For a clerk, he thinks. Is the king suggesting that he should put down his pen and pick up a sword? Despite all that has been said?
‘You remember the Cornish,’ Henry says.
He nods. ‘I was a boy then.’
‘My father took us to the Tower. He had faith in that fortress to stand, even if they looted the city.’
It is not just in the north they hate taxes. At the fringes of the kingdom they do not understand England to be one nation, with borders we all must pay to defend. When the Cornish broke out in rebellion they said they would not pay to secure the north against the Scots, for they did not know what a Scot was. They were led by a lawyer, one Thomas Flamank, and a blacksmith they called An Gof: ‘blacksmith’ is what it means, his name tells you what he was. Gathering forces as they rolled up-country, they marched towards London, and before them strode a giant, name of Bolster. Possibly he did not lead them but guarded their rear, for nobody saw him – he was always out in front or just behind.
At the Williamses’ house in Mortlake, where he ran errands in exchange for his dinner, they poured scorn on giants, roaring with laughter as they told the story of one of Bolster’s Cornish mates, a sad and lonely giant who played quoits on Sundays with his only friend, a spry lad called Jack. One day the giant patted Jack on his pate, and his fingers went through the bone as if it were piecrust. The giant’s cries made the welkin ring, while Jack’s brains ran down his chin like gravy.
He told his sister Bet, ‘Giants were descended from Cain, who killed his brother. There were hordes of them on the earth before they drowned in Noah’s flood. They were tall, but not so tall their heads came above the water.’
Bet said nothing.
He said, ‘Trojan Brutus fought those that survived, and put them to the sword. He was the mighty man who invented London.’
Bet said nothing again.
‘Bolster?’ he said. ‘Is that really his name? Because that’s ridiculous.’
Bet said, ‘Are you going to tell him that to his face?’
The more nobody saw Bolster, the more the fear of him grew. He was ten foot tall, or twelve foot, with arms like the sails of a windmill and iron-shod feet that could burst a head like a grape. In Putney, their homes stood in the path of the rebels; and he a boy, some twelve or thirteen years old, stood ready to knock hell out of Bolster’s kneecaps.
In that commotion time, Walter turned a shrewd penny, outfitting his friends in third-hand armour, bashing breastplates into shape. Privately he said he feared not, because he knew about the Cornishmen’s ale. It takes twenty-four hours to make, and they brew it wherever they camp. They down it by the pail, creamy brown and fizzing, and it gets you drunk like nothing else. Then it makes you spew all next day.
At Blackheath the rebels were destroyed by the king’s army. Many knights were made on the battlefield that day. An Gof and the lawyer were hanged and quartered, their bloody parts sent back to be displayed where they were born. But Bolster was never hanged. No gallows would be strong enough. The world is wide and he is in it somewhere. Perhaps he lies fathoms deep, breathing through his gills like a fish, till he is ready to swim up to the light and begin his career afresh. A giant is not used to inaction. Nor is my lord Privy Seal. This frustration, this constraint, as the last of the leaves fall and the early frosts begin, takes him back to his early life, before Bolster was thought of, and before he set his foot on the ladder to rise in the world: before he knew there was a ladder: back to the days when other people were in charge of his fate: before he knew there was fate: when he thought there was only the smithy, the brewery, the wharves, the river, and even London seemed distant to him, or, to speak truth, he had no idea of distance: when he was no more than seven years old, and his uncle John and his father settled his destiny between them, and he said scarcely a word.
His uncle John said: ‘I tell you what, brother. Thomas is no use to you yet, he is only underfoot. So why don’t you let me train him up?’
They’re inside the doorway of the brewhouse. The smell blankets him. He comes up to John’s elbow. His father is moving in the dimness, heaving some chests around; he wonders what’s in them. ‘Oh, just stand there, brother!’ Walter says. ‘Just stand there and watch a man break his back!’
John says, ‘Do me courtesy of listening when I speak to you.’
