With Fitzwilliam and young Wriothesley, he melts away from the wedding party to shuffle papers in a side room. Fitzwilliam has regained his chain of office as Master Treasurer. The king has pardoned him for his outburst in the council chamber; it was done, Henry has said, out of love for us. The treasurer fingers his chain now; he speculates on what maggots of ambition might be burrowing into the mind of the Duke of Norfolk. ‘I tell you, Crumb, if young Surrey were not married already, his father would be coveting the Scottish princess for him – or the Lady Mary at the least, in case ever she is restored in blood. Because when his niece Anne was alive, Norfolk could boast that a Howard sat on the throne – and that is not a boast he likes to give up.’
Not that she ever took any notice of Uncle Norfolk, he says. The late queen chose her own path, she heeded to no one. Not me, not you, and not the king, in the end. Anyway, he says, the long youth is fast married, so Uncle Norfolk is out of hope there. ‘And even if Surrey were free,’ Mr Wriothesley says, ‘I doubt Lady Mary will favour that family again. Not after Norfolk threatened to beat her head to mash.’
The king himself goes to Shoreditch for the marriage celebrations. He and his suite are dressed as Turks, in velvet turbans, breeches of striped silk and scarlet boots with tassels. At the end of the evening the king unmasks, to general astonishment and applause.
The young Duke of Richmond leaves early, heated and flushed from dancing and wine. So does Mr Wriothesley, though his exit is more sudden. ‘Sir, I am going to Whitehall, and as soon as I …’
Fitz looks after him. ‘Do you trust him? Gardiner’s pupil?’ He rubs his chin. ‘You don’t trust anybody, do you?’
‘We all need second chances, Fitz.’ He flips the treasurer’s chain of office. This last week or so, whenever Cromwell comes near, Lord Audley clutches his own chain in mock-panic.
Just Audley’s little joke. He knows well enough by now that he, Lord Cromwell, has no ambition to be chancellor. Master Secretary’s post gives him warrant for anything he needs to do, and keeps him close to Henry day by day, privy to his every sign.
By mid-July, arrangements are under way to set up the Lady Mary in a household of her own. Following her visit to Hackney – to the house that will now be known as King’s Place – she has returned to Hertfordshire. After the tears, the promises, after her father’s vows that he will never let his daughter out of his sight, a period of reflection has set in: he should, the king feels, keep her at arm’s length to quash any rumour he means to make her his heir again. Lady Hussey, the wife of her former chamberlain, remains in the Tower after her rash mistake at Whitsuntide. The king will not have his daughter disrespected, but he doesn’t want people calling her ‘princess’ either. And he wants the situation to be clear to Europe: his daughter needs him, he doesn’t need her.
At Hackney she had said, in a low voice meant only for him: ‘Lord Cromwell, I am bound to you: I am bound to pray for you during my life.’ But it may be that fortune turns and he needs more than prayers. He has called in Hans, to design a present for her. She is a young woman who needs presents, he feels. He wants to give her something that will outlast the pretty saddle horse, something to remind her of these last perilous weeks: the brink, and who pulled her back from it. He is thinking of a ring, engraved with proverbs in praise of obedience. Obedience binds us together; all practise it, under God. It is the condition of our living as humans, in cities and dwelling houses, not in hides and holes in the fields. Even beasts defer to the lion: beasts show wisdom and policy thereby.
The engravers are cunning. They can write a prayer or verse very small. But, Hans warns, such a ring must be of a certain weight, and perhaps more than a woman with small hands can conveniently wear. But she can hang it on a chain at her girdle, just as she can hang an image of her father, in miniature – where formerly she carried two or three pious tokens, emblems of those saints to whom maidens pray: St Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, or Felicity and Perpetua, eaten alive in the arena.
Hans has a round face, practical and innocent. He would not say things against you, with a covert meaning: surely not.
‘Or why should you not,’ Hans says, ‘have it made into a pendant? A medal? You could get more good advice on it, that way.’
