Her eyes snapped open. They moved over him. She gave him her strange, slow smile. I knew then (he would say later) that Anne would not stop at the king, but consume many men, young or old, rich or poor, noble or common. But at the last, she did not consume me.
He remembers her swollen feet, blue-veined, bare. How helpless they seemed, as if on that hot June day they might be cold.
At the king’s command, a lodging is prepared for Tom Truth. Constable Kingston comes in person, and suggests the upper floor of the Bell Tower, which has a good fireplace. Let’s put a hopeful face on it, Kingston says, and assume the king will show mercy, and the young man will still be alive this winter.
He says to Kingston, ‘You know the turnkey Martin?’
‘I know him. One of your gospellers.’
‘Martin ought to attend Lord Thomas,’ he says. ‘He respects those who write verse.’
Kingston stares at him as if he were ignorant. ‘They all did it. All those late gentlemen.’
‘George Boleyn, certainly,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘And Mark, I concede. But can you see Will Brereton juggling with terza rima? As for Norris, he was more interested in listing his emoluments and tabulating his assets.’
Kingston says, ‘They tried their hand. I am no judge. But the queen said there was only Wyatt who could do it.’
‘Sir William,’ he says, ‘ask your wife to sit with Lady Margaret, as she sat with the late queen. Let me know what she says.’ He adds, ‘I do not say it will end the same way. Let Lady Kingston encourage her to think she can live and thrive, if she sees her duty.’
‘I hear you will bring in a law,’ Kingston says. ‘It seems harsh, to make them commit a crime in retrospect.’
They try to explain it to the constable. A prince cannot be impeded by temporal distinctions: past, present, future. Nor can he excuse the past, just for being over and done. He can’t say, ‘all water under the bridges’; the past is always trickling under the soil, a slow leak you can’t trace. Often, meaning is only revealed retrospectively. The will of God, for instance, is brought to light these days by more skilful translators. As for the future, the king’s desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up. ‘Bear in mind his Majesty’s remarkable foresight, at the trial of the late queen. He knew the sentence before the verdict was in.’
‘True,’ Kingston says. ‘The executioner was already on the sea.’
Kingston has been a councillor long enough. He should know how the king’s mind works. Once Henry says, ‘This is my wish,’ it becomes so dear and familiar a wish that he thinks he has always had it. He names his need, and he wants it supplied.
‘But surely he won’t kill her?’ Kingston says. ‘The Princess of Scotland! What would her countrymen say?’
‘I don’t think the Scots have a use for Meg. They think she is an Englishwoman now. Still,’ he says, ‘I always pray for a good outcome. As for Lord Thomas – I’m sure the Duke of Norfolk will make his plea.’
‘Norfolk?’ the constable says. ‘Henry will throw him downstairs.’
No doubt, he thinks. I hope I am there to witness. ‘Be ready, Sir William. That’s all I advise. I wouldn’t like you to be caught out.’
After all, it’s nearly two months since the death of the queen. Quite possible that Kingston’s inner machinery will have rusted. The constable says, ‘Whatever occurs, I suppose we wouldn’t be having that fellow back?’
‘The Frenchman? No. Good God. I can’t afford him.’ Back to old-fashioned hacking. Of course, the Howards are stout for tradition. They wouldn’t want to die with any refinements.
‘He did a fine job,’ Kingston says. ‘I admit that. Beautiful weapon. He let me see it.’
He thinks, we all killed Anne Boleyn. We all imagined it, anyway. Soon I’ll hear that the king himself came down and said, ‘Master Executioner, can I try the swing of your blade?’ It’s as Francis Bryan said: Henry would have killed her one day, but in the event some other man saved him the trouble.
He remembers the weight of the weapon, when the Frenchman put it in his hand. He saw the light flash on the steel and he saw that there were words written on the blade; he drew his finger over them. Mirror of Justice. Speculum justitiae. Pray for us.
At Austin Friars, they admire Mr Wriothesley: his tenacity, his willingness to back his belief that there’s no smoke without fire. And lucky for Meg Douglas that he did not hesitate, once he grasped the facts. ‘Because imagine,’ Richard says, ‘if someone had walked in and found her naked in the arms of Truth.’