Walter dumps the box he is hauling. ‘What?’
‘Let me take Tom to Lambeth. The kitchen steward’s a good friend to me.’
‘You want to make him into a cook? No lad of mine will be known as Platterface.’
‘He won’t be bound,’ John says. ‘What harm?’
‘I suppose he can make me a posset in my old age. Stew a fowl. All right.’ Walter laughs. He thinks he’ll never be old. He thinks he’ll always have teeth. ‘Mind, Tom, obey your uncle, or you’ll be baked in a pie.’
‘You’ll be minced.’ John slaps him around the head to seal the agreement. Already there’s something solid about him, that inclines people to cuff and slap him, perhaps because it makes a satisfying noise. But as they walk away, John says, ‘You need a skill, Tom. You don’t want to be like your dad, good at nothing but trouble.’
He says, ‘There’s a box under his bed with three padlocks.’
‘Gold, I don’t doubt,’ John says. ‘Where from I don’t like to think. But take him out of his parish, and how would he thrive? They all know him in Putney and none dares cross him. But let him walk abroad without his bully boys, then it’s a different tale.’
Think of that. For the first time, he imagines Walter through the eyes of an indifferent stranger: sees a squat bruiser, unshaven, his belt holding him together. A scoffing, jeering ruffian, looking for a fight; and being Walter, he never looks far. Everybody’s agin him and hoping to do him down, filch what’s his. Filch them first, is Walter’s maxim, and that’s how he thrives. He clip-clops through life to the sound of other people grieving: sniffing out weakness, anybody sad or lost, so he can inflict them.
He says to John, ‘Everybody in Mortlake knows my dad. Everybody in Wimbledon. I’ll get the smithy when he’s dead.’
‘What’s going to kill Walter,’ his uncle asks, ‘unless the hangman? You’ll be a labourer till you’re thirty if you wait on him. I can’t teach you his business, but I can teach you mine. You need a trade you can carry with you. Even in a foreign country folk always want cooks.’
‘I wouldn’t know their dishes,’ he says.
‘A light hand with a sauce, and you’re welcome anywhere.’ John sniffs. ‘I’d like to see Walter make a cream sauce. The bugger would curdle as soon as he looked at it.’
He thinks, my uncle is jealous. My father is a famous fighter, and he’s only good at flouring things.
But he says, my good uncle, I would like to learn your trade, where do we begin?
Mid-month: Lord Clifford is besieged at Carlisle. The Duke of Norfolk is at Ampthill with the king’s forces, and with him Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter: with the marquis, though the marquis does not know it, are men watching him, on Lord Cromwell’s behalf. Norfolk has got what he wants – a troop of men at his back, the king’s commission in his saddlebag – yet still he grouches in every letter he sends. Mr Wriothesley opens them, and interprets the content to the king.
The rebels are aiming for York and the mayor believes the city is too divided to resist. The rumour is that its archbishop has already fled. Robert Aske has called down the rebels from north Yorkshire to join his host. They say they will restore houses of religion in the territory they capture. Mr Wriothesley says, I told you so. I told you, when the monks go, we should knock the buildings down after them.
He, Thomas Cromwell, goes from Windsor to London, road or river, to and from at the king’s behest – he might as well be with the armies, so uneasy his bed, so spare his diet. Even when he is on the road he feels he is still within the castle,
trapped in the royal hour, the royal day. The king is querulous when he is not in his presence – he is still Master Secretary, after all, and everything works through and by him. But the king’s first need is coin. His dishes and chalices must be sacrificed, weighty gold chains signed out of the Jewel House never to return. He has never believed metal should be left to lose its lustre, or weigh down the persons of great men – it should circulate as money and multiply. But, he says to Call-Me, I would like to meet a competent alchemist this fall, or a princess who could spin gold out of straw.
