She is innocent, he thinks. Surely. Look how she said to Norfolk, ‘You would use me as your wife,’ and did not know why he was grinning. ‘My lady,’ he says, ‘let me help you. Your eyes, your head, your understanding, all parts of you have been rebellion; you could not digest what you ate, if you slept it did not restore you. But now you have chosen a wise course, you have done as others have – men and women who love God, just as you do – all of whom have embraced conformity, and seen their duty to this realm. You have put all your strength into saying no. Now you have said yes. You have chosen to live and you must find a way to thrive. Do you think only weak people obey the law, because it terrifies them? Do you imagine only weak people do their duty, because they dare not do other? The truth is far different. In obedience, there is strength and tranquillity. And you will feel them. Believe me, I am earnest when I tell you this. It will be like the sun after a long winter.’
She says, ‘I would give anything to ride again. But I have no saddle horse. They would not let me have one.’
‘As soon as I get back to London, I will find you a mount, it will be the first thing I think of. And I will tell John Shelton you are to ride out with an escort, whenever you choose.’
‘He was afraid the country people would see me, and would kneel to me, and acclaim me as princess.’
If that happens, he thinks, Shelton will know how to quell it. And I hardly think Chapuys will rise out of a ditch and carry you away. He says, ‘I have a pretty dapple grey in my stables, a very gentle beast. She can be here with you in no time.’
‘What is her name?’
Her hair, hanging limp, is a thin russet streak. She drags at it, anxious. At this moment she looks half her age.
‘She is called Douceur. But you can change it if you like.’
‘No. It is a good name.’
She drops her silk net on the table, and he watches it soak up the spilled wine. He wants to pick it out of the liquid, but he knows it is spoiled. She says, ‘I can get another.’ Her eyes pass over him; she looks covetous. ‘Your jacket is a good blue. I like that figured stuff.’
He thinks of Mary Boleyn: I like your grey velvet. It seems so long ago, it could be another life. I was a different man then, he thinks, inside my jacket. A little thinner, perhaps. More tentative, certainly. He says, ‘When you come back to court, you can have all the silk and damask your heart desires. The king has spoken to me of what he will give you.’
Mary puts her hand over her mouth. She gives a little moan, and her forehead tents in a deep frown, and the next moment, her nose is running and tears are rolling down her cheeks – cold weighty tears, like stones before a tomb.
He crosses the room to her. On a thin note, from between her fingers, she keens as if she had stumbled over a corpse. She sways and bleats, and he grips her to keep her on her feet, mouse bones jumping and trembling in his grasp. The door opens. Lady Shelton sweeps a glance over the smashed crystal, the crimson spill, the girl with her terrible naked face, and she speaks as directly as a mother to her daughter: ‘Mary, stop that noise. Let go of the Lord Privy Seal. Put on your cap.’
Mary’s wail cuts off. Her face is streaked; she shakes like someone in the grip of fever. ‘I cannot. My cap is spoiled. I walked into the table and smashed Sir John’s jug, for which I am sorry, and then I –’
‘Never mind,’ Lady Shelton says. ‘I have never made any sense of what you say, and I suppose I shall not begin now.’ She gathers up the girl’s hair and stands holding it in her fist, as if to lead her from the room; then with a sound of exasperation, lets her go. ‘I shall take you to Lady Bryan to put you to rights. Blow your nose.’
He can hear Mary’s thoughts, as loud as if they were slapping the walls: I am a princess of England, you have made promises to me. ‘Mary,’ he says, ‘mark this. My promises are kept now. You have my duty and regard. Count on that. No more.’
Mary’s eyes flicker with dismay. ‘But you said I should be – that if anything befell the king – that you would help me to – did you not promise the ambassador?’
‘I promised what I had to,’ he says. ‘It was an extremity.’
With a tug to her scalp, Anne Shelton stops any further questions. She speaks to him over the girl’s head. ‘You cannot leave without you see Eliza. Lady Bryan insists.’
What Lady Bryan has to exhibit is a convulsing mass of linen, red flailing fists, a maw emitting shrieks. ‘Now, my lady!’ She sweeps up the little girl. ‘Show your goodness to these gentlemen. They have ridden to see you to tell your lord father how you do.’
