‘Putney, Majesty.’
‘I know that. I mean, I don’t know what makes you as you are. God’s mystery, I suppose,’ Henry says, and leaves it at that.
In the guard chamber, Charles Brandon is waiting for him. ‘Look here, Crumb, I know you’re angry with me. It’s because I didn’t kneel when that whore’s head was smitten off.’
He holds up a hand, but you can no more stop Charles than you can stop a charging bull. ‘Bear in mind how she persecuted me!’ the duke roars. ‘She accused me of swiving my own daughter!’
Every head in the crowded hall turns. His mind ranges over Charles’s offspring, born in and out of wedlock.
‘As if it were Wolf Hall!’ Charles shouts. ‘Not,’ he adds in haste, ‘that I believe those slanders about Old Sir John. It was Anne Boleyn said he was tupping his own daughter-in-law. She only said it to draw attention from her own sin with her brother.’
‘Possibly, my lord, but do you wonder that she had a grievance against you? You told the king she had to do with Tom Wyatt.’
‘Aye, I said so – and I admit it! Can you stand by, and watch your friend made a cuckold? Not that Harry liked the news – he kicked me out like a dog. Well, he’s the king, he kills the messenger.’ He drops his voice. ‘But I would always, because I am his friend, I would always tell him what he should know, even if he ruins me for it. I propped him in his saddle, Crumb, when he was a green boy in the lists. I held him steady when he couched his first lance, to run against a knight and not a foe of painted wood – I saw his wrist tremble in its glove, and I said naught but, “Courage, mon brave!” – which I learned of the French, you know. No bolder man at the tournament than Harry, after his first course or two. I could help him, for I was a seasoned fighter – I was older, you see, and still am.’ The duke’s face clears. ‘Your little lad Gregory, he shapes in the tilt yard. Very fine turnout, cuts a good figure, nothing wanting by way of harness, weaponry, very sound, very gallant. Your nephew Richard, there’s a stout fellow – perhaps a touch rustic – came late to it as we all know, but he has some weight behind him – no, I tell you, he and Gregory, they are of that breed, always Forward, Forward! – they show no fear. It must be in the blood.’ The duke looks down, from his towering height. ‘You must have blood, must you not? I reckon a man could do worse than be born of a blacksmith. Better than some quill-nibbling clerk who is half-goose. Iron in the blood, not ink.’
Charles’s father died at Bosworth, close to the person of Henry Tudor. Some say he was bearing the Tudor banner, though truth is hard to pluck from a battlefield. If he fell beneath that banner, a living hand picked it up; the Tudors ascended, and the Brandons with them.
He says, ‘My father was a brewer as well as a blacksmith. He brewed very bad ale.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ Charles says sincerely. ‘Now look – what I wish to impart is this. Harry knows that he did wrong. First he married his brother’s wife, then he had the misfortune to marry a witch. He says, how long must I be punished? He knows very well what witches do – they take your manhood away. They shrivel your member and then you die. Now I’ve told him – Majesty, don’t brood on it. Fetch the archbishop in, discharge your conscience, and start again. I don’t want this in his mind – following him, like a curse. You tell him to press on and never look back. He will take it from you, you see. Whereas me – he thinks I’m a fool.’ The duke thrusts out his vast hand. ‘So – friends?’
Allies, he thinks. What will the Duke of Norfolk say?
At Austin Friars there are always crowds about his gate, shouting his name and thrusting papers at him. ‘Make way, make way!’ Christophe gathers up an armful of petitions: ‘Get down, rats! Do not harass Master Secretary!’
‘Oy, Cromwell!’ a man shouts. ‘Why do you keep this French clown, are there no Englishmen to serve you?’
That sets up a cry: half of London wants to get inside these gates and get a position with him, and now they shout out their names, or those of their nephews and sons. ‘Patience, friends.’ His voice carries over the crowd. ‘The king may make me a great man, and then you can all come in and warm yourselves by my fire.’
