II
Entirely Beloved Cromwell
Spring–December 1530

He arrives early at York Place. The baited gulls, penned in their
keeping yards, are crying out to their free brothers on the river,
who wheel screaming and diving over the palace walls. The carmen are pushing up from the river goods incoming, and the
courts smell of baking bread. Some children are bringing fresh
rushes, tied in bundles, and they greet him by name. For their
civility, he gives each of them a coin, and they stop to talk. ‘So,
you are going to the evil lady. She has bewitched the king, you
know? Do you have a medal or a relic, master, to protect you?’
‘I had a medal. But I lost it.’
‘You should ask our cardinal,’ one child says. ‘He will give
you another.’
The scent of the rushes is sharp and green; the morning is fine.
The rooms of York Place are familiar to him, and as he passes
through them towards the inner chambers he sees a half-familiar
face and says, ‘Mark?’
The boy detaches himself from the wall where he is leaning.
‘You’re about early. How are you?’
A sulky shrug.
‘It must feel strange to be back here at York Place, now the
world is so altered.’
‘No. ‘You don’t miss my lord cardinal?’
‘No.’
‘You are happy?’
‘Yes.’
‘My lord will be pleased to know.’ To himself he says, as he
moves away, you may never think of us, Mark, but we think of
you. Or at least I do, I think of you calling me a felon and
predicting my death. It is true that the cardinal always says, there
are no safe places, there are no sealed rooms, you may as well
stand on Cheapside shouting out your sins as confess to a priest
anywhere in England. But when I spoke to the cardinal of killing,
when I saw a shadow on the wall, there was no one to hear; so if
Mark reckons I’m a murderer, that’s only because he thinks I
look like one.
Eight anterooms: in the last, where the cardinal should be, he
finds Anne Boleyn. Look, there are Solomon and Sheba,
unrolled again, back on the wall. There is a draught; Sheba eddies
towards him, rosy, round, and he acknowledges her: Anselma,
lady made of wool, I thought I’d never see you again.
He had sent word back to Antwerp, applied discreetly for
news; Anselma was married, Stephen Vaughan said, and to a
younger man, a banker. So if he drowns or anything, he said, let
me know. Vaughan writes back: Thomas, come now, isn’t
England full of widows? And fresh young girls?
Sheba makes Anne look bad: sallow and sharp. She stands by
the window, her fingers tugging and ripping at a sprig of rosemary. When she sees him, she drops it, and her hands dip back
into her trailing sleeves.
In December, the king gave a banquet, to celebrate her father’s
elevation to be Earl of Wiltshire. The queen was elsewhere, and
Anne sat where Katherine should sit. There was frost on the
ground, frost in the atmosphere. They only heard of it, in the
Wolsey household. The Duchess of Norfolk (who is always furious about something) was furious that her niece should have
precedence. The Duchess of Suffolk, Henry’s sister, refused to
eat. Neither of these great ladies spoke to Boleyn’s daughter.
Nevertheless, Anne had taken her place as the first lady of the
kingdom.
But now it’s the end of Lent, and Henry has gone back to his
wife; he hasn’t the face to be with his concubine as we move
towards the week of Christ’s Passion. Her father is abroad, on
diplomatic business; so is her brother George, now Lord
Rochford; so is Thomas Wyatt, the poet whom she tortures.
She’s alone and bored at York Place; and she’s reduced to sending
for Thomas Cromwell, to see if he offers any amusement.
A flurry of little dogs – three of them – run away from her
skirts, yapping, darting towards him. ‘Don’t let them out,’ Anne
says, and with practised and gentle hands he scoops them up –
they are the kind of dogs, Bellas, with ragged ears and tiny
wafting tails, that any merchant’s wife would keep, across the
Narrow Sea. By the time he has given them back to her, they have
nibbled his fingers and his coat, licked his face and yearned
towards him with goggling eyes: as if he were someone they had
so much longed to meet.
Two of them he sets gently on the floor; the smallest he hands
back to Anne. ‘Vous êtes gentil,’ she says, ‘and how my babies
like you! I could not love, you know, those apes that Katherine
keeps. Les singes enchaînés. Their little hands, their little necks
fettered. My babies love me for myself.’
