‘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 heathland, 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.