a blur of red-gold and flushed skin, a ready, priapic body, a hand like a ham that stretches out to take her by her nunly elbow. ‘Madam, you have something to say to me?’

She tries to curtsey, but his grip won't let her. ‘I am advised by Heaven,’ she says, ‘by the saints with whom I converse, that the heretics around you must be put into a great fire, and if you do not light that fire, then you yourself will burn.’

‘Which heretics? Where are they? I do not keep heretics about my person.’

‘Here is one.’

Anne shrinks against the king; against the scarlet and gold of his jacket she melts like wax.

‘And if you enter into a form of marriage with this unworthy woman, you will not reign seven months.’

‘Come, madam, seven months? Round it off, can you not? What sort of a prophet says “seven months”?’

‘That is what Heaven tells me.’

‘And when the seven months are up, who will replace me? Speak up, say who you would like to be king instead of me.’

The monks and priests are trying to draw her away; this was not part of their plan. ‘Lord Montague, he is of the blood. The Marquis of Exeter, he is blood royal.’ She in turn tries to pull away from the king. ‘I see your lady mother,’ she says, ‘surrounded by pale fires.’

Henry drops her as if her flesh were hot. ‘My mother? Where?’

‘I have been looking for the Cardinal of York. I have searched Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, but the cardinal is not there.’

‘Surely she is mad?’ Anne says. ‘She is mad and must be whipped. If she is not, she must be hanged.’

One of the priests says, ‘Madam, she is a very holy person. Her speech is inspired.’

‘Get her out of my way,’ Anne says.

‘Lightning will strike you,’ the nun tells Henry. He laughs uncertainly.

Norfolk erupts into the group, teeth clenched, fist raised. ‘Drag her back to her whorehouse, before she feels this, by God!’ In the mêlée, one monk hits another with the cross; the Maid is drawn backwards, still prophesying; the noise from the crowd rises, and Henry grasps Anne by the arm and pulls her back the way they came. He himself follows the Maid, sticking close to the back of the group, till the crowd thins and he can tap one of the monks on the arm and ask to speak to her. ‘I was a servant of Wolsey,’ he says. ‘I want to hear her message.’

Some consultation, and they let him through. ‘Sir?’ she says.

‘Could you try again to find the cardinal? If I were to make an offering?’

She shrugs. One of the Franciscans says, ‘It would have to be a substantial offering.’

‘Your name is?’

‘I am Father Risby.’

‘I can no doubt meet your expectations. I am a wealthy man.’

‘Would you want simply to locate the soul, to help your own prayers, or were you thinking in terms of a chantry, perhaps, an endowment?’

‘Whatever you recommend. But of course I'd need to know he wasn't in Hell. There would be no point throwing away good Masses on a hopeless case.’

‘I'll have to talk to Father Bocking,’ the girl says. ‘Father Bocking is this lady's spiritual director.’ He inclines his head. ‘Come again and ask me,’ the girl says. She turns and is lost in the crowd. He parts with some money there and then, to the entourage. For Father Bocking, whoever he may be. As it seems Father Bocking does the price list and keeps the accounts.

The nun has plunged the king into gloom. How would you feel if you were told you'd be struck by lightning? By evening he complains of a headache, a pain in his face and jaw. ‘Go away,’ he tells his doctors. ‘You can never cure it, so why should you now? And you, madam,’ he says to Anne, ‘have your ladies put you to bed, I do not want chatter, I cannot stand piercing voices.’

Norfolk grumbles under his breath: the Tudor, always something the matter with him.

At Austin Friars, if anyone gets a sniffle or a sprain, the boys perform an interlude called ‘If Norfolk were Doctor Butts’. Got a toothache? Pull them out! Trapped your finger? Hack your hand off! Pain in the head? Slice it off, you've got another.

Now Norfolk pauses, in backing out of the presence. ‘Majesty, she didn't say the lightning would in fact kill you.’

‘No more did she,’ Brandon says cheerily.

