by Hilary Mante
‘I am so sorry,’ he says.
He rubs his face. ‘Ah, God. Go back to Harry, will you? Tell him we can't do this.’
‘He will expect you to come to Calais, if your lady wife cannot.’
‘I don't like to leave her, you see?’
‘Anne is unforgiving,’ he says. ‘Hard to please, easy to offend. My lord, be guided by me.’
Brandon grunts. ‘We all are. We must be. You do everything, Cromwell. You are everything now. We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves.’ The duke sniffs. ‘We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer.’
The steaming blood of Christ. It's an oath worthy of Thomas Howard, the senior duke. When did he become the interpreter of dukes, their explainers? He asks himself but he has no bloody answer. When he returns to the king and the queen-to-be, they are looking lovingly into each other's faces. ‘The Duke of Suffolk begs pardon,’ he says. Yes, yes, the king says. I'll see you tomorrow, but not too early. You would think they were already man and wife, a languorous night before them, filled with marital delights. You would think so, except he has Mary Boleyn's word for it that the marquisate has bought Henry only the right to caress her sister's inner thigh. Mary tells him this, and doesn't even put it in Latin. Whenever she spends time alone with the king, Anne reports back to her relations, no detail spared. You have to admire her; her measured exactness, her restraint. She uses her body like a soldier, conserving its resources; like one of the masters in the anatomy school at Padua, she divides it up and names every part, this my thigh, this my breast, this my tongue.
‘Perhaps in Calais,’ he says. ‘Perhaps he will get what he wants then.’
‘She will have to be sure.’ Mary walks away. She stops and turns back, her face troubled. ‘Anne says, Cromwell is my man. I don't like her to say that.’
In ensuing days, other questions emerge to torment the English party. Which royal lady will be hostess to Anne when they meet the French? Queen Eleanor will not – you cannot expect it, as she is the Emperor's sister, and family feeling is touched by His Disgrace's abandonment of Katherine. Francis's sister, the Queen of Navarre, pleads illness rather than receive the King of England's mistress. ‘Is it the same illness that afflicts the poor Duchess of Suffolk?’ Anne asks. Perhaps, Francis suggests, it would be appropriate if the new marquess were to be met by the Duchess of Vendôme, his own maîtresse en titre?
Henry is so angry that it gives him toothache. Dr Butts comes with his chest of specifics. A narcotic seems kindest, but when the king wakes he is still so mortified that for a few hours there seems no solution but to call the expedition off. Can they not comprehend, can they not grasp, that Anne is no man's mistress, but a king's bride-to-be? But to comprehend that is not in Francis's nature. He would never wait more than a week for a woman he wanted. Pattern of chivalry, he? Most Christian king? All he understands, Henry bellows, is rutting like a stag. But I tell you, when his rut is done, the other harts will put him down. Ask any hunter!
It is suggested, finally, that the solution will be to leave the future queen behind in Calais, on English soil where she can suffer no insult, while the king meets Francis in Boulogne. Calais, a small city, should be more easily contained than London, even if people line up at the harbourside to shout ‘Putain!’ and ‘Great Whore of England.’ If they sing obscene songs, we will simply refuse to understand them.
At Canterbury, with the royal party in addition to the pilgrims from all nations, every house is packed from cellars to eaves. He and Rafe are lodged in some comfort and near the king, but there are lords in flea-bitten inns and knights in the back rooms of brothels, pilgrims forced into stables and outhouses and sleeping out under the stars. Luckily, the weather is mild for October. Any year before this, the king would have gone to pray at Becket's shrine and leave a rich offering. But Becket was a rebel against the Crown, not the sort of archbishop we like to encourage at the moment. In the cathedral the incense is still hanging in the air from Warham's interment, and prayers for his soul are a constant drone like the buzz of a thousand hives. Letters have gone to Cranmer, lying somewhere in Germany at the Emperor's travelling court. Anne has begun to refer to him as the Archbishop-Elect. No one knows how long he'll take getting home. With his secret, Rafe says.
Of course, he says, his secret, written down the side of the page.
Rafe visits the shrine. It is his first time. He comes back wide-eyed, saying it is covered in jewels the size of goose eggs.
