Читать книгу Hilary Mantel Collection - Hilary Mantel - Страница 33

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

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

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

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

‘Would you, if you were a cardinal?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look around you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cardinal vanishes, with a chortle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Perhaps Gregory's not completely stupid.’

‘I would be glad to think not.’

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

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

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

‘I suppose Gardiner has been threatening you.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He bows. ‘My flock is safe in fold.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Call it in, sir.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where? Show me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is it for me?’

‘Bless you, no. For the king.’

‘Any sightings of Wolsey?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You don't want to plead your belly?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I think the king takes it personally.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Where is murder done?’ Wriothesley says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, tweet, tweet,’ the duke says.

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

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

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

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

‘Did you not have guards?’

‘It was the guards he was afraid of.’

‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’

‘Me, evidently.’

‘What would you have done?’

‘I don't know. Bitten them?’

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

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

‘Of an age to talk, I believe.’

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

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

‘You will not see Lady Mary for yourself?’

‘Yes, but forewarned …’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘But the hair!’ he says.

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

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

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

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

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

‘I already have.’

‘And how did she take it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘He's been everywhere,’ Gregory says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Do you have to speak to him?’

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

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

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

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

‘Meat?’ Mary says.

‘In quantity.’

‘But who would you send?’

‘Dr Butts?’

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

‘It is lawful if Parliament makes it so.’

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

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

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

‘He believes as your father the king believes.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘And I am not a bastard, I suppose.’

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

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

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

‘– except she is his concubine –’

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

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

‘Does anyone talk to you of marriage?’

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

‘But you will not marry Pole.’

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

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

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

‘What, they keep you short of candles?’

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

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

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

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

‘Let me see my mother.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘She's Henry's daughter for sure.’

‘Why, does someone say she is not?’

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

‘Did you think she would?’

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

‘I don't think she has a nature.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Did I hear more than I should?’

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

‘We should all be very sorry.’

‘But who would rule?’

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

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

‘Then Fitzroy.’

‘There is a Tudor who is better placed.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘So?’

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

He laughs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

‘No.’

‘You object but you won't say why?’

‘Yes.’

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

‘I would rather not say.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Tell me now. Is it something good?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Which of us is free?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May I substitute the word ‘bite’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rafe blushes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Ah. Only up to a point.’

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

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

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

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

Two carpets. One cut in pieces. 7 sheets. 2 pillows. 1 bolster. 2 platters, 4 dishes, 2 saucers. One small basin, weight 12lbs @ 4d the pound; my Lady Prioress has it, paid 4 shillings.

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

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

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

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

‘Meg? Surely you can look at me?’

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

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

‘Surrender?’

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

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

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

‘Men may change opinions.’

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

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

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

Why do I hesitate?

Let's give him one more day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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