‘Not dead but dethroned, not dead but stricken and scorched, that's something to look forward to, is it?’ Pitifully indicating his circumstances, the king barks for a servant to bring logs and a page to warm some wine. ‘Am I to sit here, the King of England, with a miserable fire and nothing to drink?’ He does look cold. He says, ‘She saw my lady mother.’

‘Your Majesty,’ he says, cautious, ‘you know that in the cathedral one of the windows has an image of your lady mother in glass? And would not the sun shine through, so it would seem as if she was in a dazzle of light? I think that is what the nun has seen.’

‘You don't believe these visions?’

‘I think perhaps she can't tell what she sees in the outside world from what is inside her head. Some people are like that. She is to be pitied, perhaps. Though not too much.’

The king frowns. ‘But I loved my mother,’ he says. Then: ‘Buckingham set much store by visions. He had a friar who prophesied for him. Told him he would be king.’ He does not need to add, Buckingham was a traitor and is more than ten years dead.

When the court sails for France he is in the king's party, on the Swallow. He stands on deck watching England recede, with the Duke of Richmond, Henry's bastard, excited to be on his first sea voyage, and to be in his father's company too. Fitzroy is a handsome boy of thirteen, fair-haired, tall for his age but slender: Henry as he must have been as a young prince, and endowed with a proper sense of himself and his own dignity. ‘Master Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I have not seen you since the cardinal came down.’ A moment's awkwardness. ‘I am glad you prosper. Because it is said in the book called The Courtier that in men of base degree we often see high gifts of nature.’

‘You read Italian, sir?’

‘No, but parts of that book have been put into English for me. It is a very good book for me to read.’ A pause. ‘I wish’ – he turns his head, lowering his voice – ‘I wish the cardinal were not dead. Because now the Duke of Norfolk is my guardian.’

‘And I hear Your Grace is to marry his daughter Mary.’

‘Yes. I do not want to.’

‘Why not?’

‘I have seen her. She has no breasts.’

‘But she has a good wit, my lord. And time may remedy the other matter, before you live together. If your people will translate for you that part of Castiglione's book that relates to gentlewomen and their qualities, I'm sure you will find that Mary Howard has all of them.’

Let's hope, he thinks, it won't turn out like Harry Percy's match, or George Boleyn's. For the girl's sake too; Castiglione says that everything that can be understood by men can be understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their faculties, no doubt their loves and hates. Castiglione was in love with his wife Ippolita, but she died when he had only had her four years. He wrote a poem for her, an elegy, but he wrote it as if Ippolita was writing: the dead woman speaking to him.

In the ship's wake the gulls cry like lost souls. The king comes on deck and says his headache has cleared. He says, ‘Majesty, we were talking of Castiglione's book. You have found time to read it?’

‘Indeed. He extols sprezzatura. The art of doing everything gracefully and well, without the appearance of effort. A quality princes should cultivate, too.’ He adds, rather dubious, ‘King Francis has it.’

‘Yes. But besides sprezzatura one must exhibit at all times a dignified public restraint. I was thinking I might commission a translation as a gift for my lord Norfolk.’

It must be in his mind, the picture of Thomas Howard in Canterbury, threatening to punch the holy nun. Henry grins. ‘You should do it.’

‘Well, if he would not take it as a reproach. Castiglione recommends that a man should not curl his hair nor pluck his eyebrows. And you know my lord does both.’

The princeling frowns at him. ‘My lord of Norfolk?’ Henry unleashes an unregal yell of laughter, neither dignified nor restrained. It is welcome to his ears. The ship's timbers creak. The king steadies himself with a hand on his shoulder. The wind stiffens the sails. The sun dances over the water. ‘An hour and we will be in port.’

Calais, this outpost of England, her last hold on France, is a town where he has many friends, many customers, many clients. He knows it, Watergate and Lantern Gate, St Nicholas Church and Church of Our Lady, he knows its towers and bulwarks, its markets, courts and quays, Staple Inn where the Governor lodges, and the houses of the Whethill and Wingfield families, houses with shady gardens where gentlemen live in pleasant retreat from an England they claim they no longer understand. He knows the fortifications – crumbling – and beyond the city walls the lands of the Pale, its woods, villages and marshes, its sluices, dykes and canals. He knows the road to Boulogne, and the road to Gravelines, which is the Emperor's territory, and he knows that either monarch, Francis or Charles, could take this town with one determined push. The English have been here for two hundred years, but in the streets now you hear more French and Flemish spoken.

