I mean to retire from court this year,’ Sir Henry says. ‘It’stime I wrote my will. May I name you as executor?’‘You do me honour.’‘There is no one I’d rather trust with my affairs. You’ve thesteadiest hand I know.’He smiles, puzzled; nothing in his world seems steady to him . ‘I understand you,’ Wyatt says. ‘I know our old fellow inscarlet nearly brought you down. But look at you, eatingalmonds, with all your teeth in your head, and your householdaround you, and your affairs prospering, and men like Norfolkspeaking to you civil.’ Whereas, he doesn’t need to add, a yearago they were wiping their feet on you. Sir Henry breaks up, inhis fingers, a cinnamon wafer, and dabs it on to his tongue, acareful, secular Eucharist. It is forty years, more, since the Tower,but his smashed-up jaw still stiffens and plagues him with pain.‘Thomas, I have something to ask you … Will you keep an eyeon my son? Be a father to him?’‘Tom is, what, twenty-eight? He may not like another father.’‘You cannot do worse than I did. I have much to regret, hismarriage chiefly … He was seventeen, he did not want it, it was Iwho wanted it, because her father was Baron Cobham, and Iwanted to keep my place up among my neighbours in Kent. Tomwas always good to look at, a kind boy and courteous as well,you’d have thought he would have done for the girl, but I don’tknow if she was faithful to him a month. So then, of course, hepaid her in kind … the place is full of his doxies, open a closet atAllington and some wench falls out of it. He roams off abroadand what comes of that? He ends up a prisoner in Italy, I shallnever understand that affair. Since Italy he’s had even less sense.Write you a piece of terza rima, of course, but sit down and workout where his money’s gone …’ He rubs his chin. ‘But there youhave it. When all’s said, there is no braver boy than my boy.’‘Will you come back now, and join the company? You knowwe take a holiday when you visit us.’Sir Henry levers himself upright. He is a portly man, thoughhe lives on pottage and mashes. ‘Thomas, how did I get old?’When they return to the hall it is to find a play in progress.Rafe is acting the part of Leontina and the household is roaringhim on. It is not that the boys don’t believe the lion tale; it is justthat they like to put their own words to it. He extends a peremp tory hand to Richard, who has been standing on a joint-stool,squealing. ‘You are jealous of Tom Wyatt,’ he says.‘Ah, don’t be out of temper with us, master.’ Rafe resumeshuman form and throws himself on to a bench. ‘Tell us aboutFlorence. Tell us what else you did, you and Giovannino.’‘I don’t know if I should. You will make a play of it.’Ah, do, they persuade him, and he looks around: Rafe encourages him with a purr. ‘Are we sure Call-Me-Risley is not here?Well … when we had a day off, we used to take down buildings.’‘Take them down?’ Henry Wyatt says. ‘Did you so?’‘What I mean is, blow them up. But not without the owner’spermission. Unless we thought they were crumbling and adanger to passers-by. We only charged for explosive materials.Not for our expertise.’‘Which was considerable, I suppose?’‘It’s a lot of digging for a few seconds of excitement. But Iknew some boys who went into it as a profession. In Florence,’he says, ‘it was just what you might do for your recreation. Likefishing. It kept us out of trouble.’ He hesitates. ‘Well, no, itdidn’t. Not really.’Richard says, ‘Did Call-Me tell Gardiner? About yourCupid?’‘What do you think?’The king had said to him, I hear you antiqued a statue. Theking was laughing, but perhaps also making a note; laughingbecause the joke’s against clerics, against cardinals, and he’s in themood for such a joke.Secretary Gardiner: ‘Statue, statute, not much difference.’‘One letter is everything, in legislating. But my precedents arenot faked.’‘Stretched?’ Gardiner says.‘Majesty, the Council of Constance granted your ancestor,Henry V, such control over the church in England as no otherChristian king exercised in his realm.’ The concessions were not applied. Not with consistency.Why is that?’‘I don’t know. Incompetence?’‘But we have better councillors now?’