They laugh. He is already a great man, and London knows it. His property is walled and guarded, his gatehouse manned day and night. The keepers salute him; he passes into the courtyard, and through a door beside which, left and right, are two gaps through which one could slide a blade, or slot the muzzle of a gun; they are aligned so any malefactor can be pierced or blasted from both sides at once. His chief cook, Thurston, had said to him, ‘Sir, I am no military man, but it seems excessive to me: having killed your foe at the gate, would you slaughter him again at the door?’
‘I neglect no precaution,’ he had said. ‘The times being what they are, a man may enter the gate as your friend and change sides while he crosses the courtyard.’
Austin Friars was a small place once: twelve rooms, when he first took the lease for himself and his clerks, for Lizzie and the girls, for Lizzie’s mother Mercy Prior. Mercy has now entered into her old age. She is the lady of the house, but she mostly keeps to her own part, a book open on her knees. She reminds him of an image of St Barbara he saw once in Antwerp, a saint reading against the noise of a construction site, backed by scaffolding and raw brick. Everybody complains about builders, the time they take, the mounting expense, the noise and the dust, but he likes their banging and thudding, their songs and their chat, their shortcuts and secret lore. As a boy he was always climbing about on somebody’s roof, often without their knowledge. Show him a ladder and he was up it, seeking a longer view. But when he got up there, what could he see? Only Putney.
In the great hall, his nephew Richard is waiting for him. Standing under the tapestry the king gave him, he opens a letter from the king’s daughter, written in her own hand.
Richard says, ‘I suppose Lady Mary thinks she’s coming home.’
He is heading for his own rooms, shaking off the clerks who sway after him, weighed down by files of paper, by bulging books of statute and precedent, by parchments and scrolls. ‘Later, boys …’
In his chamber the air is sharply scented: juniper, cinnamon. He takes off his orange coat. In the dimness of the room, shuttered against the afternoon, it blazes as if he handled fire. There were certain miserable divines, in darker days than these, who said that if God had meant us to wear coloured clothes He would have made coloured sheep. Instead, His providence has given us dyers, and the materials for their craft. Here in the city, amid dun and slate, donkey’s back and mouse, gold quickens the heart; on those days of grey swilling rain that afflict London in every season, we are reminded of Heaven by a flash of celestial blue. Just as the soldier looks up to the flutter of bright banners, so the workman on his daily trudge rejoices to see his betters shimmer above him imperial purple, in silver and flame and halcyon against the wash of the English sky.
Richard has followed him. He closes the door behind them. The sounds of the house recede. He puts a hand to his chest – that habitual motion – and from a pocket inside his jacket, he takes out a knife.
‘Still?’ Richard says. ‘Even now?’
‘Especially now.’ Without the weight next to his heart, he would hardly know himself.
‘Carry it on the street, yes,’ Richard says. ‘But at court, sir? I cannot imagine the circumstance in which you could use it.’
Nor can I, he thinks. It is because I cannot imagine the circumstance, that I need it. He tests the blade against his thumb. He made his first knife for himself, when he was a boy. That was a good blade, and he misses it every day.
‘Go and get Chapuys,’ he says to Richard. ‘My compliments to him, and may I give him supper? If he says no, tell him I feel a lust for diplomacy – say I must have a treaty before sunset, and if he won’t come I’ll fetch in the French ambassador instead.’
‘Right you are.’ Richard goes out. And he, ligh
ter by the orange coat, lighter by the knife, runs downstairs into the fresh air of an inner courtyard, and crosses to the kitchens to see Thurston.
He can hear Thurston before he sees him: some underling wishes he had never been born. ‘Told you once,’ Thurston roars, ‘told you twice, and next time, boy, that you use that mortar for garlic, I will personally knock out your brain, place it in the said mortar, pestle it to a fine paste and give it to Dick Purser for feeding the dogs.’
He passes the cold room where two peacocks hang on a rack, their throats cut, weights on their heels. He rounds the corner, meets the face of the chastened boy: ‘Mathew? Mathew, from Wolf Hall?’
Thurston snorts. ‘Comes from Wolf Hall! He comes from the pit!’
He is astonished to see the boy. ‘I brought you here to clerk for me, not for kitchen work.’
‘Yes, sir, I told them so.’ A pale, modest young man, Mathew had brought his letters courteously each morning, last year when the king had visited the Seymours. He had thought him too personable and deft to be left in the country; the boy’s face lit up when he’d asked, would you like to come away and see the world?