The Governor greets His Majesty; Lord Berners, old soldier and scholar, is the pattern of old-fashioned virtue, and if it were not for his limp, and his evident anxiety about the vast expenses he is about to incur, he would be straight out of the book called The Courtier. He has even arranged to lodge the king and the marquess in rooms with an interconnecting door. ‘I think that will be very suitable, my lord,’ he says. ‘As long as there is a sturdy bolt on both sides.’

Because Mary told him, before they left dry land, ‘Till now she wouldn't, but now she would, but he won't. He tells her he must be sure that if she gets a child it's born in wedlock.’

The monarchs are to meet for five days in Boulogne, then five days in Calais. Anne is aggrieved at the thought of being left behind. He can see by her restlessness that she knows this is a debatable land, where things might happen you cannot foretell. Meanwhile he has private business to transact. He leaves even Rafe behind, and slips away to an inn in a back court off Calk-well Street.

It is a low sort of place, and smells of wood smoke, fish and mould. On a side wall is a watery mirror through which he glimpses his own face, pale, only his eyes alive. For a moment it shocks him; you do not expect to see your own image in a hovel like this.

He sits at a table and waits. After five minutes there is a disturbance of the air at the back of the room. But nothing happens. He has anticipated they will keep him waiting; to pass the time, he runs over in his head the figures for last year's receipts to the king from the Duchy of Cornwall. He is about to move on to the figures submitted by the Chamberlain of Chester, when a dark shape materialises, and resolves itself into the person of an old man in a long gown. He totters forward, and in time two others follow him. You could change any one for the other: hollow coughs, long beards. According to some precedence which they negotiate by grunting, they take their seats on a bench opposite. He hates alchemists, and these look like alchemists to him: nameless splashes on their garments, watering eyes, vapour-induced sniffles. He greets them in French. They shudder, and one of them asks in Latin if they are not going to have anything to drink. He calls for the boy, and asks him without much hope what he suggests. ‘Drink somewhere else?’ the boy offers.

A jug of something vinegary comes. He lets the old men drink deeply before he asks, ‘Which of you is Maître Camillo?’

They exchange glances. It takes them as long as it takes the Graiae to pass their single shared eye.

‘Maître Camillo has gone to Venice.’

‘Why?’

Some coughing. ‘For consultations.’

‘But he does mean to return to France?’

‘Quite likely.’

‘The thing you have, I want it for my master.’

A silence. How would it be, he thought, if I take the wine away till they say something useful? But one pre-empts him, snatching up the jug; his hand shakes, and the wine washes over the table. The others bleat with irritation.

‘I thought you might bring drawings,’ he says.

They look at each other. ‘Oh, no.’

‘But there are drawings?’

‘Not as such.’

The spilt wine begins to soak into the splintered wood. They sit in miserable silence and watch this happen. One of them occupies himself in working his finger through a moth hole in his sleeve.

He shouts to the boy for a second jug. ‘We do not wish to disoblige you,’ the spokesman says. ‘You must understand that Maître Camillo is, for now, under the protection of King Francis.’

‘He intends to make a model for him?’

‘That is possible.’

‘A working model?’

‘Any model would be, by its nature, a working model.’

‘Should he find the terms of his employment in the least unsatisfactory, my master Henry would be happy to welcome him in England.’

There is another pause, till the jug is fetched and the boy has gone. This time, he does the pouring himself. The old men exchange glances again, and one says, ‘The magister believes he would dislike the English climate. The fogs. And also, the whole island is covered with witches.’

The interview has been unsatisfactory. But one must begin somewhere. As he leaves he says to the boy, ‘You might go and swab the table.’

‘I may as well wait till they've upset the second jug, monsieur.’

‘True. Take them in some food. What do you have?’

‘Pottage. I wouldn't recommend it. It looks like what's left when a whore's washed her shift.’

‘I never knew the Calais girls to wash anything. Can you read?’

