‘Ah. Didn’t you know?’ The shock around him is gratifying.
He shrugs. ‘I thought it a family matter.’
Bryan’s eyepatch winks at him, today a jaundiced yellow. ‘You
must watch her very closely, Cromwell.’
‘A matter in which I have failed,’ Boleyn says. ‘Evidently. She
claims the child’s father is William Stafford, and she has married
him. You know this Stafford, do you?’
‘Just about. Well,’ he says cheerfully, ‘shall we go in? Mark, we
are not setting this affair to music, so take yourself off to where
you can be useful.’
Only Henry Norris is attending the king: Jane Rochford, the
queen. Henry’s big face is white. ‘You blame me, madam, for
what I did before I even knew you.’
They have crowded in behind him. Henry says, ‘My lord
Wiltshire, can you not control either of your daughters?’
‘Cromwell knew,’ Bryan says. He snorts with laughter.
Monseigneur begins to talk, stumbling – he, Thomas Boleyn,
diplomat famed for his silver-tongued finesse. Anne cuts him off:
‘Why should she get a child by Stafford? I don’t believe it’s his.
Why would he agree to marry her, unless for ambition – well, he
has made a false move there, for he will never come to court
again, nor will she. She can crawl on her knees to me. I care not.
She can starve.’
If Anne were my wife, he thinks, I’d go out for the afternoon.
She looks haggard, and she cannot stay still; you wouldn’t trust
her near a sharp knife. ‘What to do?’ Norris whispers. Jane
Rochford is standing back against the tapestries, where nymphs
entwine themselves in trees; the hem of her skirt is dipped in
some fabulous stream, and her veil brushes a cloud, from which
a goddess peeps. She lifts her face; her look is one of sober
triumph.
I could have the archbishop fetched, he thinks. Anne wouldn’t
rage and stamp under his eyes. Now she has Norris by the sleeve;
what is she doing? ‘My sister has done this to spite me. She thinks she will sail about the court with her great belly, and pity
me and laugh at me, because I have lost my own child.’
‘I feel sure that, if the matter were to be viewed –’ her father
begins.
‘Get out!’ she says. ‘Leave me, and tell her – Mistress Stafford
– that she has forfeited any claim on my family. I don’t know her.
She is no longer a Boleyn.’
‘Wiltshire, go.’ Henry adds, in the tone in which a schoolboy
is promised a whipping, ‘I shall speak to you later.’
He says to the king, innocent, ‘Majesty, shall we do no business today?’ Henry laughs.
Lady Rochford runs beside him. He does not slow his pace so
she has to pick up her skirts. ‘Did you really know, Master Secretary? Or did you say that just to see their faces?’
‘You are too good for me. You see through all my ploys.’
‘Lucky I see through Lady Carey’s.’
‘It was you who detected her?’ Who else, he thinks? With her
husband George away she has no one to spy on.
Mary’s bed is strewn with silks – flame, orange, carnation – as
if a fire has broken out in the mattress. Across stools and a
window seat trail lawn smocks, entangled ribbons and unpaired
gloves. Are those the same green stockings she once revealed to
the knee, running full-tilt towards him on the day she proposed
marriage?
He stands in the doorway. ‘William Stafford, eh?’
She straightens up, her cheeks flushed, a velvet slipper in her
hand. Now the secret is out, she has loosened her bodice. Her
eyes slide past him. ‘Good girl, Jane, bring that here.’
‘Excuse me, Master.’ It is Jane Seymour, tiptoeing past him
with an armful of folded laundry. Then a boy after her, bumping
a yellow leather chest. ‘Just here, Mark.’
‘Behold me, Master Secretary,’ Smeaton says. ‘I’m making
myself useful.’ Jane kneels before the chest and swings it opens. ‘Cambric to
line it?’
‘Never mind cambric. Where’s my other shoe?’
‘Best be gone,’ Lady Rochford warns. ‘If Uncle Norfolk sees
you he’ll take a stick to you. Your royal sister thinks the king
has fathered your child. She says, why would it be William
Stafford?’
Mary snorts. ‘So much does she know. What would Anne
know of taking a man for himself? You can tell her he loves me.
You can tell her he cares for me and no one else does. No one else
in this world.’