‘Better kings, Your Majesty.’Behind Henry’s back, Gardiner makes a gargoyle face at him.He almost laughs.The legal term closes. Anne says, come and eat a poor Adventsupper with me. We’ll use forks.He goes, but he doesn’t like the company. She has made pets ofthe king’s friends, the gentlemen of his privy chamber: HenryNorris, William Brereton, those people, and her brother, ofcourse, Lord Rochford. Anne is brittle in their company, and asruthless with their compliments as a housewife snapping thenecks of larks for the table. If her precise smile fades for amoment, they all lean forward, anxious to know how to pleaseher. A bigger set of fools you would go far to seek.For himself, he can go anywhere, he has been anywhere.Brought up on the table talk of the Frescobaldi family, the Portinari family, and latterly at the cardinal’s table among the savantsand wits, he is unlikely to find himself at a loss among the prettypeople Anne gathers around her. God knows, they do their best,the gentlemen, to make him uncomfortable; he imports his owncomfort, his calm, his exact and pointed conversation. Norris,who is a witty man, and not young, stultifies himself by keepingsuch company: and why? Proximity to Anne makes him tremble.It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.After that first occasion, Norris follows him out, touches hissleeve, and brings him to a standstill, face to face. ‘You don’t seeit, do you? Anne?’He shakes his head.‘So what would be your idea? Some fat frau from yourtravels? A woman I could love, would be a woman in whom the kinghas no interest at all.’‘If that is a piece of advice, tell it to your friend Wyatt’s son.’‘Oh, I think young Wyatt has worked it out. He is a marriedman. He says to himself, from your deprivations make a verse.Don’t we all grow wiser, from pinpricks to the amour propre?’‘Can you look at me,’ Norris says, ‘and think I grow wiser?’He hands Norris his handkerchief. Norris mops his face andgives the handkerchief back. He thinks of St Veronica, swabbingwith her veil the features of the suffering Christ; he wonders if,when he gets home, Henry’s gentlemanly features will beimprinted on the cloth, and if so, will he hang the result on thewall? Norris turns away, with a little laugh: ‘Weston – youngWeston, you know – he is jealous of a boy she brings in to singfor us some nights. He is jealous of the man who comes in tomend the fire, or the maid who pulls her stockings off. Everytime she looks at you, he keeps count, he says, there, there, doyou see, she is looking at that fat butcher, she looked at himfifteen times in two hours.’‘It was the cardinal who was the fat butcher.’‘To Francis, one tradesman’s the same as the next.’‘I quite see that. Give you good night.’Night, Tom, Norris says, batting him on the shoulder, absent,distracted, almost as if they were equals, as if they were friends;his eyes are turned back to Anne, his steps are turned back to hisrivals.One tradesman the same as the next? Not in the real world.Any man with a steady hand and a cleaver can call himself abutcher: but without the smith, where does he get that cleaver?Without the man who works in metal, where are your hammers,your scythes, your sickles, scissors and planes? Your arms andarmour, your arrowheads, your pikes and your guns? Where areyour ships at sea and their anchors? Where are your grapplinghooks, your nails, latches, hinges, pokers and tongs? Where are your spits, kettles, trivets, your harness rings, buckles and bits?Where are your knives?He remembers the day they heard the Cornish army wascoming. He was – what – twelve? He was in the forge. He hadcleaned the big bellows and he was oiling the leather. Waltercame over and looked at it. ‘Wants caulking.’‘Right,’ he said. (This was the kind of conversation he hadwith Walter.)‘It won’t do itself.’‘I said, right, right, I’m doing it!’He looked up. Their neighbour Owen Madoc stood in thedoorway. ‘They’re on the march. Word’s all down the river.Henry Tudor ready to fight. The queen and the little ones in theTower.’Walter wipes his mouth. ‘How long?’Madoc says, ‘God knows. Those fuckers can fly.’He straightens up. Into his hand has floated a four-poundhammer with an ash shaft.The next few days they worked till they were ready to drop.Walter undertook body armour for his friends, and he to put anedge on anything that can cut, tear, lacerate rebel flesh. The menof Putney have no sympathy with these heathens. They pay theirtaxes: why not the Cornish? The women are afraid that theCornishmen will outrage their honour. ‘Our priest says theyonly do it to their sisters,’ he says, ‘so you’ll be all right, our Bet.But