‘A little.’

‘Write?’

‘No, monsieur.’

‘You should learn. Meanwhile use your eyes. If anyone else comes to talk to them, if they bring out any drawings, parchments, scrolls, anything of that kind, I want to know.’

The boy says, ‘What is it, monsieur? What are they selling?’

He almost tells him. What harm could it do? But then in the end he can't think of the right words.

Part-way through the talks in Boulogne, he has a message that Francis would like to see him. Henry deliberates before giving him permission; face-to-face, monarchs should deal only with fellow monarchs, and lords and churchmen of high rank. Since they landed, Brandon and Howard, who were friendly enough on board ship, have been distant with him, as if to make it quite clear to the French that they accord him no status; he is some whim of Henry's, they pretend, a novelty councillor who will soon vanish in favour of a viscount, baron or bishop.

The French messenger tells him, ‘This is not an audience.’

‘No,’ he says, ‘I understand. Nothing of that sort.’

Francis sits waiting, attended only by a handful of courtiers, for what is not an audience. He is a beanpole of a man, his elbows and knees jutting at the air, his big bony feet restless inside vast padded slippers. ‘Cremuel,’ he says. ‘Now, let me understand you. You are a Welshman.’

‘No, Your Highness.’

Sorrowful dog eyes; they look him over, they look him over again. ‘Not a Welshman.’

He sees the French king's difficulty. How has he got his passport to the court, if he is not from some family of humble Tudor retainers? ‘It was the late cardinal who induced me into the king's business.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ Francis says, ‘but I think to myself there is something else going on here.’

‘That may be, Highness,’ he says crisply, ‘but it's certainly not being Welsh.’

Francis touches the tip of his pendulous nose, bending it further towards his chin. Choose your prince: you wouldn't like to look at this one every day. Henry is so wholesome, in his fleshy, scrubbed pink-and-whiteness. Francis says, his glance drifting away, ‘They say you once fought for the honour of France.’

Garigliano: for a moment he lowers his eyes, as if he's remembering a very bad accident in the street: some mashing and irretrievable mangling of limbs. ‘On a most unfortunate day.’

‘Still … these things pass. Who now remembers Agincourt?’

He almost laughs. ‘It is true,’ he says. ‘A generation or two, or three … four … and these things are nothing.’

Francis says, ‘They say you are in very good standing with That Lady.’ He sucks his lip. ‘Tell me, I am curious, what does my brother king think? Does he think she is a maid? Myself, I never tried her. When she was here at court she was young, and as flat as a board. Her sister, however –’

He would like to stop him but you can't stop a king. His voice runs over naked Mary, chin to toes, and then flips her over like a griddle cake and does the other side, nape to heels. An attendant hands him a square of fine linen, and as he finishes he dabs the corner of his mouth: and hands the kerchief back.

‘Well, enough,’ Francis says. ‘I see you will not admit to being Welsh, so that is the end of my theories.’ The corners of his mouth turn up; his elbows work a little; his knees twitch; the not-audience is over. ‘Monsieur Cremuel,’ he says, ‘we may not meet again. Your sudden fortunes may not last. So, come, give me your hand, like a soldier of France. And put me in your prayers.’

He bows. ‘Your beadsman, sir.’

As he leaves, one of the courtiers steps forward, and murmuring, ‘A gift from His Highness,’ hands him a pair of embroidered gloves.

Another man, he supposes, would be pleased, and try them on. For his part, he pinches the fingers, and finds what he is looking for. Gently, he shakes the glove, his hand cupped.

He goes straight to Henry. He finds him in the sunshine, playing a game of bowls with some French lords. Henry can make a game of bowls as noisy as a tournament: whooping, groaning, shouting of odds, wails, oaths. The king looks up at him, his eyes saying, ‘Well?’ His eyes say, ‘Alone,’ the king's say, ‘Later,’ and not a word is spoken, but all the time the king keeps up his joking and backslapping, and he straightens up, watching his wood glide over the shorn grass, and points in his direction. ‘You see this councillor of mine? I warn you, never play any game with him. For he will not respect your ancestry. He has no coat of arms and no name, but he believes he is bred to win.’