‘I know. Are they real, do you think?’
‘They show you a skull, they say it's Becket's, it's smashed up by the knights but it's held together with a silver plate. For ready money, you can kiss it. They have a tray of his finger bones. They have his snotty handkerchief. And a bit of his boot. And a vial they shake up for you, they say it's his blood.’
‘At Walsingham, they have a vial of the Virgin's milk.’
‘Christ, I wonder what that is?’ Rafe looks sick. ‘The blood, you can tell it's water with some red soil in it. It floats about in clumps.’
‘Well, pick up that goose quill, plucked from the pinions of the angel Gabriel, and we will write to Stephen Vaughan. We may have to set him on the road, to bring Thomas Cranmer home.’
‘It can't be soon enough,’ Rafe says. ‘Just wait, master, till I wash Becket off my hands.’
Though he will not go to the shrine, the king wants to show himself to the people, Anne by his side. Leaving Mass, against all advice he walks out among the crowds, his guards standing back, his councillors around him. Anne's head darts, on the slender stem of her neck, turning to catch the comments that come her way. People stretch out their hands to touch the king.
Norfolk, at his elbow, stiff with apprehension, eyes everywhere: ‘I don't care for this proceeding, Master Cromwell.’ He himself, having once been quick with a knife, is alert for movements below the eyeline. But the nearest thing to a weapon is an outsize cross, wielded by a bunch of Franciscan monks. The crowd gives way to them, to a huddle of lay priests in their vestments, a contingent of Benedictines from the abbey, and in the midst of them a young woman in the habit of a Benedictine nun.
‘Majesty?’
Henry turns. ‘By God, this is the Holy Maid,’ he says. The guards move in, but Henry holds up a hand. ‘Let me see her.’ She is a big girl, and not so young, perhaps twenty-eight; plain face, dusky, excited, with an urgent flush. She pushes towards the king, and for a second he sees him through her eyes: a blur of red-gold and flushed skin, a ready, priapic body, a hand like a ham that stretches out to take her by her nunly elbow. ‘Madam, you have something to say to me?’
She tries to curtsey, but his grip won't let her. ‘I am advised by Heaven,’ she says, ‘by the saints with whom I converse, that the heretics around you must be put into a great fire, and if you do not light that fire, then you yourself will burn.’
‘Which heretics? Where are they? I do not keep heretics about my person.’
‘Here is one.’
Anne shrinks against the king; against the scarlet and gold of his jacket she melts like wax.
‘And if you enter into a form of marriage with this unworthy woman, you will not reign seven months.’
‘Come, madam, seven months? Round it off, can you not? What sort of a prophet says “seven months”?’
‘That is what Heaven tells me.’
‘And when the seven months are up, who will replace me? Speak up, say who you would like to be king instead of me.’
The monks and priests are trying to draw her away; this was not part of their plan. ‘Lord Montague, he is of the blood. The Marquis of Exeter, he is blood royal.’ She in turn tries to pull away from the king. ‘I see your lady mother,’ she says, ‘surrounded by pale fires.’
Henry drops her as if her flesh were hot. ‘My mother? Where?’
‘I have been looking for the Cardinal of York. I have searched Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, but the cardinal is not there.’
‘Surely she is mad?’ Anne says. ‘She is mad and must be whipped. If she is not, she must be hanged.’
One of the priests says, ‘Madam, she is a very holy person. Her speech is inspired.’
‘Get her out of my way,’ Anne says.
‘Lightning will strike you,’ the nun tells Henry. He laughs uncertainly.
Norfolk erupts into the group, teeth clenched, fist raised. ‘Drag her back to her whorehouse, before she feels this, by God!’ In the mêlée, one monk hits another with the cross; the Maid is drawn backwards, still prophesying; the noise from the crowd rises, and Henry grasps Anne by the arm and pulls her back the way they came. He himself follows the Maid, sticking close to the back of the group, till the crowd thins and he can tap one of the monks on the arm and ask to speak to her. ‘I was a servant of Wolsey,’ he says. ‘I want to hear her message.’