He leans down and whispers, ‘Mistress Seymour, I did not
think you were a friend of Lady Carey.’
‘No one else will help her.’ She keeps her head down; the nape
of her neck flushes pink.
‘Those bed hangings are mine,’ Mary says. ‘Pull them down.’
Embroidered on them, he sees, are the arms of her husband Will
Carey, dead what – seven years now? ‘I can unpick the badges.’
Of course: what use are a dead man and his devices? ‘Where’s
my gilt basin, Rochford, have you got it?’ She gives the yellow
chest a kick; it is stamped all over with Anne’s falcon badge. ‘If
they see me with this, they’ll take it off me and tip my stuff in
the road.’
‘If you can wait an hour,’ he says, ‘I’ll send someone with a
chest for you.’
‘Will it be stamped Thomas Cromwell? God save me, I
haven’t an hour. I know what!’ She begins to haul the sheets off
the bed. ‘Make bundles!’
‘For shame,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘And run off like a servant
who’s stolen the silver? Besides, you won’t need these things
down in Kent. Stafford has a farm or something, hasn’t he? Some
little manor? Still, you can sell them. You’ll have to, I suppose.’
‘My sweet brother will help me when he returns from France.
He will not see me cut off. ‘I beg to differ. Lord Rochford will be sensible, as I am, that
you have disgraced all your kin.’
Mary turns on her, arm sweeping out like a cat flashing
claws. ‘This is better than your wedding day, Rochford. It’s
like getting a houseful of presents. You can’t love, you don’t
know what love is, and all you can do is envy those who do
know, and rejoice in their troubles. You are a wretched
unhappy woman whose husband loathes her, and I pity you,
and I pity my sister Anne, I would not change places with her,
I had rather be in the bed of an honest poor gentleman who
cares only for me than be like the queen and only able to keep
her man with old whore’s tricks – yes, I know it is so, he has
told Norris what she offers him, and it doesn’t conduce to
getting a child, I can tell you. And now she is afraid of every
woman at court – have you looked at her, have you looked at
her lately? Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God
protect us from answered prayers. She thought it would be like
her coronation every day.’ Mary, breathless, reaches into the
mill of her possessions and throws Jane Seymour a pair of
sleeves. ‘Take these, sweetheart, with my blessing. You have
the only kind heart at court.’
Jane Rochford, in departing, slams the door.
‘Let her go,’ Jane Seymour murmurs. ‘Forget her.’
‘Good riddance!’ Mary snaps. ‘I must be glad she didn’t pick
my things over, and offer me a price.’ In the silence, her words go
crash, flap, rattling around the room like trapped birds who
panic and shit down the walls: he has told Norris what she offers
him. By night, her ingenious proceedings. He is rephrasing it: as,
surely, one must? I’ll bet Norris is all ears. Christ alive, these
people! The boy Mark is standing, gapey-faced, behind the door.
‘Mark, if you stand there like a landed fish I shall have you
filleted and fried.’ The boy flees.
When Mistress Seymour has tied the bundles they look like
birds with broken wings. He takes them from her and reties them, not with silk tags but serviceable string. ‘Do you always
carry string, Master Secretary?’
Mary says, ‘Oh, my book of love poems! Shelton has it.’ She
pitches from the room.
‘She’ll need that,’ he says. ‘No poems down in Kent.’
‘Lady Rochford would tell her that sonnets don’t keep you
warm. Not,’ Jane says, ‘that I’ve ever had a sonnet. So I wouldn’t
really know.’
Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me
this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain? He turns. ‘Jane –’
‘Master Secretary?’ She dips her knees and rolls sideways on
to the mattress; she sits up, drags her skirts from under her, finds
her footing: gripping the bedpost, she scrambles up, reaches
above her head, and begins to unhook the hangings.
‘Come down! I’ll do that. I’ll send a wagon after Mistress
Stafford. She can’t carry all she owns.’
‘I can do it. Master Secretary doesn’t deal with bed hangings.’
‘Master Secretary deals with everything. I’m surprised I don’t
make the king’s shirts.’
Jane sways gently above him. Her feet sink into the feathers.
‘Queen Katherine does. Still.’
‘The Dowager Katherine. Come down.’
She hops down to the rushes, giving her skirts a shake. ‘Even
now after all that has passed between them. She sent a new parcel
last week.’