‘But a ring is more –’
‘More of a promise,’ Hans says. ‘Thomas, I wonder that you can be so –’
But then a message comes in, to tell him to attend the Duke of Richmond. He never manages to finish a conversation these days, in his own household or in the king’s, in stable yard or chapel or council chamber. ‘Yes, I’m on my way,’ he says. And to Hans, ‘Give it some thought.’
He leaves the table strewn with sketches – his offers, Holbein’s emendations. There is something he needs to repeat to Mary, because he hasn’t said it strongly enough. These last few years you have carried a great burden, and carried it alone – and look at the result. You are stooped, you are worn, you are bowed under the weight of your past, and you are only twenty years old. Now let go. Let others bear the burden, who are stronger, and appointed by God to carry the cares of state. Look up at the world, instead of down at your prayer book. Try smiling. You’ll be surprised how much better you feel.
Not that you can put it like that to a woman. Stooped, worn – she might take it badly. Sometimes Mary looks twice her age. Sometimes she looks like an unformed child.
At St James’s, Richmond’s people usher him to the sickroom, shuttered against the midsummer heat. ‘Dr Butts,’ he says, nodding, and makes his bow to a miserable heap under the bedclothes.
At the sound of his voice the young duke stirs. He pushes the covers back. ‘Cromwell! You did not do what I said. I told you Parliament must name me heir.’ He punches a pillow away, as if it were interfering with his rights. ‘Why is my name not in the bill?’
‘Your lord father is still advising on the matter,’ he says easily. ‘The bill permits him liberty to decide who follows him. And you know you stand high in his favour.’
Attendants cluster around the bed, and under the doctor’s eye they ease the boy back against the bolsters, shake the quilts, swaddle him. A great bowl of water stands atop a brazier, bubbling away to moisten the air. Richmond leans forward, coughing. His face is burning, his nightshirt patched with sweat. When he masters the fit he subsides, white as the linen. He touches his breast. ‘Sore,’ he tells Butts.
Dr Butts says, ‘Turn on your afflicted side, my lord.’
The boy slaps out at his attendants. He wants to view Cromwell and he means to do it. He begins to talk, but there is little sense in what he says, and presently his eyelids flutter and close; at a signal from the doctor they ease away the cushions and settle him.
Butts makes a gesture: creep over here, my lord. ‘Usually I would keep him upright to ease his breathing, but he needs to sleep – I have prescribed a tincture. Otherwise I fear he would be up and fomenting trouble. He was fretting about poison. He mentioned you.’ The doctor pauses. ‘I do not mean to say he accused you.’
‘Some men always think they’re poisoned. In Italy one hears it.’
‘Well,’ Butts says, ‘in Italy they are probably right. But I said to him, my lord, poison most usually shows in gripes and chills, vomiting and confusion, a burning in the throat and entrails. But then he talked about Wolsey, the pain in his chest before he died –’
He takes Butts by his coat, unobtrusively. He doesn’t want this conversation public. The outer chamber is seething with people – retainers, well-wishers, probably creditors, too. Safe in a window embrasure, he murmurs: ‘About Wolsey – I do not know how young Fitzroy heard it, but what is your opinion? Could he be right?’
‘That he was poisoned?’ Butts looks him over. ‘I really have no idea. More likely his heart gave out. Consult your memory, if you will. I admired your old master. I did all I could to reconcile him with the king.’ Butts seems anxious: as
if he fears he, Cromwell, is nourishing a grudge. ‘Dr Agostino was with him at the end, not I. But they say he starved and purged himself, which is never advisable while travelling in winter … and think what he was travelling towards. A trial or an act of attainder, and the Tower. The fear would act upon a man.’
He says, ‘The cardinal was not afraid of the living or the dead.’
‘And he told you so, I am sure.’ It’s clear the doctor thinks, why fret about it now? ‘Do not think I heed young Richmond’s talk. When the king is ill he believes the whole world is against him. The boy is the same, a bad patient. When the fever was high he said, “I blame the Howards for this – Norfolk has no father’s heart towards me, he only loves me because I am the king’s son – and if I am not to be king, I am no use to him. Besides,” he said, “Norfolk does not need me now – he has thought of another way towards the throne, he will get it by fair means or foul.”’