Richard Riche says, ‘I would not offend the king in such a way and expect long continuance in my life.’
Riche is busy drafting. The new clauses won’t necessarily stop royal persons doing stupid things. But they will create a formal process for dealing with them, when they do. The question is, who is complicit in Meg’s crime? He had asked for the rotas, to see which ladies were attending the queen – the dead one – during March, April and what she saw of the month of May. But the haughty dames who arrange such matters – Lady Rutland, Lady Sussex – had simply raised their eyebrows at him, and hinted that the whole thing was a mystery. Whereas with the king’s privy chamber, as Rafe Sadler says, you have a list, you know who should be where, and when.
Not that it necessarily works. Vagrant habits took hold this spring.
Approaching the king with the bad news, he had found him in a huddle with his architects, plotting to spend some money. ‘My lord Cromwell? Which of these?’ He had flourished a baton patterned with egg-and-dart moulding, which he was narrowly preferring to laurel wreaths.
‘Wreaths,’ he had said. ‘I have something to tell you.’ The draughtsmen rolled up their plans. His eyes followed them to the door.
Once the king had grasped what he was being told, he had shouted at the top of his voice that the business should be kept quiet. The baton was still in his royal hand: if Meg Douglas had been standing there, he would have broken the eggs over her head and stuck her with the darts. ‘I want no repeat of what happened in May, a royal lady before a public court. Europe will be scandalised.’
‘Then what shall I do?’
Henry dropped his voice. ‘Choose some neater way.’ As for Truth: ‘Draw up a charge of treason – I want it recorded in the indictment that the devil inspired him. Unless it was my lord of Norfolk?’
He had offered no comment. Meanwhile – as one of Truth’s own rhymes states, ‘False report as grass doth groweth.’ Word has got around that Lord Thomas is arrested, and so it is assumed that he has been revealed as one more lover of the late Anne.
At the Bell Tower he and Wriothesley approach Truth by the turret stair, passing the lower chamber where Thomas More’s shadow squats in the dark with the shutters closed. He puts his palm against the wall, as if feeling for a minute tremor in the stonework that would tell him More was talking in there: chattering to himself, jokes and stories and proverbs, scripture verses, mottoes, tags.
Christophe comes behind with the evidence. It is not stained bed sheets, but something nastier. The poems – Tom Truth’s and Meg’s mixed with others – have come to him in sheaves – some found, some left, some handed over by third parties. The papers are curled at the edges, and some are folded many times; they are written in divers hands, annotated in others; scribbled, blotted and smudged, they vary in skill of construction, but not in content. I love her, she loves not me. O she is cruel! Ah me, I shall die! He wonders if any of Henry’s poems have got mixed in. It was alleged, against the recently dead gentlemen, that they had laughed at the royal verses. But the king’s handwriting, fortunately, is unlike any other hand. He would know it in the dark.
In his upper room, Tom Truth is staring at the wall. ‘I wondered when you would get here.’
He – Lord Cromwell – takes off his coat. ‘Christophe?’
The boy produces papers. They look more crumpled than he remembers. ‘
Have you been chewing them?’
Christophe grins. ‘I eat anything,’ he tells Tom Truth. As he, Lord Cromwell shuffles through the papers and prepares to read aloud, Truth becomes irate and tense, like any author whose work is under scrutiny.
‘She knoweth my love of long time meant,
She knoweth my truth, nothing is hid,
She knoweth I love in good intent,
As ever man and woman did.’
He looks at Tom Truth over the paper. ‘Nothing is hid?’
‘Have you tupped her?’ Mr Wriothesley asks.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Tom Truth says. ‘What opportunity? With your eyes on us?’
Many-eyed Argus. He holds the paper at arm’s length. ‘Can you go on, Mr Wriothesley? I cannot. It’s not the handwriting,’ he assures Truth. ‘It’s that my tongue refuses to do it.’
Mr Wriothesley takes the paper by one corner.
‘What helpeth hope of happy hap
When hap will hap unhappily?’