Some consultation, and they let him through. ‘Sir?’ she says.
‘Could you try again to find the cardinal? If I were to make an offering?’
She shrugs. One of the Franciscans says, ‘It would have to be a substantial offering.’
‘Your name is?’
‘I am Father Risby.’
‘I can no doubt meet your expectations. I am a wealthy man.’
‘Would you want simply to locate the soul, to help your own prayers, or were you thinking in terms of a chantry, perhaps, an endowment?’
‘Whatever you recommend. But of course I'd need to know he wasn't in Hell. There would be no point throwing away good Masses on a hopeless case.’
‘I'll have to talk to Father Bocking,’ the girl says. ‘Father Bocking is this lady's spiritual director.’ He inclines his head. ‘Come again and ask me,’ the girl says. She turns and is lost in the crowd. He parts with some money there and then, to the entourage. For Father Bocking, whoever he may be. As it seems Father Bocking does the price list and keeps the accounts.
The nun has plunged the king into gloom. How would you feel if you were told you'd be struck by lightning? By evening he complains of a headache, a pain in his face and jaw. ‘Go away,’ he tells his doctors. ‘You can never cure it, so why should you now? And you, madam,’ he says to Anne, ‘have your ladies put you to bed, I do not want chatter, I cannot stand piercing voices.’
Norfolk grumbles under his breath: the Tudor, always something the matter with him.
At Austin Friars, if anyone gets a sniffle or a sprain, the boys perform an interlude called ‘If Norfolk were Doctor Butts’. Got a toothache? Pull them out! Trapped your finger? Hack your hand off! Pain in the head? Slice it off, you've got another.
Now Norfolk pauses, in backing out of the presence. ‘Majesty, she didn't say the lightning would in fact kill you.’
‘No more did she,’ Brandon says cheerily.
‘Not dead but dethroned, not dead but stricken and scorched, that's something to look forward to, is it?’ Pitifully indicating his circumstances, the king barks for a servant to bring logs and a page to warm some wine. ‘Am I to sit here, the King of England, with a miserable fire and nothing to drink?’ He does look cold. He says, ‘She saw my lady mother.’
‘Your Majesty,’ he says, cautious, ‘you know that in the cathedral one of the windows has an image of your lady mother in glass? And would not the sun shine through, so it would seem as if she was in a dazzle of light? I think that is what the nun has seen.’
‘You don't believe these visions?’
‘I think perhaps she can't tell what she sees in the outside world from what is inside her head. Some people are like that. She is to be pitied, perhaps. Though not too much.’
The king frowns. ‘But I loved my mother,’ he says. Then: ‘Buckingham set much store by visions. He had a friar who prophesied for him. Told him he would be king.’ He does not need to add, Buckingham was a traitor and is more than ten years dead.
When the court sails for France he is in the king's party, on the Swallow. He stands on deck watching England recede, with the Duke of Richmond, Henry's bastard, excited to be on his first sea voyage, and to be in his father's company too. Fitzroy is a handsome boy of thirteen, fair-haired, tall for his age but slender: Henry as he must have been as a young prince, and endowed with a proper sense of himself and his own dignity. ‘Master Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I have not seen you since the cardinal came down.’ A moment's awkwardness. ‘I am glad you prosper. Because it is said in the book called The Courtier that in men of base degree we often see high gifts of nature.’
‘You read Italian, sir?’
‘No, but parts of that book have been put into English for me. It is a very good book for me to read.’ A pause. ‘I wish’ – he turns his head, lowering his voice – ‘I wish the cardinal were not dead. Because now the Duke of Norfolk is my guardian.’
‘And I hear Your Grace is to marry his daughter Mary.’
‘Yes. I do not want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘I have seen her. She has no breasts.’
‘But she has a good wit, my lord. And time may remedy the other matter, before you live together. If your people will translate for you that part of Castiglione's book that relates to gentlewomen and their qualities, I'm sure you will find that Mary Howard has all of them.’