then again, the priest says they have cold scaly members likethe devil, so you might want the novelty.’Bet throws something at him. He dodges. It’s always theexcuse for breakages, in that house: I threw it at Thomas. ‘Well, Idon’t know what you like,’ he says.That week, rumours proliferate. The Cornishmen work underthe ground, so their faces are black. They are half-blind and soyou can catch them in a net. The king will give you a shilling for each you catch, two shillings if it’s a big one. Just how big arethey? Because they shoot arrows a yard long.Now all household objects are seen in a new light. Skewers,spits, larding needles: anything for defence at close quarters. Theneighbours are paying out to Walter’s other business, thebrewery, as if they think the Cornishmen mean to drink Englanddry. Owen Madoc comes in and commissions a hunting knife,hand-guard, blood gutter and twelve-inch blade. ‘Twelve-inch?’he says. ‘You’ll be flailing around and cut your ear off.’‘You’ll not be so pert when the Cornish seize you. They spitchildren like you and roast them on bonfires.’‘Can’t you just slap them with an oar?’‘I’ll slap your jaw shut,’ Owen Madoc bellows. ‘You littlefucker, you had a bad name before you were born.’He shows Owen Madoc the knife he has made for himself,slung on a cord under his shirt: its stub of blade, like a single, eviltooth. ‘What do you think?’‘Christ,’ Madoc says. ‘Be careful who you leave it in.’He says to his sister Kat – just resting his four-pound hammer onher windowsill at the Pegasus – why did I have a bad name beforeI was born?Ask Morgan Williams, she says. He’ll tell you. Oh, Tom, Tom,she says. She grabs his head and kisses it. You don’t put yourselfout there. Let him fight.She hopes the Cornish will kill Walter. She doesn’t say so, buthe knows it.When I am the man of this family, he says, things will bedifferent, I can tell you.Morgan tells him – blushing, for he is a very proper man – thatboys used to follow his mother in the street, shouting ‘Look atthe old mare in foal!’His sister Bet says, ‘Another thing those Cornish have got,they have got a giant called Bolster, who’s in love with St Agnes and he follows her around and the Cornish bear her image ontheir flags and so he’s coming to London after them.’‘Bolster?’ he sneers. ‘I expect he’s that big.’‘Oh, you will see,’ Bet says. ‘Then you won’t be so quick withyour answers.’The women of the district, Morgan says, clucked around hismother pretending concern: what will it be when it’s born, she’slike the side of a house!Then when he came into this world, bawling, with clenchedfists and wet black curls, Walter and his friends reeled throughPutney, singing. They shouted, ‘Come and get it, girls!’ and‘Barren wives served here!’They never noted the date. He said to Morgan, I don’t mind. Idon’t have a natal chart. So I don’t have a fate.As fate had it, there was no battle in Putney. For the outridersand escapees, the women were ready with bread knives andrazors, the men to bludgeon them with shovels and mattocks, tohollow them with adzes and to spike them on butchers’ steels.The big fight was at Blackheath instead: Cornishmen cut up intolittle pieces, minced by the Tudor in his military mincingmachine. All of them safe: except from Walter.His sister Bet says, ‘You know that giant, Bolster? He hearsthat St Agnes is dead. He’s cut his arm and in sorrow his blood hasflowed into the sea. It’s filled up a cave that can never be filled,which goes into a hole, which goes down beneath the bed of thesea and into the centre of the earth and into Hell. So he’s dead.’‘Oh, good. Because I was really worried about Bolster.’‘Dead till next time,’ his sister says.So on a date unknown, he was born. At three years old, he wascollecting kindling for the forge. ‘See my little lad?’ Walterwould say, batting him fondly around the head. His fingerssmelled of burning, and his palm was solid and black.In recent years, of course, scholars have tried to give him afate; men learned in reading the heavens have tried to work him back from what he is and how he is, to when he was born. Jupiterfavourably aspected, indicating prosperity. Mercury rising,offering the faculty of quick and persuasive speech. Kratzer says,if Mars is not in Scorpio, I don’t know my trade. His mother wasfifty-two and they thought she could neither conceive nordeliver a child. She hid her powers and disguised him underdraperies, deep inside her, for as long as she could contrive. Hecame out and they said, what is it?In mid-December, James Bainham, a barrister of the MiddleTemple, abjures his heresies before the Bishop of London. Hehas been tortured, the city says, More himself questioning himwhile the handle of the rack is turned and asking him to nameother infected members of the Inns of Court. A few days later, aformer monk and a leather-seller are burned together. The monkhad run in consignments of books through the Norfolk portsand then, stupidly enough, through St Katharine’s Dock, wherethe Lord Chancellor was waiting to seize them. The leather-sellerhad possession of Luther’s Liberty of a Christian Man, the textcopied out in his own hand. These are men he knows, thedisgraced and broken Bainham, the monk Bayfield, JohnTewkesbury, who God knows was no doctor of theology. That’show the year goes out, in a puff of smoke, a pall of human ashhanging over Smithfield.On New Year’s Day, he wakes before dawn to see Gregory at thefoot of his bed. ‘You’d better come. Tom Wyatt’s been taken up.’He is out of bed instantly; his first thought is that More hasstruck into the heart of Anne’s circle. ‘Where is he? They’ve nottaken him to Chelsea?’Gregory sounds mystified. ‘Why would they take him toChelsea?’‘The king cannot allow – it comes too near him – Anne hasbooks, she has shown them to him – he himself has read Tyndale what next, is More going to arrest the king?’ He reaches for ashirt.‘It’s nothing to do with More. It’s some fools taken up formaking a riot in Westminster, they were in the street leaping overbonfires and took to smashing windows, you know how it goes…’ Gregory’s voice is weary. ‘Then they go fighting the watchand they get locked up, and a message comes, will MasterCromwell go down and give the turnkey a New Year present?’‘Christ,’ he says. He sits down on the bed, suddenly consciousof his nakedness, of feet, shins, thighs, cock, his pelt of body hair,bristling chin: and the sweat that has broken out across his shoulders. He pulls on his shirt. ‘They’ll have to take me as they findme,’ he says. ‘And I’ll have my breakfast first.’Gregory says, with light malice, ‘You agreed to be a father tohim. This is what being a father means.’He stands up. ‘Get Richard.’‘I’ll come.’‘Come if you must, but I want Richard in case there’s trouble.’There is no trouble, only a bit of haggling. Dawn is breakingwhen the young gentlemen reel out into the air, haggard,battered, their clothes torn and dirty. ‘Francis Weston,’ he says,‘good morning, sir.’ He thinks, if I’d known you were here, I’dhave left you. ‘Why are you not at court?’‘I am,’ the boy says, on an outgust of sour breath. ‘I am atGreenwich. I am not here. Do you understand?’‘Bilocation,’ he says. ‘Right.’‘Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus my Redeemer.’ Thomas Wyatt stands inthe bright snowy light, rubbing his head. ‘Never again.’‘Till next year,’ Richard says.He turns, to see a last shambling figure fall out into the street.‘Francis Bryan,’ he says. ‘I should have known this enterprisewould not be complete without you. Sir.’Exposed to the first chill of the new year, Lady Anne’s cousinshakes himself like a wet dog. ‘By the tits of Holy Agnes, it’s freezing.’ His doublet is ripped and his shirt collar torn off, andhe has only one shoe. He clutches at his hose to keep them up.Five years ago, he lost an eye in the joust; now he has lost hiseyepatch, and the livid socket is on view. He looks around, withwhat ocular equipment remains. ‘Cromwell? I don’t rememberyou were with us last night.’‘I was in my bed and would be glad if I were there still.’‘Why not go back?’ Risking dangerous slippage, he throws hishands out. ‘Which of the city wives is waiting for you? Do youhave one for each of the twelve days of Christmas?’ He almostlaughs, till Bryan adds, ‘Don’t you sectaries hold your women incommon?’‘Wyatt,’ he turns away, ‘get him to cover himself, or his partswill be frostbitten. Bad enough to be without an eye.’‘Say thank you.’ Thomas Wyatt bellows, and thumps hiscompanions. ‘Say thank you to Master Cromwell and pay himback what you owe him. Who else would be up so early on aholiday, and with his purse open? We could have been there tilltomorrow.’They do not look like men who have a shilling between them.‘Never mind,’ he says. ‘I’ll put it on the account.