‘I thought the king had forbidden her.’
‘Anne says they should be torn up and used for, well, you
know what for, in a jakes. He was angry. Possibly because he
doesn’t like the word “jakes”.’
‘No more does he.’ The king deprecates coarse language, and
not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling some dirty
story. ‘Is it true what Mary says? That the queen is afraid?’
‘For now he is sighing over Mistress Shelton. Well, you know
that. You have observed. But surely that is harmless? A king is obliged to be gallant, till
he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the
fire with his chaplains.’
‘Explain it to Anne, she doesn’t see it. She wanted to send
Shelton away. But her father and her brother would not have it.
Because the Sheltons are their cousins, so if Henry is going to
look elsewhere, they want it to be close to home. Incest is so
popular these days! Uncle Norfolk said – I mean, His Grace –’
‘It’s all right,’ he says, distracted, ‘I call him that too.’
Jane puts a hand over her mouth. It is a child’s hand, with tiny
gleaming nails. ‘I shall think of that when I am in the country and
have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew
Cromwell?’
‘You are leaving court?’ No doubt she has a husband in view:
some country husband.
‘I hope that when I have served another season I might be
released.’
Mary rips into the room, snarling. She juggles two embroidered cushions above the bulk of her child, a bulk which now
seems evident; she has a hand free for her gilt basin, in which is
her poetry book. She throws down the cushions, opens her fist
and scatters a handful of silver buttons, which rattle into the
basin like dice. ‘Shelton had these. Curse her for a magpie.’
‘It is not as if the queen likes me,’ Jane says. ‘And it is a long
time since I saw Wolf Hall.’
For the king’s new-year gift he has commissioned from Hans
a miniature on vellum, which shows Solomon on his
throne receiving Sheba. It is to be an allegory, he explains, of the
king receiving the fruits of the church and the homage of his
people.
Hans gives him a withering look. ‘I grasp the point.’
Hans prepares sketches. Solomon is seated in majesty. Sheba
stands before him, unseen face raised, her back to the onlooker. In your own mind,’ he says, ‘can you see her face, even though
it’s hidden?’
‘You pay for the back of her head, that’s what you get!’ Hans
rubs his forehead. He relents. ‘Not true. I can see her.’
‘See her like a woman you meet in the street?’
‘Not quite like that. More like someone you remember. Like
some woman you used to know when you were a child.’
They are seated in front of the tapestry the king gave him. The
painter’s eyes stray to it. ‘This woman on the wall. Wolsey had
her, Henry had her, now you.’
‘I assure you, she has no counterpart in real life.’ Well,
not unless Westminster has some very discreet and versatile
whore.
‘I know who she is.’ Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed
together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase it. ‘They talk about it in Antwerp.
Why don’t you go over and claim her?’
‘She is married.’ He is taken aback, to think that his private
business is common talk.
‘You think she would not come away with you?’
‘It’s years. I have changed.’
‘Ja. Now you are rich.’
‘But what would be said of me, if I enticed away a woman
from her husband?’
Hans shrugs. They are so matter-of-fact, the Germans. More
says the Lutherans fornicate in church. ‘Besides,’ Hans says,
‘there is the matter of the –’
‘The what?’
Hans shrugs: nothing. ‘Nothing! You are going to hang me up
by my hands till I confess?’
‘I don’t do that. I only threaten to do it.’
‘I meant only,’ Hans says soothingly, ‘there is the matter of all
the other women who want to marry you. The wives of England,
they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you are the top of
everyone’s list.’
In his idle moments – in the week there are two or three – he
has been picking through the records of the Rolls House.
Though the Jews are forbidden the realm, you cannot know
what human flotsam will be washed up by the tide of fortune,
and only once, for a single month in these three hundred years,
has the house been empty. He runs his eye over the accounts of
the successive wardens, and he handles, curious, the receipts for
their relief given by the dead inhabitants, written in Hebrew
characters. Some of them spent fifty years within these walls,
flinching from the Londoners outside. When he walks the
crooked passages, he feels their footsteps under his.
He goes to see the two who remain. They are silent and vigilant women of indeterminate age, and the names they go by are
Katherine Wheteley and Mary Cook.