One of the French lords says, ‘To lose gracefully is an art that every gentleman cultivates.’

‘I hope to cultivate it too,’ he says. ‘If you see an example I might follow, please point it out.’

For they are all, he notices, intent on winning this game, on taking a piece of gold from the King of England. Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it. Perhaps I could issue him with gaming tokens, he thinks, redeemable only if presented in person at some office in Westminster: with tortuous paperwork attached, and fees to clerks, and a special seal to be affixed. That would save us some money.

But the king's wood moves smoothly towards the marker ball. Henry is winning the game anyway. From the French, a spatter of polite applause.

When he and the king are alone, he says, ‘Here's something you will like.’

Henry likes surprises. With a thick forefinger, his pink clean English nail, he nudges the ruby about on the back of his hand. ‘It is a good stone,’ he says. ‘I am a judge of these things.’ A pause. ‘Who is the principal goldsmith here? Ask him to wait on me. It is a dark stone, Francis will know it again; I will wear it on my own finger before our meetings are done. France shall see how I am served.’ He is in high good humour. ‘However, I shall give you the value.’ He nods, to dismiss him. ‘Of course, you will compound with the goldsmith to put a higher valuation on it, and arrange to split the profit with him … but I shall be liberal in the matter.’

Arrange your face.

The king laughs. ‘Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own? One day Francis will offer you a pension. You must take it. By the way, what did he ask you?’

‘He asked if I were Welsh. It seemed a great question with him, I was sorry to be so disappointing.’

‘Oh, you are not disappointing,’ Henry says. ‘But the moment you are, I will let you know.’

Two hours. Two kings. What do you know, Walter? He stands in the salty air, talking to his dead father.

When Francis comes back with his brother king to Calais, it is Anne who leads him out to dance after the evening's great feast. There is colour in her cheeks, and her eyes sparkle behind her gilded mask. When she lowers the mask and looks at the King of France, she wears a strange half-smile, not quite human, as if behind the mask were another mask. You can see his jaw drop; you can see him begin to drool. She entwines her fingers with his, and leads him to a window seat. They speak in French for an hour, whispering, his sleek dark head leaning towards her; sometimes they laugh, looking into each other's eyes. No doubt they are discussing the new alliance; he seems to think she has another treaty tucked down her bodice. Once Francis lifts her hand. She pulls back, half-resisting, and for one moment it seems he intends to lay her little fingers upon his unspeakable codpiece. Everyone knows that Francis has recently taken the mercury cure. But no one knows if it has worked.

Henry is dancing with the wives of Calais notables: gigue, saltarello. Charles Brandon, his sick wife forgotten, is making his partners scream by throwing them in the air so that their skirts fly up. But Henry's glance keeps straying down the hall to Anne, to Francis. His spine is stiff with his personal terror. His face expresses smiling agony.

Finally, he thinks, I must end this: can it be true, he wonders, that as a subject should, I really love my king?

He ferrets Norfolk out of the dark corner where he is hiding, for fear that he should be commanded to partner the Governor's wife. ‘My lord, fetch your niece away. She has done enough diplomacy. Our king is jealous.’

‘What? What the devil is his complaint now?’ Yet Norfolk sees at a glance what is happening. He swears, and crosses the room – through the dancers, not round them. He takes Anne by her wrist, bending it back as if to snap it. ‘By your leave, Highness. My lady, we shall dance.’ He jerks her to her feet. Dance they do, though it bears no relation to any dance seen in any hall before this. On the duke's part, a thundering with demon hooves; on her part, a blanched caper, one arm held like a broken wing.

He looks across at Henry. The king's face expresses a sober, righteous satisfaction. Anne should be punished, and by whom except her kin? The French lords huddle together, sniggering. Francis looks on with narrowed eyes.

That night the king withdraws from company early, dismissing even the gentlemen of his privy chamber; only Henry Norris is in and out, trailed by an underling carrying wine, fruit, a large quilt, then a pan of coals; it has turned chilly. The women, in their turn, have become brisk and snappish. Anne's raised voice has been heard. Doors slam. As he is talking to Thomas Wyatt, Mistress Shelton comes careering towards him. ‘My lady wants a Bible!’