‘This boy is out of his right place,’ he says to Thurston. ‘There has been a mistake.’
‘Good. Take him. Take him away before I do him some mischief.’
‘Off with this.’ He indicates the boy’s spattered smock.
‘In truth, sir?’
‘Your day has come.’ He helps the boy free himself and emerge thinner, in shirt and hose. ‘How’s your friend Rob? Do you hear from him?’
‘Yes, sir. And he does as you bade him, he keeps an eye out, who visits Wolf Hall, and he faithfully writes down their names. Only I could not come at you, to give his news.’
‘I am sorry for your rough treatment. Cross the court and ask for Thomas Avery – say I have sent you to learn the household accounts. Perhaps when you have mastered that, you might go into some other family for a while.’
The boy is hurt. ‘I like it here.’
‘Despite this churl?’ He indicates Thurston. ‘If I sent you away, you would still be in my service.’
‘Would I go under another name?’ The boy hitches an imaginary coat on his shoulders. ‘I understand you, sir.’
Thurston says, ‘I’m glad somebody does.’
Around them, two dozen boys are dragging panniers across a stone floor, sharpening their paring knives, counting eggs, pricking off an inventory and plucking fowl. The house goes on without him, its arrangements complete. In here the blood puddings are stirred, the fish gutted; across the court, the bright-eyed clerks perch on their stools, hungry to incise. Here the chafing dish and the latten pan, there the penknife and the sealing wax, the ribbon and silk tags, the black words that creep across the parchment, the quills. He remembers the day in Florence, when the call came for him in his turn. ‘Englishman, they want you in the counting house.’ And how, leisurely, he had untied his apron, and hung it on a peg, and left behind him the copper pans and basins, and the row of lipped jars for oil and wine that stood together in an alcove, each as high as a child of seven. He had run up the stairs two at a time, and as he passed the sala he heard the drops of water falling from the wall fountain into its marble basin, a tiny erratic drum-beat, pit-pat … pit … pat-pit. The boy scrubbing the steps got out of his way. He sang: Scaramella’s off to war …
He says to Thurston, ‘Chapuys to supper. It will be just the two of us.’
‘Of course it will,’ Thurston says. He sieves his flour, allowing little puffs and billows to rise between them. ‘Somebody said to me, that Spanish fellow, that one who is always at your house – he and your master plotted it all between them to kill the queen, for she was in the way of their friendship.’
‘Chapuys is not a Spaniard. You know that.’
Thurston gives him a look that says, it is demeaning and futile to differentiate between foreigners. ‘I know that the Emperor is the King of Spain and lord of half the world. No wonder you want to be in bed with him.’
‘I have to be,’ he says. ‘I clasp him to my bosom.’
‘When’s the king coming again to dine?’ Thurston asks. ‘Mind, I expect he’s lost his appetite. Wouldn’t you, if your bollocks were insulted in open court?’
‘Would I? I don’t know. It’s never happened to me.’
‘The whole of London listening,’ Thurston says with relish. ‘Of course, we don’t know for sure what George said, it being in French. We speculate it was along the lines of, the king can get it up, he can get it in, but he doesn’t last long enough to please a lady.’
‘See,’ he says, ‘now you wish you’d learned French.’
‘But that was the gist of it,’ Thurston says comfortably. ‘If you can’t please a lady, she don’t get a child, or if she does, it’s some puny object that never lives to be christened. You remember the Spanish queen. When she was young she dropped them by the dozen. But they none of them lived, except for that little lass Mary, and she’s the size of a mouse.’
At his feet, eels are swimming in a pail, twisting and gliding; interlacing in their futile efforts, as they wait to be killed and sauced. He asks Thurston, ‘What are they saying on the street? About Anne?’
Thurston scowls. ‘She never had friends. Not even among the women. They say, if she went to it with her brother, that would explain why no child she got would stick in there. A brother’s child, or a child got on a Friday, or one got when you shove it in from the back – it’s against nature. They shed themselves, poor sinful creatures. For what’s the point of them being born only to die?’
