She is embroidering shirts for Gregory with a black-work
design; it’s the same one the queen uses, for she makes the king’s
shirts herself.
‘If I were Katherine I’d leave the needle in them,’ he says.
She grins. ‘I know you would.’
Lizzie had grown silent and stern when he told her how the
king had spoken, at the meeting with Katherine. He had told her
they should separate, pending a judgment on their marriage;
perhaps she would retire from court? Katherine had said no; she
said that would not be possible; she said she would seek advice
from canon lawyers, and that he, himself, should equip himself
with better lawyers, and better priests; and then, after the shouting was done, the people with their ears pressed to the walls had
heard Katherine crying. ‘He doesn’t like her crying.’
‘Men say,’ Liz reaches for her scissors, ‘“I can’t endure it when
women cry” – just as people say, “I can’t endure this wet
weather.” As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the
crying. Just one of those things that happen.’
‘I’ve never made you cry, have I?’
‘Only with laughter,’ she says.
Conversation fades into an easy silence; she is embroidering
her own thoughts, he is plotting what to do with his money. He
is supporting two young scholars, not belonging to the family,
through Cambridge University; the gift blesses the giver. I could
increase those endowments, he thinks, and – ‘I suppose I should
make a will,’ he says.
She reaches out for his hand. ‘Tom, don’t die.’
‘Good God, no, I’m not proposing it.’
He thinks, I may not be rich yet but I am lucky. Look how I
got out from under Walter’s boots, from Cesare’s summer, and a
score of bad nights in back alleys. Men, it is supposed, want to
pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to
protect his own son from a quarter of what he knows. Where
does Gregory’s sweet nature come from? It must be the result of his mother’s prayers. Richard Williams, Kat’s boy, is sharp, keen
and forward. Christopher, his sister Bet’s boy, is clever and
willing too. And then he has Rafe Sadler, whom he trusts as he
would trust his son; it’s not a dynasty, he thinks, but it’s a start.
And quiet moments like this are rare, because his house is full of
people every day, people who want to be taken to the cardinal.
There are artists looking for a subject. There are solemn Dutch
scholars with books under their arms, and Lübeck merchants
unwinding at length solemn Germanic jokes; there are musicians
in transit tuning up strange instruments, and noisy conclaves of
agents for the Italian banks; there are alchemists offering recipes
and astrologers offering favourable fates, and lonely Polish fur
traders who’ve wandered by to see if someone speaks their
language; there are printers, engravers, translators and cipherers;
and poets, garden designers, cabalists and geometricians. Where
are they tonight?
‘Hush,’ Liz says. ‘Listen to the house.’
At first, there is no sound. Then the timbers creak, breathe. In
the chimneys, nesting birds shuffle. A breeze blows from the
river, faintly shivering the tops of trees. They hear the sleeping
breath of children, imagined from other rooms. ‘Come to bed,’
he says.
The king can’t say that to his wife. Or, with any good effect, to
the woman they say he loves.
Now the cardinal’s many bags are packed for France; his
entourage yields little in splendour to the one with which he
crossed seven years ago to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. His
itinerary is leisurely, before he embarks: Dartford, Rochester,
Faversham, Canterbury for three or four days, prayers at the
shrine of Becket.
So, Thomas, he says, if you know the king’s had Anne, get a
letter to me the very day. I’ll only trust it if I hear it from you.
How will you know it’s happened? I should think you’ll know by his face. And if you have not the honour of seeing it? Good
point. I wish I had presented you; I should have taken the chance
while I had it.
‘If the king doesn’t tire of Anne quickly,’ he tells the cardinal,
‘I don’t see what you are to do. We know princes please themselves, and usually it’s possible to put some gloss on their actions.
But what case can you make for Boleyn’s daughter? What does
she bring him? No treaty. No land. No money. How are you to
present it as a creditable match at all?’
Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing
his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he
begins to talk about England.
You can’t know Albion, he says, unless you can go back
before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar’s
legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay
on the ground where one day London would be built. You must
go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and
crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of
Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or
hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers;
beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual.
These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember,
do believe them.