‘Master Cromwell can recite the whole New Testament,’ Wyatt says helpfully.

The girl looks agonised. ‘I think she wants it to swear on.’

‘In that case I'm no use to her.’

Wyatt catches her hands. ‘Who's going to keep you warm tonight, young Shelton?’ She pulls away from him, shoots off in pursuit of the scriptures. ‘I'll tell you who. Henry Norris.’

He looks after the girl. ‘She draws lots?’

‘I have been lucky.’

‘The king?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Recently?’

‘Anne would pull out their hearts and roast them.’

He feels he should not go far, in case Henry calls for him. He finds a corner for a game of chess with Edward Seymour. Between moves, ‘Your sister Jane …’ he says.

‘Odd little creature, isn't she?’

‘What age would she be?’

‘I don't know … twenty or so? She walked around at Wolf Hall saying, “These are Thomas Cromwell's sleeves,” and nobody knew what she was talking about.’ He laughs. ‘Very pleased with herself.’

‘Has your father made a match for her?’

‘There was some talk of –’ He looks up. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Just distracting you.’

Tom Seymour bursts through the door. ‘Good e'en, grandfer,’ he shouts at his brother. He knocks his cap off and ruffles his hair. ‘There are women waiting for us.’

‘My friend here advises not.’ Edward dusts his cap. ‘He says they're just the same as Englishwomen but dirtier.’

‘Voice of experience?’ Tom says.

Edward resettles his cap primly. ‘How old would our sister Jane be?’

‘Twenty-one, twenty-two. Why?’

Edward looks down at the board, reaches for his queen. He sees how he's trapped. He glances up in appreciation. ‘How did you manage that?’

Later, he sits with a blank piece of paper before him. He means to write a letter to Cranmer and cast it to the four winds, send it searching through Europe. He picks up his pen but does not write. He revisits in his mind his conversation with Henry, about the ruby. His king imagines he would take part in a backstairs deceit, the kind that might have entertained him in the days when he antiqued cupids and sold them to cardinals. But to defend yourself against such accusations makes you seem guilty. If Henry does not fully trust him, is it surprising? A prince is alone: in his council chamber, in his bedchamber, and finally in Hell's antechamber, stripped – as Harry Percy said – for Judgment.

This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travellers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind. He wonders where Tom Wyatt is, and in what sort of trouble. He doesn't think he can sleep: though not because he's worried about Wyatt. He goes to the window. The moon, as if disgraced, trails rags of black cloud.

In the gardens, torches burn in wall brackets, but he walks away from the light. The faint push and pull of the ocean is steady and insistent as his own heartbeat. He knows he shares this darkness, and within a moment there is a footstep, a rustle of skirts, a faint breathy gulp, a hand sliding on his arm. ‘You,’ Mary says.

‘Me.’

‘Do you know they unbolted the door between them?’ She laughs, a merciless giggle. ‘She is in his arms, naked as she was born. She can't change her mind now.’

‘Tonight I thought they would quarrel.’

‘They did. They like quarrelling. She claims Norfolk has broken her arm. Henry called her a Magdalene and some other names I forget, I think they were Roman ladies. Not Lucrece.’

‘No. At least, I hope not. What did she want the Bible for?’

‘To swear him. Before witnesses. Me. Norris. He made a binding promise. They are married in God's sight. And he swears he will marry her again in England and crown her queen when spring comes.’

He thinks of the nun, at Canterbury: if you enter into a form of marriage with this unworthy woman, you will not reign seven months.

‘So now,’ Mary says, ‘it is just a question of whether he will find he is able to do the deed.’

‘Mary.’ He takes her hand. ‘Don't frighten me.’

‘Henry is timid. He thinks you expect a kingly performance. But if he is shy, Anne will know how to help.’ She adds, carefully, ‘I mean to say, I have advised her.’ She slides her hand on to his shoulder. ‘So now, what about us? It has been a weary struggle to bring them here. I think we have earned our recreation.’

No answer. ‘You're not still frightened of my uncle Norfolk?’