In Windsor the town hugs the castle walls, and what were market stalls in King Edward’s day are dwellings now, dirty infills like dens for dwarves, clustering up to the castle ditch. The streets are packed with tradespeople come to try their luck, see what they can sell to the court, for within the castle’s tight precincts they grow nothing, can’t even stock a carp pond. All day wagons rumble uphill, across the cobbles and through the great gate, so noble folk must edge aside to give carters a path. He hears that sermons have been preached in the town in favour of the Pilgrims. He slips money to a few boys of his choosing so they can stand in line at stalls and get the gossip, and later filter into the Windsor taverns, jostling with the customers of Thameside harlots. Afterwards they seek out a priest, see what kind of confessions he likes to hear, then put it to him bald: are these rebels holy, Father? Should we take their part?
So much travelling in the cold and wet, and he wakes up aching. His dreams are oppressive: he finds himself at a landing stage, the opposite bank out of view. The river widening, nothing but the grey still water stretching away, polished pewter reflecting a silver sky: no bank in view because there is no bank, because the water has become eternity, because his flesh is dissolved in it; because his stories merge, all memories flatten to one.
His uncle John says, mind, young Thomas: if you are going to learn, you can’t go running up and down the riverbank, you have to be where we can find you. Because when Archbishop Morton – Cardinal Morton, he is now – has visitors from Rome, they’re not replete with a dish of split peas, they expect to eat songbirds basted in honey. We can’t say to them, well, Monsignors, unfortunately the boy who catches larks has gone home to Putney, because his father’s entered in a shin-kicking contest, and Tom is holding his coat and taking the bets.
It was not easy to leave Putney. There were matters that called him back; he was a boy, you whistled for him and he came. Men planned a robbery and besought him to go through a window for them, and open up the house.
‘No,’ he said.
‘No?’ said the brigands. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I fear God’s punishment.’
The chief robber said, ‘You should more fear my fist.’ And showed it to him.
Besides, they said, why would God notice a boy like you? Why would He care if you go through Mildred Dyer’s window, she being a widow with a store of money, and none but a lapdog to defend her, a cur we can kick away, or easy break its neck?
He thought, God regards every sparrow that falls. From listening at a sermon, he had this text by heart. God regards Mildred Dyer. God regards her dog Pippin. He said, ‘I disdain you. You are the sort who need strong drink before you dare jump a puddle, and on the day you are hanged my friends will laugh at you while you kick.’
The chief robber deployed his fist then, pinning him against the wall and pounding his head till the others cried, ‘Edwin, he’s not worth it.’
He did not remember the pain, perhaps did not feel it. But he remembered the taint of the man’s breath.
‘Who did that?’ Walter said, when he took his injuries home. ‘All angels help me,’ he said, when he heard the story. ‘Next time someone invites you to a robbery, say no in a civil fashion. Tell them you’ve a job on somewhere else – it’s only common courtesy.’
As he grew up, he grew into caution: to a degree. He sinned, he sinned greatly, but usually he picked his time. He saw a woman forced, and he said and did nothing. He saw a man’s eyes put out of their sockets, because he had witnessed what he should not: Jesu, he’d said, would it not have made more sense to slit his tongue? One day when he was brought up against the frontier of Walter’s schemes – some frontier he was unwilling to cross – he had said, ‘Father, do you not know right from wrong?’
Walter’s face grew dark. But he said in a tone mild in the circumstances, ‘Listen, son, this is what I know: right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for. As I’m sure life will instruct you, by and by, if your father’s precept and example can’t get it through your skull.’
The thief Edwin had said, while he sucked his knuckles, ‘Be glad of that, boy, a gift from me. You may go begging for a beating hereafter: Satan himself wouldn’t soil his paws.’
On 16 October the rebels enter York. York is the second city in the realm. England is collapsing in on herself, like a house of straw.
When the news comes he is in London, scraping together ten thousand pounds so Norfolk can pay his troops. A message comes from Wriothesley: the king wants him, wants to see him as soon as humanly possible. Another letter follows, another …
When he arrives at Windsor a knot of councillors surges around him, long-faced. The king is at prayer. In his private closet? No, he is addressing God from a grander place, the chapel of St George’s.