‘They could not be fair means,’ he says. ‘If you think about it.’
‘I would rather not,’ Dr Butts says.
‘Any witnesses to my lord’s words?’
‘Dr Cromer was standing by. But with God’s help and with our science, we have suppressed the fever and with it all talk of treason.’
‘So if not poison, what does ail him?’ Apart from pique, he thinks.
The doctor shrugs. ‘It is July. We should be elsewhere. You are bringing in too many laws, my lord. Let Parliament rise, and we can all quit London. They say that Cain invented cities. And if it was not he, it was someone else fond of murder.’ The doctor is turning away, but then he hesitates. ‘My lord, about the king’s daughter … Dr Cromer would wish me to speak for both of us. We consider you have done a blessed work. You have done better than we healers could. Her spirit was so taxed by papish practices that her health and judgement failed. But they say your lordship’s presence at Hackney worked on her like a potion from Asclepius.’
Asclepius, the doctors’ god, learned his art from a snake. He could bring his patients back from the edge, or beyond it; Hades grew jealous, fearing lack of custom. ‘I take no credit,’ he says. ‘It was more that she warmed to the company, and ate her dinner. She is given to fasting. As if she is not meagre already in her person.’
‘If the king should ask our opinion,’ Butts says, ‘we are inclined to give it heartily in favour of her marriage. My fellow physicians have shown me where, in the writings of the ancients, such cases are described – young girls who are fervent, studious, given to fantasies, and prone to starving themselves if forced into any course that does not suit. They are virgins, and there lies their disease – if their single state is prolonged, they will see ghosts, and attempt to hang and drown themselves.’
‘Oh, I should say we are clear from that.’ He wonders, can you help seeing ghosts? Don’t they just turn up and make you see them? When people raise the cardinal’s name, he asks himself: if I had been with him in the north, would he have succumbed – to poison, to fear, to whatever? Some said it was self-slaughter. He thinks of the cold dark weather, the back end of 1529: Thomas Howard and Charles Brandon kicking their way into York Place as only dukes can kick, tossing Wolsey’s treasures into packing cases; clerks humming under their breath as they listed plate and gems; the chilly scramble to the water gate, the dripping canopy of the barge, the phantom jeering on the riverbank from voices in wet mist. At Putney horses met them, and they rode over the heath: there came Harry Norris in a lather, flinging himself from the saddle with an incomprehensible message from the king. He saw the spark in Wolsey’s eyes, his face light up; he thought the horror was over, that Norris was coming to lead him home, and he knelt to him – the cardinal, kneeling in the mud.
But Norris shook his head, and spoke in the cardinal’s ear, and pretended to be sorry. When hope drained away the cardinal’s strength went with it – as if by operation of a spell he was changed, suddenly elderly, fumbling, heavy. They dusted off their hands and hoisted him into his saddle, put the reins in his hand as if he were a child. No dignity, no time for it – and that knave Sexton, his jester, giggling and capering till he stopped him with a threat. They rode to the cardinal’s house at Esher: to the fireless grate, the unprovisioned kitchen: to truckle beds, lighting their way with tallow candles on pewter prickets. The cellar was full, at least: he sat up, drinking through the night with George Cavendish, one of the cardinal’s men – too scared, if he was honest, to sleep.
If I had known how it would end, he thinks, what would I have done different? Ahead was a harsh winter: half-drowned in puddles, unfed, unkempt, daily and desperate he forged across the Surrey bridleways in half-light, bringing his master news from Parliament – what was said against him and what was done, Thomas More’s twisted sneers and Norfolk’s common slanders: never in time for meat or sleep or prayer, always leaving and arriving in the dark, heaving himself onto a steaming horse: a winter of fog and wet wool and rain cascading from slick leather. And Rafe Sadler at his side, drenched, frozen, and shivering like a greyhound whelp, nothing but ribs and eyes: bewildered, bereft, never complaining once.
Yet here he is at St James’s: six years on, Baron Cromwell, the sun shining. Over the heads of Richmond’s retainers, Mr Wriothesley calls his name. Shouldering through, he swats the air with his feathered cap, his face glowing, his shirt neck unlaced.