‘Mary, I am terrified of your uncle Norfolk.’

Still, that's not the reason, not the reason why he hesitates, not quite pulling away. Her lips brush his. She asks, ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I was thinking that if I were not the king's most dutiful servant, it would be possible to be on the next boat out.’

‘Where would we go?’

He doesn't remember inviting a friend. ‘East. Though I grant this would not be a good starting point.’ East of the Boleyns, he thinks. East of everybody. He is thinking of the Middle Sea, not these northern waters; and one night especially, a warm midnight in a house in Larnaca: Venetian lights spilling out on to the dangerous waterfront, the slap of slave feet on tiles, a perfume of incense and coriander. He puts an arm around Mary, encountering something soft, totally unexpected: fox fur. ‘Clever of you,’ he says.

‘Oh, we brought everything. Every stitch. In case we are here till winter.’

A glow of light on flesh. Her throat very white, very soft. All things seem possible, if the duke stays indoors. His fingertip teases out the fur till fur meets flesh. Her shoulder is warm, scented and a little damp. He can feel the bounce of her pulse.

A sound behind him. He turns, dagger in hand. Mary screams, pulls at his arm. The point of the weapon comes to rest against a man's doublet, under the breastbone. ‘All right, all right,’ says a sober, irritated English voice. ‘Put that away.’

‘Heavens,’ Mary says. ‘You almost murdered William Stafford.’

He backs the stranger into the light. When he sees his face, not till then, he draws back the blade. He doesn't know who Stafford is: somebody's horse-keeper? ‘William, I thought you weren't coming,’ Mary says.

‘If I didn't, it seems you had a reserve.’

‘You don't know what a woman's life is! You think you've fixed something with a man, and you haven't. He says he'll meet you, and he doesn't turn up.’

It is a cry from the heart. ‘Give you good night,’ he says. Mary turns as if to say, oh, don't go. ‘Time I said my prayers.’

A wind has blown up from the Narrow Sea, snapping at the rigging in the harbour, rattling the windows inland. Tomorrow, he thinks, it may rain. He lights a candle and goes back to his letter. But his letter has no attraction for him. Leaves flurry from the gardens, from the orchards. Images move in the air beyond the glass, gulls blown like ghosts: a flash of his wife Elizabeth's white cap, as she follows him to the door on her last morning. Except that she didn't: she was sleeping, wrapped in damp linen, under the yellow turkey quilt. If he thinks of the fortune that brought him here he thinks equally of the fortune that brought him to that morning five years ago, going out of Austin Friars a married man, files of Wolsey's business under his arm: was he happy then? He doesn't know.

That night in Cyprus, long ago now, he had been on the verge of handing his resignation to his bank, or at least of asking them for letters of introduction to take him east. He was curious to see the Holy Land, its plant life and people, to kiss the stones where the disciples had walked, to bargain in the hidden quarters of strange cities and in black tents where veiled women scuttle like cockroaches into corners. That night his fortunes had been in equipoise. In the room behind him, as he looked out over the harbour lights, he heard a woman's throaty laughter, her soft ‘al-hamdu lillah’ as she shook the ivory dice in her hand. He heard her spill them, heard them rattle and come to rest: ‘What is it?’

East is high. West is low. Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.

‘It is three and three.’

Is that low? You must say it is. Fate has not given him a shove, more of a gentle tap. ‘I shall go home.’

‘Not tonight, though. It is too late for the tide.’

Next day he felt the gods at his back, like a breeze. He turned back towards Europe. Home then was a narrow shuttered house on a quiet canal, Anselma kneeling, creamily naked under her trailing nightgown of green damask, its sheen blackish in candlelight; kneeling before the small silver altarpiece she kept in her room, which was precious to her, she had told him, the most precious thing I own. Excuse me just a moment, she had said to him; she prayed in her own language, now coaxing, now almost threatening, and she must have teased from her silver saints some flicker of grace, or perceived some deflection in their glinting rectitude, because she stood up and turned to him, saying, ‘I'm ready now,’ tugging apart the silk ties of her gown so that he could take her breasts in his hands.