She’s so small. Her bones are so delicate, her waist so narrow;
if two law students make one cardinal, two Annes make one
Katherine. Various women are sitting on low stools, sewing or
rather pretending to sew. One of them is Mary Boleyn. She keeps
her head down, as well she might. One of them is Mary Shelton,
a bold pink-and-white Boleyn cousin, who looks him over, and –
quite obviously – says to herself, Mother of God, is that the best
Lady Carey thought she could get? Back in the shadows there is another girl, who has her face turned away, trying to hide. He
does not know who she is, but he understands why she’s looking
fixedly at the floor. Anne seems to inspire it; now that he’s put
the dogs down, he’s doing the same thing.
‘Alors,’ Anne says softly, ‘suddenly, everything is about you.
The king does not cease to quote Master Cromwell.’ She
pronounces it as if she can’t manage the English: Cremuel. ‘He is
so right, he is at all points correct … Also, let us not forget,
Maître Cremuel makes us laugh.’
‘I see the king does sometimes laugh. But you, madame? In
your situation? As you find yourself?’
A black glance, over her shoulder. ‘I suppose I seldom. Laugh.
If I think. But I had not thought.’
‘This is what your life has come to.’
Dusty fragments, dried leaves and stems, have fallen down her
skirts. She stares out at the morning.
‘Let me put it this way,’ he says. ‘Since my lord cardinal was
reduced, how much progress have you seen in your cause?’
‘None.’
‘No one knows the workings of Christian countries like my
lord cardinal. No one is more intimate with kings. Think how
bound to you he would be, Lady Anne, if you were the means of
erasing these misunderstandings and restoring him to the king’s
grace.’
She doesn’t answer.
‘Think,’ he says. ‘He is the only man in England who can
obtain for you what you need.’
‘Very well. Make his case. You have five minutes.’
‘Otherwise, I can see you’re really busy.’
Anne looks at him with dislike, and speaks in French. ‘What
do you know of how I occupy my hours?’
‘My lady, are we having this conversation in English or
French? Your choice entirely. But let’s make it one or the other,
yes?’ He sees a movement from the corner of his eye; the halfhidden girl has raised her face. She is plain and pale; she looks
shocked.
‘You are indifferent?’ Anne says.
‘Yes.’
‘Very well. In French.’
He tells her again: the cardinal is the only man who can deliver
a good verdict from the Pope. He is the only man who can
deliver the king’s conscience, and deliver it clean.
She listens. He will say that for her. He has always
wondered how well women can hear, beneath the muffling
folds of their veils and hoods, but Anne does give the impression that she is hearing what he has said. She waits him out, at
least; she doesn’t interrupt, until at last she does: so, she says,
if the king wants it, and the cardinal wants it, he who was
formerly the chief subject in the kingdom, then I must say,
Master Cremuel, it is all taking a marvellous long while to
come to pass!
From her corner her sister adds, barely audible, ‘And she’s not
getting any younger.’
Not a stitch have the women added to their sewing since he
has been in the room.
‘One may resume?’ he asks, persuading her. ‘There is a
moment left?’
‘Oh yes,’ Anne says. ‘But a moment only: in Lent I ration my
patience.’
He tells her to dismiss the slanderers who claim that the cardinal obstructed her cause. He tells her how it distresses the cardinal that the king should not have his heart’s desire, which was
ever the cardinal’s desire too. He tells her how all the king’s
subjects repose their hopes in her, for an heir to the throne; and
how he is sure they are right to do so. He reminds her of the
many gracious letters she has written to the cardinal in times
past: all of which he has on file. ‘Very nice,’ she says, when he stops. ‘Very nice, Master
Cremuel, but try again. One thing. One simple thing we asked of
the cardinal, and he would not. One simple thing.’
‘You know it was not simple.’
‘Perhaps I am a simple person,’ Anne says. ‘Do you feel I
am?’
‘You may be. I hardly know you.’
The reply incenses her. He sees her sister smirk. You may go,
Anne says: and Mary jumps up, and follows him out.
Once again Mary’s cheeks are flushed, her lips are parted. She’s
brought her sewing with her, which he thinks is strange; but
perhaps, if she leaves it behind, Anne pulls the stitches out. ‘Out
of breath again, Lady Carey?’
‘We thought she might run up and slap you. Will you come
again? Shelton and I can’t wait.’