‘Perhaps it sounds better if you sing it,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘Shall we have Martin fetch a lute?
‘And thus my hap my hope has turned
Clear out of hope into despair.’
‘Pause there,’ he tells Wriothesley. He accepts the paper back, between finger and thumb. ‘It seems you declared yourself, even at the risk of a rebuff. She knoweth my truth, nothing is hid. At this date she does not seem amenable. Though it is usual, is it not, to say that you love the lady more than she loves you?’
‘It is considered polite,’ Wriothesley assures him.
‘And yet she loved you well enough to give you a diamond.’
Tom Truth says, ‘I do not know if I wrote this verse.’
‘You have forgot it,’ he says. ‘As would any man of sense. Yet in the fifth stanza you write, Pardon me, your man, Tom Truth. Which you rhyme, unfortunately, with growth.’
Christophe sniggers. ‘Even I know better, and I am French.’
‘There is many a Thomas at court,’ the accused man says, ‘and not all of them tell the truth, though I am sure they all claim to.’
‘He’s looking at us,’ he says to Thomas Wriothesley. ‘I hope you aren’t saying one of us wrote it?’
Call-Me says, ‘All the world knows you go by that name, so you may as well stand to it. You have married her, her servants say.’
Tom Truth opens his mouth, but leafing through the pages he cuts in: ‘You ask her to ease you of your pain.’
‘Would that be the pain in your bollocks?’ Christophe says.
He quells him with a look; but he cannot help laughing. ‘You have been in love for a certain space – Although I burn and long have burned – and then you make some pledge – why would you do that, unless to make her think it is lawful to go to bed?’
Wriothesley says, ‘The lady tells us there are witnesses to the pledge.’
When the pause prolongs, he says, ‘You need not reply in verse.’
Tom Truth says, ‘I know what you do, Cromwell.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘I do nothing, unless with the king’s permission. Without that, I don’t swat a fly.’
‘The king will not permit you to ill-use a gentleman.’
‘Agreed,’ Wriothesley advises, ‘but don’t try Lord Cromwell’s patience. He once broke a man’s jaw with a single blow.’
Did I? He is astonished. He says, ‘We are tenacious. In time you will confess you meant to do ill, even if you did not achieve your purpose. You will acknowledge your error to the king, and beg his pardon.’ Though I doubt it will forthcome, he thinks. ‘We understand your situation. You come of a great family, but all you younger Howards are poor. And being of such exalted blood, you cannot soil your hands with any occupation. If you want to make your fortune you must wait for a war, or you must marry well. And you say to yourself, here I am, a man of great qualities – yet I have no money, and no one regards me, except to confuse me with my elder brother. So I know what I’ll do – I’ll marry the king’s niece. Odds-on I’ll be King of England one day.’
‘And till then I can borrow against my expectations,’ Wriothesley adds.
A line of Wyatt’s comes to him: For I am weak, and clean without defence. In Wyatt’s verse there is a tussle in every line. In the verse of Lord Thomas, there is no contest at all, just a smooth surrender to idiocy. Though he is staunch under questioning – you must concede that. He does not weep or beseech. He just says, ‘What have you done with Lady Margaret?’
‘She is here in the queen’s rooms,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘Though probably not for long.’
They leave him with that ambiguous thought. The harmless truth is that Meg may have to be lodged elsewhere if the king decides to go ahead with a coronation, because by tradition Jane will spend the night there before her procession to Westminster. The king had talked of a ceremony at midsummer. But now there are rumours of plague and sweating sickness. It is not wise to allow crowds in the street, or pack bodies into indoor spaces. The Seymours, of course, urge the king to take the risk.
He and Call-Me go downstairs. One fights as a unit, he thinks. He misses Rafe, always at his right hand. But if the king wants Rafe’s presence he must have it. He says, ‘Did I? Broke a jaw? Whose?’
‘The cardinal used to tell about it,’ Wriothesley says happily. He passes into the sunshine. ‘Sometimes it was an abbot, sometimes a petty lord. In the north somewhere.’