He is dismayed. ‘She screams as if she had seen Bishop Gardiner.’
A chortle from Brandon. A tight smile from Thomas Howard.
‘Will you tell their lordships you are glad to see them?’ Lady Bryan asks her charge. ‘Will you sing them a song?’
‘I take leave to doubt it,’ Norfolk says.
‘Fol-de-dee, fol-de-dee, fol-de-dee-do,’ trills Lady Bryan. ‘When sparrows build churches upon a green hill … No? Never mind, darling. Bite on this.’ She produces a circle of ivory, garlanded with green ribbons; the child seizes it and falls to. ‘Her teeth come very slowly forth.’
Suffolk stares down from his vast height. ‘Thank God they are no faster. I should be afraid she would nip me.’
‘Perhaps we could come back at a better time,’ he says.
‘Aye,’ Suffolk mutters, ‘when she is thirty.’ But he likes children, and he cannot help leaning down and making faces at her. The little girl breaks off grizzling, touches his beard; she rubs it, and looks at her fingers, dubious.
‘It doesn’t come off,’ Charles tells her. The child’s black eyes snap at him; she thrusts her ivory ring back into her mouth, but she does not cry again.
‘I never saw a child suffer so,’ Lady Bryan says. ‘It makes me give way to her when perhaps I should not. Sir John lets her sit at table, and she is too young to be refrained from what she has a fancy for.’ She turns to him. ‘Master Cromwell, how does your little Gregory these days?’
‘A head taller than me, and in want of a wife.’
‘How the years fly! It seems no time since you brought him to … wherever we were …’
‘Hatfield.’
‘Mary was wasting away.’ She turns to the dukes. ‘Till Thomas Cromwell came, we could do nothing with her. We could not make her come to the common board, because she would have had to sit lower than her sister – Eliza was a princess then. And Sir John said, mark my words, give way to one, and they will all be wanting to dine in private, and the cooks will be put about, and the expense will run beyond my means – no, he said, Mary dines and sups in the hall with us, or she must go without. But Master Cromwell got the physicians to state, on their honour, that Mary could not thrive without a trencher of red meat at her first rising in the morning. Sir John could hardly refuse her a breakfast, for that meal we all take apart. So she had her fill of venison while the larder lasted, and salt beef when needs must.’
Suffolk smiles. ‘She breakfasted like Robin Hood and his men, feasting in the green wood. I trust it did her good.’
‘So is Mary now a princess again?’ Lady Bryan asks.
He says, ‘She remains as she was, Lady Mary the king’s daughter.’
‘And this lass,’ Norfolk says, ‘is to be known as My Lady Bastard, till you hear different.’
‘For shame!’ Lady Bryan is distraught. ‘Whoever she may be, she is a gentleman’s daughter, and I know not how to keep her in that degree. All children do grow, sir, and this last month she has outgrown every stitch she owns, and Sir John says he has no budget and no instructions. We have patched and mended till we can do no more. She needs nightgowns, she needs caps –’
‘Madam, am I a nursemaid?’ Norfolk says. ‘Tell Cromwell about it – I dare say he can understand the child’s requirements. No trade is beyond him – give
him some cambric and a needle and you will find your little dame clad before supper time.’
The duke turns on his heel and stalks out of the room. They can hear him on the stairs, calling for John Shelton to fetch the horses.
‘Write to me,’ he says to Lady Bryan. He wants to get after Norfolk. He doesn’t want him alone with Mary.
But Lady Bryan follows him, a buzz at his elbow. On the stairs, ‘Cromwell, I spoke to her. As you demanded. So did my daughter, Lady Carew.’ Her voice is low. ‘We did what you asked.’
‘Good.’
‘You have broken her pride. It is ill-done.’
‘It saved her life.’
‘To what purpose?’
He strides ahead. ‘Send me a list of what the little maid needs.’
Shelton is outside, with the horseboys. Lady Shelton says, laughing, ‘No need to haste away. Mary has run upstairs. Did you think she would be rushing to confer with your enemies? You take her for a fickle mistress.’
He checks his pace. ‘The dukes are not my enemies. We are all the king’s servants.’