Bishop Sampson says, ‘Cromwell, he waits on you.’
‘But you have told him? That York is lost?’ Only in that moment does it strike him that they might have held back the news for him to break.
But it appears Rafe Sadler has done it: Rafe is with him now. Oxford says, ‘I doubt the king will blame you too much, my lord.’
For the fall of York? How could he be to blame? But someone must be …
Lord Audley says, ‘I doubt even Wolsey could have changed the wind these last weeks.’
No? Wolsey would not have fled York, like the present archbishop. He says, ‘No rebel would have dared to rise within a hundred miles of my lord cardinal. Active force would have met him, if he did.’
To St George’s, then. He pushes through the councillors. ‘Come on, Call-Me.’
Wriothesley says, striding beside him, ‘Death has made the cardinal invincible, sir?’
‘So it appears.’ Though Wolsey never speaks to him now. Since he came back from Shaftesbury he is without company or advice. The cardinal bounces in the clouds, where the Faithful Departed giggle at our miscalculations. The dead are magnified in our eyes, while we to them appear as ants. They look down on us from the mists, like mystic beasts on spires, and they sail above us like flags.
The king is in the chantry chapel, high above the Garter stalls. He climbs, and on the tight spiral of the stair the chambers of his heart squeeze small. From here, he knows, the king looks down on his ancestors, at the murdered King Henry – sixth of that name – in his tomb.
He ducks into the low doorway. The king is kneeling, back rigid, seemingly at prayer. Rafe Sadler is kneeling behind him, as far away as the space will allow. Rafe turns up his face, imploring; as he, Lord Cromwell, passes him, he flips his cap over his eyes.
There is a cushion; it’s better than the bare boards. For some time he kneels in silence, directly behind his monarch.
In Florence, he thinks, I played at calcio. It is a game of many players, more a mêlée than a sport. The young men of family would turn out their stouter servants, twenty or thirty to each team. Mad Englishman, he: his excuse being that, as his Tuscan was not perfect, he did not know the rules.
He can hear the king’s breath, his sigh. Henry knows he is there: he gives himself away by a twitch of the muscles at the back of his neck.
Ten minutes into the game you would be bloodied, the ball itself basted in snot and sand and gore, your breath short, your long bones juddering, your feet stamped to a paste and your hair yanked out in handfuls: but you never noticed or c
ared, once you got hold of the ball. Forward you charged, ball tucked against you, a whoop of triumph sailing over the rooftops; but when you had run ten paces, some bellowing lunatic would hack you behind the knees.
Henry puts his hand to his nape, like someone who has been brushed by a gnat. His sacred head half-turns; he lifts his gaze, wary. ‘Crumb?’ he says. As if it were the start of a prayer: though one with no particular efficacy.
He waits. The king heaves a deeper sigh: a groan.
Mother of Sorrows, the game hurt when it stopped. Though when you were playing, you never felt a thing.
Henry crosses himself, and begins to struggle to his feet. Would a hand to help him be welcome, or bitten?
‘York? How can York fall?’ When the king turns his face it is dismayed: as if somebody has cut a gash in it, opened his brain to the light.
Rafe, in the shadows, stands behind him.
He scoops up his cushion. It is embroidered gold on crimson: ‘HA HA’, it says. Henricus Rex. Anna Regina.
Rafe takes it from him as if it were hot.
If this were Florence, he thinks, I would boot that cushion over Santa Croce. Her memory with it.
The king says, ‘Tonight I shall dine in the great hall.’
‘Majesty,’ he says.
‘I must appear in great …’ the king falters … ‘glory, you understand me? Where is the Mirror of Naples?’
‘Whitehall, sir.’
He thinks Henry will say, take a guard and fetch it. The king takes no heed of distance or weather. He wants to blaze before his subjects in the great pearl and diamond that was the treasure of France.
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 39