‘She can stand it,’ he says, and Mary says, indeed, she likes a
skirmish with someone on her own level. What are you working
there? he asks, and she shows him. It is Anne’s new coat of arms.
On everything, I suppose, he says, and she smiles broadly, oh
yes, her petticoats, her handkerchiefs, her coifs and her veils; she
has garments that no one ever wore before, just so she can have
her arms sewn on, not to mention the wall hangings, the table
napkins …
‘And how are you?’
She looks down, glance swivelling away from him. ‘Worn
down. Frayed a little, you might say. Christmas was …’
‘They quarrelled. So one hears.’
‘First he quarrelled with Katherine. Then he came here for
sympathy. Anne said, what! I told you not to argue with
Katherine, you know you always lose. If he were not a king,’ she
says with relish, ‘one could pity him. For the dog’s life they lead
him.’
‘There have been rumours that Anne ‘Yes, but she’s not. I would be the first to know. If she thickened by an inch, it would be me who let out her clothes. Besides,
she can’t, because they don’t. They haven’t.’
‘She’d tell you?’
‘Of course – out of spite!’ Still Mary will not meet his eyes.
But she seems to feel she owes him information. ‘When they are
alone, she lets him unlace her bodice.’
‘At least he doesn’t call you to do it.’
‘He pulls down her shift and kisses her breasts.’
‘Good man if he can find them.’
Mary laughs; a boisterous, unsisterly laugh. It must be audible
within, because almost at once the door opens and the small
hiding girl manoeuvres herself around it. Her face is grave, her
reserve complete; her skin is so fine that it is almost translucent.
‘Lady Carey,’ she says, ‘Lady Anne wants you.’
She speaks their names as if she is making introductions
between two cockroaches.
Mary snaps, oh, by the saints! and turns on her heel, whipping
her train behind her with the ease of long practice.
To his surprise, the small pale girl catches his glance; behind
the retreating back of Mary Boleyn, she raises her own eyes to
Heaven.
Walking away – eight antechambers back to the rest of his day –
he knows that Anne has stepped forward to a place where he can
see her, the morning light lying along the curve of her throat. He
sees the thin arch of her eyebrow, her smile, the turn of her head
on her long slender neck. He sees her speed, intelligence and
rigour. He didn’t think she would help the cardinal, but what do
you lose by asking? He thinks, it is the first proposition I have
put to her; probably not the last.
There was a moment when Anne gave him all her attention:
her skewering dark glance. The king, too, knows how to look;
blue eyes, their mildness deceptive. Is this how they look at each other? Or in some other way? For a second he understands it;
then he doesn’t. He stands by a window. A flock of starlings
settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black
buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He
becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that
something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future,
is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he
is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of
penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a
world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a
world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he
doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken
back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
In Lent, there are butchers who will sell you red meat, if you
know where to go. At Austin Friars he goes down to talk to his
kitchen staff, and says to his chief man, ‘The cardinal is sick, he is
dispensed from Lent.’
His cook takes off his hat. ‘By the Pope?’
‘By me.’ He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks,
the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its
edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, ‘Do you think I look
like a murderer? In your good opinion?’
A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, ‘At this moment,
master, I would have to say …’
‘No, but suppose I were making my way to Gray’s Inn … Can
you picture to yourself? Carrying a folio of papers and an
inkhorn?’
‘I do suppose a clerk would be carrying those.’
‘So you can’t picture it?’
Thurston takes off his hat again, and turns it inside out. He
looks at it as if his brains might be inside it, or at least some
prompt as to what to say next. ‘I see how you would look like a lawyer. Not like a murderer, no. But if you will forgive me,
master, you always look like a man who knows how to cut up a
carcase.’
He has the kitchen make beef olives for the cardinal, stuffed
with sage and marjoram, neatly trussed and placed side by side in
trays, so that the cooks at Richmond need do nothing but bake
them. Show me where it says in the Bible, a man shall not eat beef
olives in March.
He thinks of Lady Anne, her unslaked appetite for a fight; the
sad ladies about her. He sends those ladies some flat baskets of
small tarts, made of preserved oranges and honey. To Anne
herself he sends a dish of almond cream. It is flavoured with rosewater and decorated with the preserved petals of roses, and with
candied violets. He is above riding across the country, carrying
food himself; but not that much above it. It’s not so many years
since the Frescobaldi kitchen in Florence; or perhaps it is, but his
memory is clear, exact. He was clarifying calf’s-foot jelly, chatting away in his mixture of French, Tuscan and Putney, when
somebody shouted, ‘Tommaso, they want you upstairs.’ His
movements were unhurried as he nodded to a kitchen child, who
brought him a basin of water. He washed his hands, dried them
on a linen cloth. He took off his apron and hung it on a peg. For
all he knows, it is there still.