Thurston believes it. Incest is a sin, we all acknowledge; but then so is congress in any position other than the one approved by priests. So is congress on a Friday, the day of Christ’s crucifixion; or on Sundays, Saturdays and Wednesdays. If you listen to churchmen, it’s a sin to penetrate a woman during Lent and Advent – or on saints’ days, though the calendar is bright with festivals. More than half the year is accursed, one way and another. It’s a wonder anyone is ever born.
‘Some women like to go on top,’ Thurston says. ‘That’s not godly, is it? You can imagine the sort of runt that would result from that carry-on. It doesn’t last the week.’
He speaks as if a child were a stale cake, a fading flower: doesn’t last the week. He and Lizzie had lost a child once. Thurston made a chicken broth to strengthen her and prayed for her while he diced the vegetables. That had been at Fenchurch Street. He was just a jobbing lawyer in those days, and Gregory was still in skirts, and his daughter Anne not weaned, and his little daughter Grace not even thought of; and Thurston himself was just a family cook and not the master chef he is now, with a brigade at his command. He remembers how, when the broth was put before her, Lizzie had cried into it, and they took it out untouched.
‘Are you just going to stand talking,’ Thurston says, ‘or are you killing those eels for me?’
He looks down into the pail. When he was a cook, he kept his eels in their watery world till the pans were hot. Still, it’s not worthwhile to argue. He turns back his sleeves. ‘Skin them while you’re about it,’ Thurston says.
‘In my days in Italy, as a student,’ Ambassador Chapuys says, ‘I never took more than bread and olives for supper.’
‘Nothing more healthful,’ he says. ‘Sadly, our English climate does not permit it.’
‘Perhaps a handful of tender broad beans, still in their pod. A small glass of vin santo.’
It is Gregory who, to honour their guest, brings in the linen towels and the basin. The ambassador’s fingers ripple through sprigs of dried lavender. ‘You will be hunting this summer, Master Gregory?’
‘I hope so,’ Gregory says. He dips his head; the ambassador blesses himself and offers up a grace. One forgets Chapuys is in holy orders. How does he manage about women? Either he is celibate or, like his host, discree
t.
The eels come in, presented in two fashions: salted in an almond sauce, and baked with the juice of an orange. There is a spinach tart, green as the summer evening, flavoured with nutmeg and a splash of rosewater. The silver gleams; the napkins are folded into the shapes of Tudor roses; the coverpanes at each place are worked with silver garlands. ‘Bon appetit,’ he says to the ambassador. ‘I’ve had a letter.’
‘Ah yes, from the Princess Mary. And she says?’
‘You know what she says. Now listen to what I say.’ He hunches forward. ‘The princess, as you call her – the Lady Mary – believes her father will welcome her back to court. She thinks that with the change of wife her troubles are over. You must disillusion her, or I will.’
Chapuys takes a portion of eel between finger and thumb. ‘She blamed Anne Boleyn for all her afflictions these last years. She is convinced it was the concubine who had her separated from her mother and shut up in the country. She reveres her father and believes him at all times wise. As a daughter should, of course.’
‘So she must take the oath. She has evaded it, but now I see no help. All subjects must take it, when the king requires.’
‘Let me be exact about what you ask of her. She must recognise that her mother’s marriage was of no effect, and that she, though the king’s eldest child, is not his heir. She must swear to uphold, as the king’s successor, the little daughter of Boleyn, whom he has just killed.’
‘The oath will be revised. Eliza will be excluded.’
‘Good. Because she is Henry Norris’s bastard, as I understand it. Or is she the lute player’s? This is excellent,’ he says, addressing the eel. ‘So what does Henry intend now? My master will not accept young Richmond in Mary’s place. Nor, I think, will the King of France.’
‘Parliament will settle up the succession.’
‘Not Henry’s whim, then?’ The ambassador chuckles. ‘Have you told Henry?’
‘Mary claims she has no desire to be queen. She says she will support whatever successor her father chooses. But she cannot accept her father as head of the church.’
The Mirror and the Light: 2020’s highly anticipated conclusion to the best selling, award winning Wolf Hall series (The Wolf Hall Trilogy, Book 3) Page 6