‘What do you do?’ With your time, he means.
‘We say our prayers.’
They watch him for evidence of his intentions, good or ill.
Their faces say, we are two women with nothing left but our life
stories. Why should we part with them to you?
He sends them presents of fowl but he wonders if they eat
flesh from gentile hands. Towards Christmas, the prior of
Christchurch in Canterbury sends him twelve Kentish apples,
each one wrapped in grey linen, of a special kind that is good
with wine. He takes these apples to the converts, with wine he
has picked out. ‘In the year 1353,’ he says, ‘there was only one
person in the house. I am sorry to think she lived here without
company. Her last domicile was the city of Exeter, but I wonder
where before that? Her name was Claricia.’
‘We know nothing of her,’ says Katherine, or possibly Mary.
‘It would be surprising if we did.’ Her fingertip tests the apples.
Possibly she does not recognise their rarity, or that they are the
best present the prior could find. If you don’t like them, he says, or if you do, I have stewing pears. Somebody sent me five
hundred.
‘A man who meant to get himself noticed,’ says Katherine or
Mary, and the other says, ‘Five hundred pounds would have been
better.’
The women laugh, but their laughter is cold. He sees he will
never be on terms with them. He likes the name Claricia and he
wishes he had suggested it for the gaoler’s daughter. It is a name for
a woman you might dream of: one you could see straight through.
When the king’s new-year present is done Hans says, ‘It is the
first time I have made his portrait.’
‘You shall make another soon, I hope.’
Hans knows he has an English bible, a translation almost
ready. He puts a finger to his lips; too soon to talk about it, next
year maybe. ‘If you were to dedicate it to Henry,’ Hans says,
‘could he now refuse it? I will put him on the title page, displayed
in glory, head of the church.’ Hans paces, growls out a few
figures. He is thinking of paper and printer’s costs, estimating his
profits. Lucas Cranach draws title pages for Luther. ‘Those
pictures of Martin and his wife, he has sold prints by the basketful. And Cranach makes everybody look like a pig.’
True. Even those silvery nudes he paints have sweet pig-faces,
and labourer’s feet, and gristly ears. ‘But if I paint Henry, I must
flatter, I suppose. Show him how he was five years ago. Or ten.’
‘Stick to five. He will think you are mocking him.’
Hans draws his finger across his throat, buckles at the knees,
thrusts out his tongue like a man hanged; it seems he envisages
every method of execution.
‘An easy majesty would be called for,’ he says.
Hans beams. ‘I can do it by the yard.’
The end of the year brings cold and a green aqueous light,
washing across the Thames and the city. Letters fall to his desk
with a soft shuffle like great snowflakes: doctors of theology from Germany, ambassadors from France, Mary Boleyn from
her exile in Kent.
He breaks the seal. ‘Listen to this,’ he says to Richard. ‘Mary
wants money. She says, she knows she should not have been so
hasty. She says, love overcame reason.’
‘Love, was it?’
He reads. She does not regret for a minute she has taken on
William Stafford. She could have had, she says, other husbands,
with titles and wealth. But ‘if I were at liberty and might choose,
I ensure you, Master Secretary, I have tried so much honesty to be
in him, that I had rather beg my bread with him than to be the
greatest Queen christened.’
She dare not write to her sister the queen. Or her father or her
uncle or her brother. They are all so cruel. So she is writing to
him … He wonders, did Stafford lean over her shoulder, while
she was writing? Did she giggle and say, Thomas Cromwell, I
once raised his hopes.
Richard says, ‘I hardly remember how Mary and I were to be
married.’
‘That was in other days than these.’ And Richard is happy; see
how it has worked out; we can thrive without the Boleyns. But
Christendom was overturned for the Boleyn marriage, to put the
ginger pig in the cradle; what if it is true, what if Henry is sated,
what if the enterprise is cursed? ‘Get Wiltshire in.’
‘Here to the Rolls?’
‘He will come to the whistle.’
He will humiliate him – in his genial fashion – and make him
give Mary an annuity. The girl worked for him, on her back, and
now he must pension her. Richard will sit in the shadows and
take notes. It will remind Boleyn of the old days: the old days
now being approximately six, seven years back. Last week
Chapuys said to him, in this kingdom now you are all the cardinal was, and more.