He saw a young boy – younger than him – on hands and
knees, scrubbing the steps. He sang as he worked:
‘Scaramella va alla guerra
Colla lancia et la rotella
La zombero boro borombetta,
La boro borombo …’
‘If you please, Giacomo,’ he said. To let him pass, the boy
moved aside, into the curve of the wall. A shift of the light wiped
the curiosity from his face, blanking it, fading his past into the past, washing the future clean. Scaramella is off to war … But
I’ve been to war, he thought.
He had gone upstairs. In his ears the roll and stutter of the
song’s military drum. He had gone upstairs and never come
down again. In a corner of the Frescobaldi counting house, a
table was waiting for him. Scaramella fa la gala, he hummed. He
had taken his place. Sharpened a quill. His thoughts bubbled and
swirled, Tuscan, Putney, Castilian oaths. But when he committed
his thoughts to paper they came out in Latin and perfectly
smooth.
Even before he walks in from the kitchens at Austin Friars, the
women of the house know that he has been to see Anne.
‘So,’ Johane demands. ‘Tall or short?’
‘Neither.’
‘I’d heard she was very tall. Sallow, is she not?’
‘Yes, sallow.’
‘They say she is graceful. Dances well.’
‘We did not dance.’
Mercy says, ‘But what do you think? A friend to the gospel?’
He shrugs. ‘We did not pray.’
Alice, his little niece: ‘What was she wearing?’
Ah, I can tell you that; he prices and sources her, hood to hem,
foot to fingertip. For her headdress Anne affects the French
style, the round hood flattering the fine bones of her face. He
explains this, and though his tone is cool, mercantile, the women
somehow do not appreciate it.
‘You don’t like her, do you?’ Alice says, and he says it’s not for
him to have an opinion; or you either, Alice, he says, hugging her
and making her giggle. The child Jo says, our master is in a good
mood. This squirrel trim, Mercy says, and he says, Calabrian.
Alice says, oh, Calabrian, and wrinkles her nose; Johane remarks,
I must say, Thomas, it seems you got close.
‘Are her teeth good?’ Mercy says. ‘For God’s sake, woman: when she sinks them into me, I’ll let
you know.’
When the cardinal had heard that the Duke of Norfolk was
coming out to Richmond to tear him with his teeth, he had
laughed and said, ‘Marry, Thomas, time to be going.’
But to go north, the cardinal needs funding. The problem is
put to the king’s council, who fall out, and continue the quarrel
in his hearing. ‘After all,’ Charles Brandon says, ‘one can’t let an
archbishop creep away to his enthronement like a servant who’s
stolen the spoons.’
‘He’s done more than steal the spoons,’ Norfolk says. ‘He’s
eaten the dinner that would have fed all England. He’s filched the
tablecloth, by God, and drunk the cellar dry.’
The king can be elusive. One day when he thinks he has an
appointment to meet Henry, he gets Master Secretary instead.
‘Sit down,’ Gardiner says. ‘Sit down and listen to me. Contain
yourself in patience, while I put you straight on a few matters.’
He watches him ranging to and fro, Stephen the noonday
devil. Gardiner is a man with bones loose-jointed, his lines
flowing with menace; he has great hairy hands, and knuckles
which crack when he folds his right fist into his left palm.
He takes away the menace conveyed, and the message. Pausing
in the doorway, he says mildly, ‘Your cousin sends greetings.’
Gardiner stares at him. His eyebrows bristle, like a dog’s
hackles. He thinks that Cromwell presumes –
‘Not the king,’ he says soothingly. ‘Not His Majesty. I mean
your cousin Richard Williams.’
Aghast, Gardiner says, ‘That old tale!’
‘Oh, come,’ he says. ‘It’s no disgrace to be a royal bastard. Or
so we think, in my family.’
‘In your family? What grasp have they on propriety? I have no
interest in this young person, recognise no kinship with him, and
I will do nothing for him.’