‘You appear to have Suffolk in awe.’
True, he thinks. Brandon gives no trouble these days.
He turns and takes her hand; but there is a yell from below, like a hunting call. ‘Cromwell!’
It is Charles, stopped on the threshold, head thrown back, pointing upwards. ‘Cromwell, see that?’
He has to clatter downstairs, to look from another angle. Far above them, in a haze of blood-coloured light, the initials of the late Anne rest on a glazed cushion.
‘Shelton!’ the duke yells. ‘You’ve got a HA-HA. Knock it out, man. Do it while the weather’s fine.’ Charles bellows with laughter. ‘Get the Lady Mary to heave a brick at it.’
The boy Mathew is outside, holding his horse’s bridle. ‘Keep steady,’ he says. He doesn’t mean the horse.
He mounts, and below the creak of saddle and harness the boy murmurs, ‘Get me home when you can, sir.’
‘I’ll tell Thurston you miss him.’
Mathew backs away. ‘God be with you, sir.’
He gathers his reins. John Shelton is standing in their path, apologising for the HA-HA. ‘I thought I had got them. Every last one.’
He says, ‘It’s scarcely a month since Galyon Hone sent in his bill from Dover Castle, for setting the queen’s badges in the private lodgings.’
‘What?’ Norfolk says. ‘The queen that is now, or the other one?’
‘Wasted,’ he says. ‘Two hundred pounds.’
Brandon whistles. ‘It’s the devil. Stone, you can chisel it off; wood, you can rip it out or reshape it; whitewash and repaint your plasterwork, and stitching you can unpick – but when it’s blazing down at you, the sun behind it, what can you do?’
They get on the road. The early-summer day will allow them home by dusk. ‘Which is sad for you, Cromwell,’ Norfolk says. ‘You’d rather make a stop, I suppose. Still, keep looking in the ditch, you might spot some drab with her legs apart.’
Norfolk rides ahead with his people; but he and Brandon ride companionably, knee to knee. In Southwark, Brandon says, where his family has a great house and the glassmakers have their shops, they are at constant peril from the fires that blaze away when their kilns are opened. ‘Catch a wisp of straw,’ Brandon says, ‘and whoosh – the whole district goes up.’
Well, at those temperatures, he thinks. A blacksmith’s forge is dangerous, and smiths are always blackened and burned, but you don’t find them pierced to the heart with their own product, or hurtling to their deaths from church towers, as glaziers do every day of the week.
As they meet the road to Ware, Thomas Howard stops and turns in his saddle, watching them. His half-brother Tom Truth stops too, and twists to look back.
‘Look at the Howards, twitching,’ he says. ‘They want to know what we are talking about.’
Glazing still, as it happens. ‘Do you know, Cromwell,’ the duke says, ‘I was a rare hand at smashing glass in my youth? I expect you were. Though perhaps you didn’t have the chance?’
‘Yes, my lord, we had glass in Putney.’
‘My lord Norfolk?’ Charles calls out. ‘Just telling Cromwell here – I’ve not broken a window in years.’
In the first week of July, the king indicates that he is ready to meet his daughter. Not, yet, to bring her to court: ‘But the queen is urging me,’ he says. ‘And I thought you might manage it so as … just to allow me to see her. Allow me to judge her feelings towards me. And Crumb,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to ride far.’
The physicians are in daily consultation. The king’s good humour is soured by the nagging pain of his injured leg. I have feared for some time, Butts says, there is residual foulness in the bone. What is in the flesh, we can wash out – cut out, if we have to. But the bone must mend itself. Or not. Young Richmond was right. Decay runs deep. Next year the king might not be here.
At Austin Friars, he goes to Mercy Prior’s chamber. ‘Mother, the king would like to see his daughter. I thought we might use our new house at Hackney.’
Mercy’s lodging gives out onto the garden, so she can sit in the sun when there is any. She keeps up letter-writing with her friends, many younger than herself, some of them learned, some of them Lutherans. Sometimes Mistress Sadler comes to read to her; Helen can read now as well as if she had learned as a child, and can write a fair hand too. But today Mercy is alone with her New Testament, the book of Tyndale’s making. If she cannot always make out the words, she likes to have the text to hand. She sets it down and watches it for a moment, as you might watch a child to see if it will settle. ‘I suppose there is no news?’