When this is over – however it ends – he will try to return the poems to their owners, though they don’t put their names to them. He pictures himself on a windy day, throwing them into the air so that they flap down Whitehall, sailing across the river and landing in Southwark: where they will be giggled at by whores, and used to wipe their arses. When he gets home he says to Gregory, ‘Never write verse.’
Bess Darrell had sent him a message: come to me at L’Erber. It is not surprising the Pole family should offer her shelter; she is a legacy from the late Katherine. But she must have kept it from them that she is carrying a child. The old countess would not want Wyatt’s bastard under her roof.
He finds Bess and Lady Salisbury sitting together, peaceful as St Ann and the Virgin in a book of hours. A strip of fine linen lies across their laps, and on it a needlework paradise, a garden of summer flowers. He greets the countess with elaborate courtesy – as perhaps he did not at their last meeting. He notes that Bess has not unlaced her bodices yet. She is a delicate woman; how long can she keep her secret?
The countess indicates her sewing: ‘I know that of your gentleness you interest yourself in the work we women do. You see I have found young eyes to help mine.’
‘I compliment you. I wish my flowers would bloom as fast.’
‘Your gardens are all new-planted,’ Lady Salisbury says sweetly. ‘God takes His time.’
‘And yet,’ Bess says, ‘He made the whole world in a week.’
He nods to her gravely; says to the countess, ‘I hear your son Reynold has been summoned by the Pope.’
‘Has he? It is more than I know.’
He has only just heard himself, and it may not be true. ‘I wonder what Farnese intends. He would not whistle him to Rome for a hand of Laugh and Lie Down.’
The countess looks enquiring. ‘It is a card game,’ Bess says. ‘For children.’
The countess says, ‘We do not know my son’s plans, any more than you do.’
‘Less.’ Bess merely breathes it, stirring the petals beneath her fingers.
‘You know the king wants him to come home?’
‘That is a matter that lies between Reynold and his Majesty. As I have explained – and his Majesty well accepts it, if you do not – neither I, nor my son Montague, knew in advance of his writings against the king. And we do not know where he is now.’
‘But he has written to you?’
�
�He has. It is a letter that goes straight to a mother’s heart. He says that whoever observes the laws of this realm and this king is shut out of Heaven – even if they are tricked or coerced into obedience.’
‘But you are not tricked or coerced, are you? Your loyalty comes from gratitude.’
‘There is more,’ Margaret Pole says. ‘My son bids me cease dabbling in his affairs. He says I cast him off as a boy – that I had no use for him. It is true I sent him away from home to his studies. But my understanding was, I gave him to God.’ She lifts her chin. ‘Reynold severs his ties to us. He says we are damned by our obedience to Henry Tudor.’
He thinks, it is very sad he should write you such a letter. It is also convenient. The countess takes a neat loop of her thread and slips her needle into the cloth. ‘But you want to speak with Mistress Darrell.’ Rising, she slides the work into Bess’s lap, and murmurs a question not meant for his ears.
Bess says, ‘No, I trust my lord Privy Seal.’
‘Then so do I,’ the countess says.
He smiles. ‘Encouraging for me.’
Lady Salisbury draws together her skirts. Ah, she is cold to my charms, he thinks. Bess Darrell sits with bent head, and does not look up even when they are left alone, the door ajar. Her hood hides what Wyatt has seen, her hair of crisped gold. He had imagined Wyatt would only chase what flies; that the pursuit would interest him, but not the capture. Yet Bess looks not simply captured but tamed, a woman trapped by her own ill-luck. He looks after Lady Salisbury: ‘You may judge how far she trusts me. Not enough to close the door on us.’
Bess says, ‘She does not think you will throw me to the floor and ravish me. Perhaps she fears you will sit and whisper bad verses, and coax me into marriage.’
So she has heard about the Douglas affair. No doubt the gossip is everywhere. He says, ‘I have found a refuge for you. As I promised Wyatt. The Courtenay family will ask you to be companion to my lady marquise.’
‘Gertrude?’ She folds the linen on her lap; folds and folds it again, so it becomes a square, the needle inside. ‘But she doesn’t like you.’
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 22