He speaks of the deaths of kings: of how the second Richard
vanished into Pontefract Castle and was murdered there or
starved; how the fourth Henry, the usurper, died of a leprosy
which so scarred and contracted his body that it was the size of a
mannikin or child. He talks of the fifth Henry’s victories in
France, and the price, not in money, to be paid for Agincourt. He
talks of the French princess whom that great prince married; she
was a sweet lady, but her father was insane and believed that he
was made of glass. From this marriage – Fifth Henry and the
Glass Princess – sprung another Henry who ruled an England
dark as winter, cold, barren, calamitous. Edward Plantagenet, son of the Duke of York, came as the first sign of spring: he was a
native of Aries, the sign under which the whole world was made.
When Edward was eighteen years old, he seized the kingdom,
and he did it because of a sign he received. His troops were
baffled and battle-weary, it was the darkest time of one of God’s
darkest years, and he had just heard the news that should have
broken him: his father and his youngest brother had been
captured, mocked and slaughtered by the Lancastrian forces. It
was Candlemas; huddled in his tent with his generals, he prayed
for the slaughtered souls. St Blaise’s Day came: 3 February, black
and icy. At ten in the morning, three suns rose in the sky: three
blurred discs of silver, sparkling and hazy through particles of
frost. Their garland of light spread over the sorry fields, over the
sodden forests of the Welsh borderlands, over his demoralised
and unpaid troops. His men knelt in prayer on the frozen
ground. His knights genuflected to the sky. His whole life took
wing and soared. In that wash of brilliant light he saw his future.
When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it
means to be a king. At the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross he took
prisoner one Owen Tudor. He beheaded him in Hereford
marketplace and set his head to rot on the market cross. An
unknown woman brought a basin of water and washed the
severed head; she combed its bloody hair.
From then on – St Blaise’s Day, the three suns shining – every
time he touched his sword he touched it to win. Three months
later he was in London and he was king. But he never saw the
future again, not clearly as he had that year. Dazzled, he stumbled through his kingship as through a mist. He was entirely the
creature of astrologers, of holy men and fantasists. He didn’t
marry as he should, for foreign advantage, but became enmeshed
in a series of half-made, half-broken promises to an unknown
number of women. One of them was a Talbot girl, Eleanor by
name, and what was special about her? It was said she was
descended – in the female line – from a woman who was a swan. And why did he fasten his affection, finally, on the widow of a
Lancastrian knight? Was it because, as some people thought, her
cold blonde beauty raised his pulse? It was not exactly that; it
was that she claimed descent from the serpent woman, Melusine,
whom you may see in old parchments, winding her coils about
the Tree of Knowledge and presiding over the union of the moon
and the sun. Melusine faked her life as an ordinary princess, a
mortal, but one day her husband saw her naked and glimpsed her
serpent’s tale. As she slid from his grip she predicted that her
children would found a dynasty that would reign for ever: power
with no limit, guaranteed by the devil. She slid away, says the
cardinal, and no one ever saw her again.
Some of the candles have gone out; Wolsey does not call for
more lights. ‘So you see,’ he says, ‘King Edward’s advisers were
planning to marry him to a French princess. As I … as I have
intended. And look what happened instead. Look how he chose.’
‘How long is that? Since Melusine?’
It is late; the whole great palace of York Place is quiet, the city
sleeping; the river creeping in its channels, silting its banks. In
these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these
spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine,
mutable, sly.
‘But the woman King Edward married – she brought, did she
not, a claim to the throne of Castile? Very ancient, very obscure?’
The cardinal nods. ‘That was the meaning of the three suns.
The throne of England, the throne of France, the throne of
Castile. So when our present king married Katherine, he was
moving closer to his ancient rights. Not that anyone, I imagine,
dared put it in those terms to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. But it is as well to remember, and mention from time to
time, that our king is the ruler of three kingdoms. If each had
their own.’
‘By your account, my lord, our king’s Plantagenet grandfather
beheaded his Tudor great-grandfather. ‘A thing to know. But not to mention.’
‘And the Boleyns? I thought they were merchants, but should
I have known they had serpent fangs, or wings?’
‘You are laughing at me, Master Cromwell.’