The Bible scholar has been in the Emperor’s prison at Vilvoorde for a year now, ever since he was taken up in Antwerp. Now his time is short. Tyndale will recant, or he will burn. Perhaps he will recant and burn. The Emperor wishes to make an example, and keep the town of Antwerp in fear. The King of England will not stir for this subject of his, as Tyndale stood against him in the matter of his divorce. Because you are against the Pope, it doesn’t mean you are for Henry; Tyndale has always said, as Martin Luther does, we do not love Rome or its authority, but we cannot fault your marriage to Katherine, it is good and it must stick.
‘You cannot move the king to speak for him?’ Mercy asks. ‘Now he has his new queen and is at ease … you say he will reconcile with his daughter, and the other party in the quarrel is dead and gone.’
Katherine is dead and not dead. Her cause flourishes, its taproot deep in acid soil. Mercy says, ‘I think of Tyndale in his cell. Could you fetch him out of there, before winter comes? Would it be possible?’
‘You mean, would it be possible for me? You think it is a thing I might attempt?’
‘You might attempt anything.’ She does not mean it as a compliment.
He has a ground plan of the fortress of Vilvoorde. He knows where Tyndale is kept. But if he got him to the coast, where would he go? ‘I think we will see the Testament in English soon. I think Henry will allow it. The work will be Tyndale’s. But it cannot have his name on it.’
‘I hope I live so long,’ Mercy says. ‘I blame Thomas More for Tyndale, his nest of spies that lived on after he was dead, and if I thought the dead in their graves felt pain I would grub him from the ground and kick him up and down Cheap, for what he inflicted on men and women who are nearer to God than he will ever be.’
‘Blessed are the meek,’ he says.
‘Yes, so they claim. I notice where it gets you.’
He has often thought, these last weeks, that if you matched the king’s daughter with Tyndale – to see which was the more stubborn, the more set on self-destruction – it would be a close contest. ‘But you see,’ he says, ‘she has yielded. If we bring her to Hackney, then if it goes ill, the king can quickly be away.’
For the last yea
r, he has been rebuilding a place made over to the king by the Earl of Northumberland. Young Harry Percy is sick, and deep in debt to the crown. He offered in part-payment the house with all its contents; Henry had said, why don’t you move in, Crumb, during the renovations, then you can keep a hand on the workmen? With young Sadler building his house just across the meadow, you can redirect the labour as needed … The king had sent seasoned oak from the royal forests, and he and Rafe had set up a brickfield, the water from the brook supplying it. Mercy had said, ‘You’ll see, Thomas, as soon as all the hard work is done, Henry will turn you out.’
Of course – but it’s the king’s house, after all. He is laying out a new garden and he has ambassadors alert for cuttings and seeds, of plants not grown in England. Light will flood the old rooms. There will be no HA-HAs, nor need he bear the arrogance of Hone’s glaziers – James Nicholson is just as skilled at a lower rate. He has walked the ground with the builders, deep in talk about pipes and culverts, the capacity of cisterns, hidden springs that can be tapped. Even in his early days at Austin Friars, he had made a bathroom, but it is hard to get piped water to more than a trickle; you need a healthy supply for a kitchen, if it has to feed a king.
‘Will you come out there?’ he asks Mercy. ‘Everything must be ready for royal ladies to lodge one night.’
‘Helen Sadler will do it. I am too old to go jolting out to the country. And as neither of us have ever been near the court, she can guess as well as I what is wanted. Mary is only human, I suppose, and a girl like other young girls.’
Yes, he thinks, and Jane a queen like other queens. Henry has been showing her off to the ambassadors, allowing her to converse. He is surprised – everyone is surprised – by her calm and poise. But afterwards she seems to withdraw into herself. During her first week on show, her eyes had sought out her brothers, or his, for a signal what to do. The women around her are still set fluttering by any disturbance. Francis Bryan says, what do you expect, Thomas? It is only weeks since you were questioning them one by one and tying their poor little stories in knots. They need time to recover from the fright.
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 17