Let's hope, he thinks, it won't turn out like Harry Percy's match, or George Boleyn's. For the girl's sake too; Castiglione says that everything that can be understood by men can be understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their faculties, no doubt their loves and hates. Castiglione was in love with his wife Ippolita, but she died when he had only had her four years. He wrote a poem for her, an elegy, but he wrote it as if Ippolita was writing: the dead woman speaking to him.
In the ship's wake the gulls cry like lost souls. The king comes on deck and says his headache has cleared. He says, ‘Majesty, we were talking of Castiglione's book. You have found time to read it?’
‘Indeed. He extols sprezzatura. The art of doing everything gracefully and well, without the appearance of effort. A quality princes should cultivate, too.’ He adds, rather dubious, ‘King Francis has it.’
‘Yes. But besides sprezzatura one must exhibit at all times a dignified public restraint. I was thinking I might commission a translation as a gift for my lord Norfolk.’
It must be in his mind, the picture of Thomas Howard in Canterbury, threatening to punch the holy nun. Henry grins. ‘You should do it.’
‘Well, if he would not take it as a reproach. Castiglione recommends that a man should not curl his hair nor pluck his eyebrows. And you know my lord does both.’
The princeling frowns at him. ‘My lord of Norfolk?’ Henry unleashes an unregal yell of laughter, neither dignified nor restrained. It is welcome to his ears. The ship's timbers creak. The king steadies himself with a hand on his shoulder. The wind stiffens the sails. The sun dances over the water. ‘An hour and we will be in port.’
Calais, this outpost of England, her last hold on France, is a town where he has many friends, many customers, many clients. He knows it, Watergate and Lantern Gate, St Nicholas Church and Church of Our Lady, he knows its towers and bulwarks, its markets, courts and quays, Staple Inn where the Governor lodges, and the houses of the Whethill and Wingfield families, houses with shady gardens where gentlemen live in pleasant retreat from an England they claim they no longer understand. He knows the fortifications – crumbling – and beyond the city walls the lands of the Pale, its woods, villages and marshes, its sluices, dykes and canals. He knows the road to Boulogne, and the road to Gravelines, which is the Emperor's territory, and he knows that either monarch, Francis or Charles, could take this town with one determined push. The English have been here for two hundred years, but in the streets now you hear more French and Flemish spoken.
The Governor greets His Majesty; Lord Berners, old soldier and scholar, is the pattern of old-fashioned virtue, and if it were not for his limp, and his evident anxiety about the vast expenses he is about to incur, he would be
straight out of the book called The Courtier. He has even arranged to lodge the king and the marquess in rooms with an interconnecting door. ‘I think that will be very suitable, my lord,’ he says. ‘As long as there is a sturdy bolt on both sides.’
Because Mary told him, before they left dry land, ‘Till now she wouldn't, but now she would, but he won't. He tells her he must be sure that if she gets a child it's born in wedlock.’
The monarchs are to meet for five days in Boulogne, then five days in Calais. Anne is aggrieved at the thought of being left behind. He can see by her restlessness that she knows this is a debatable land, where things might happen you cannot foretell. Meanwhile he has private business to transact. He leaves even Rafe behind, and slips away to an inn in a back court off Calk-well Street.
* * *
It is a low sort of place, and smells of wood smoke, fish and mould. On a side wall is a watery mirror through which he glimpses his own face, pale, only his eyes alive. For a moment it shocks him; you do not expect to see your own image in a hovel like this.
He sits at a table and waits. After five minutes there is a disturbance of the air at the back of the room. But nothing happens. He has anticipated they will keep him waiting; to pass the time, he runs over in his head the figures for last year's receipts to the king from the Duchy of Cornwall. He is about to move on to the figures submitted by the Chamberlain of Chester, when a dark shape materialises, and resolves itself into the person of an old man in a long gown. He totters forward, and in time two others follow him. You could change any one for the other: hollow coughs, long beards. According to some precedence which they negotiate by grunting, they take their seats on a bench opposite. He hates alchemists, and these look like alchemists to him: nameless splashes on their garments, watering eyes, vapour-induced sniffles. He greets them in French. They shudder, and one of them asks in Latin if they are not going to have anything to drink. He calls for the boy, and asks him without much hope what he suggests. ‘Drink somewhere else?’ the boy offers.