‘Indeed not. But I want the best information, if you are leaving
me to watch this situation for you.’
The cardinal talks then about killing. He talks about sin: about
what’s to be expiated. He talks about the sixth King Henry,
murdered in the Tower; of King Richard, born under Scorpio,
the sign of secret dealings, tribulation and vice. At Bosworth,
where the Scorpian died, bad choices were made; the Duke of
Norfolk fought on the losing side, and his heirs were turned out
of their dukedom. They had to work hard, long and hard, to get
it back. So do you wonder, he says, why the Norfolk that is now
shakes sometimes, if the king is in a temper? It’s because he
thinks he will lose all he has, at an angry man’s whim.
The cardinal sees his man make a mental note; and he speaks of
the loose rattling bones under the paving of the Tower, those
bones bricked into staircases and mulched into the Thames mud.
He talks about King Edward’s two vanished sons, the younger of
them prone to stubborn resurrections that almost threw Henry
Tudor out of his kingdom. He speaks of the coins the Pretender
struck, stamped with their message to the Tudor king: ‘Your days
are numbered. You are weighed in the balance: and found
wanting.’
He speaks of the fear that was then, of the return of civil war.
Katherine was contracted to be married into England, had been
called ‘Princess of Wales’ since she was three years old; but
before her family would let her embark from Corunna, they
exacted a price in blood and bone. They asked Henry to turn his
attention to the chief Plantagenet claimant, the nephew of King
Edward and wicked King Richard, whom he had held in the
Tower since he was a child of ten. To gentle pressure, King
Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God’s light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But
there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed,
though not unsupervised. There will always be the need for more
killing; one must, says the cardinal, have the stomach for it, I
suppose, though I don’t know I ever have; I am always ill when
there is an execution. I pray for them, these old dead people. I
even pray for wicked King Richard sometimes, though Thomas
More tells me he is burning in Hell.
Wolsey looks down at his own hands, twists the rings on his
fingers. ‘I wonder,’ he murmurs. ‘Wonder which it is.’ Those
who envy the cardinal say he has a ring which enables its owner
to fly, and allows him to encompass the death of his enemies. It
detects poisons, renders ferocious beasts harmless, ensures the
favour of princes, and protects against drowning.
‘I suppose other people know, my lord. Because they have
employed conjurers, to try to get it copied.’
‘If I knew, I’d get it copied myself. I’d give one to you.’
‘I picked up a snake once. In Italy.’
‘Why did you do that?’
‘For a bet.’
‘Was it poisonous?’
‘We didn’t know. That was the point of the bet.’
‘Did it bite you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Why of course?’
‘It wouldn’t be much of a story, would it? If I’d put it down
unharmed, and away it slid?’
Unwillingly, the cardinal laughs. ‘What will I do without you,’
he says, ‘among the double-tongued French?’
In the house at Austin Friars, Liz is in bed but she stirs in her
sleep. She half wakes, says his name and inches into his arms. He
kisses her hair and says, ‘Our king’s grandfather married a
serpent.’ Liz murmurs, ‘Am I awake or asleep?’ A heartbeat, and she
slides away from him, and turns over, throwing out an arm; he
wonders what she will dream. He lies awake, thinking. All that
Edward did, his battles, his conquests, he did with Medici money
behind him; their letters of credit were more important than
signs and wonders. If King Edward was, as many people say, not
the son of his father at all, not the son of the Duke of York; if
King Edward’s mother, as some people do believe, had bred him
from an honest English soldier, an archer called Blaybourne;
then if Edward married a serpent woman, his offspring would be
… Unreliable, is the word that comes to mind. If all the old
stories are to be believed, and some people, let us remember, do
believe them, then our king is one part bastard archer, one part
hidden serpent, one part Welsh, and all of him in debt to the
Italian banks … He too slides, drifts towards sleep. His accounting fails; the spectral world moves in, where pages of figures used
to be. Try always, the cardinal says, to learn what people wear
under their clothes, for it’s not just their skin. Turn the king
inside out, and you will find his scaly ancestors: his warm, solid,
serpentine flesh.