‘Don’t go in there,’ he says, barring the way to the sickroom. ‘Fitzroy will accuse you of poisoning him.’
Dr Butts chuckles. ‘I see you are agog with news, young man. Well, I leave you to tell it. But whatever the urgency, do not hurry in the heat. Let your hat be on your head and not in your hand – the rays are too burning for one of your fair complexion. Be advised, tepid liquids are more refreshing than cold, which may cause colics. And do not be tempted to jump into rivers.’
‘No.’ Wriothesley stares at him. ‘I wouldn’t.’
The doctor touches his cap in farewell. Wriothesley asks his retreating back, ‘Will Fitzroy mend?’
Butts is tranquil. ‘I have seen off worse trouble.’
Wriothesley talks at him; they walk into a blaze of sunshine, feel the heat on their backs. ‘Sir, I have made pressing enquiries, among the Scottish princess’s folk.’
‘To what end? Put your cap on, by the way. Butts talks sense.’
The young man places his cap carefully, though he lacks a mirror to admire its angle; he looks closely at his master, as if trying to see a little Call-Me reflected in his eyes. ‘I have been sure this long while that something is amiss with her – I had been turning it over in my mind for weeks – her furtive manner whenever you were by, as if she was afraid some mischief would be found out – and also –’
‘You thought the ladies were making secret signs to each other.’
‘You laughed at me,’ Wriothesley says.
‘I did. So what have you found? Not a lover?’
‘You will excuse me, sir, for running ahead of you – it came to me at the wedding, but I could not speak till I had proof. I questioned her chaplain, and her men Harvey and Peter, and the boys who see to her horses, in case she had ridden out to some tryst. And they were not shy to speak – all except the chaplain, who was afraid.’
He begins to get the drift. ‘I wonder that I could be so simple. So who is he? And who knew? Which of the women, I mean?’
Mr Wriothesley says, ‘Sir, I leave the women to you.’
The scuffling and haste, the sudden vanishing of papers, the shushing, the whisk of skirts and the slammed doors; the indrawn breath, the glance, the sigh, the sideways look, and the pit-pat of slippered feet; the rapid scribble with the ink still wet; a trail of sealing wax, of scent. All spring, we scrutinised Anne the queen, her person, her practices; her guards and gates, her doors, her secret chambers. We glimpsed the privy chamber gentlemen, sleek in black velvet, invisible except where moonlight plays on a beaded cuff. We picked out, with the
inner eye, the shape of someone where no one should be – a man creeping along the quays to a skiff where a patient oarsman with bowed head is paid for silence, and nothing to tell the tale but the small wash and ripple of the Thames; the river has seen so much, with its grey blink. A rocking boat, a splash, a stride, and the boots of Incognito gain the slithery quay: he is at Whitehall or Hampton Court, wherever the queen goes, with her women following after. The same trick suffices on land: a small coin to the stables, an unbarred door or gate, a swift progress up staircases and through flickering candlelit rooms to – to what? To kisses and illicit embraces, to promises and sighs, and so to feather bed, where Meg Douglas, the king’s niece, disposes herself against the pillows and waits for her pleasure.
Call-Me says, ‘It is Thomas Howard. The younger, I mean. Norfolk’s half-brother.’
‘Thomas the Lesser,’ he says.
‘Your man, Tom Truth. Wooed her with his verses, sir. Undressed her with his wit.’
Wreckage, he thinks. Winter and spring we watched Anne, but should we have watched another lady? Truth was on the river, Truth was in the dark; Truth stripped to his shirt and his member jutted beneath the linen, while the Princess of Scotland lay back and parted her plump white thighs. For a Howard.
He says to Call-Me, how did Meg contrive to be alone with him? There are some sharp old dames at court. My lady Salisbury for one, Margaret Pole – still in post about the new queen because, though the king is enraged with her son, he would rather have the countess where he can see her. And of course, to save face, we are still pretending to the world that Reynold’s poisoned letter has never been received: that the wretched document is still in Italy, where Pole plays with his phrasing.
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 20