When in Italy he had picked up a snake for a bet, he had to
hold it till they counted ten. They counted, rather slowly, in the
slower languages: eins, zwei, drei … At four, the startled snake
flicked its head and bit him. Between four and five he tightened
his grip. Now some cried, ‘Blood of Christ, drop it!’ Some
prayed and some swore, some just kept on counting. The snake
looked sick; when they had all reached ten, and not before, he
eased its coiled body gently to the ground, and let it slip away
into its future.
There was no pain, but one could see clearly the puncture
wound. On instinct, he tasted it, almost bit his own wrist. He
noticed, surprised by it, the private, white, English flesh of his
inner arm; he saw the narrow blue-green veins into which the
snake had slipped the poison. He collected his winnings. He waited to die, but he never did
die. If anything, he got stronger, quick to hide and quick to
strike. There was no Milanese quartermaster could out-bawl
him, no bought-in Bernese capitaine who would not fall back
before his grim reputation for blood first and bargaining later.
Tonight is hot, it is July; he is asleep; he dreams. Somewhere in
Italy, a snake has children. He calls his children Thomas; they
carry in their heads pictures of the Thames, of muddy shallow
banks beyond the reach of the tide, beyond the wash of the
water.
Next morning when he wakes, Liz is still sleeping. The sheets
are damp. She is warm and flushed, her face smooth like a young
girl’s. He kisses her hairline. She tastes of salt. She murmurs, ‘Tell
me when you are coming home.’
‘Liz, I’m not going,’ he says. ‘I’m not going with Wolsey.’ He
leaves her. His barber comes to shave him. He sees his own eyes
in a polished mirror. They look alive; serpent eyes. What a
strange dream, he says to himself.
As he goes downstairs he thinks he sees Liz following him. He
think he sees the flash of her white cap. He turns, and says, ‘Liz,
go back to bed …’ But she’s not there. He is mistaken. He picks
up his papers and goes to Gray’s Inn.
It is recess. The business is not legal; the discussion is of texts,
and the whereabouts of Tyndale (somewhere in Germany), and
the immediate problem is a fellow lawyer (so who shall say he
should not be there, visiting Gray’s Inn?) called Thomas Bilney,
who is a priest also, and a fellow of Trinity Hall. ‘Little Bilney’
he’s called, on account of his short stature and worm-like attributes; he sits twisting on a bench, and talking about his mission to
lepers.
‘The scriptures, to me, are as honey,’ says Little Bilney, swivelling his meagre bottom, and kicking his shrunken legs. ‘I am
drunk on the word of God. ‘For Christ’s sake, man,’ he says. ‘Don’t think you can crawl
out of your hole because the cardinal is away. Because now the
Bishop of London has his hands free, not to mention our friend
in Chelsea.’
‘Masses, fasting, vigils, pardons out of Purgatory … all
useless,’ Bilney says. ‘This is revealed to me. All that remains, in
effect, is to go to Rome and discuss it with His Holiness. I am
sure he will come over to my way of thinking.’
‘You think your viewpoint is original, do you?’ he says
gloomily. ‘Still, at that, it may be, Father Bilney. If you think the
Pope would welcome your advice in these matters.’
He goes out, saying, there’s one who will jump into the fire,
given an invitation. Masters, be careful there.
He doesn’t take Rafe to these meetings. He will not draw any
member of his household into dangerous company. The
Cromwell household is as orthodox as any in London, and as
pious. They must be, he says, irreproachable.
The rest of the day is nothing to remember. He would have
been home early, if he had not arranged to meet up in the
German enclave, the Steelyard, with a man from Rostock, who
brought along a friend from Stettin, who offered to teach him
some Polish.
It’s worse than Welsh, he says at the end of the evening. I’ll
need a lot of practice. Come to my house, he says. Give us notice
and we’ll pickle some herring; otherwise, it’s pot-luck.
There’s something wrong when you arrive home at dusk but
torches are burning. The air is sweet and you feel so well as you
walk in, you feel young, unscarred. Then you see the dismayed
faces; they turn away at the sight of you.
Mercy comes and stands before him, but here is no mercy. ‘Say
it,’ he begs her.
She looks away when she says, I am so sorry.