‘It seems,’ Chapuys snaps, ‘that you are too good to live. If you cannot mind your country’s interests, I must mind them for you. They will not give you territory, whatever they say. May I remind you what poor friends the French have been to you these last months while you have not been able to feed your people? If it were not for the shipments of grain my master permits, your subjects would be corpses piled from here to the Scots border.’
Some exaggeration there. Lucky that Henry is in holiday humour. He likes feasts, pastimes, an hour in the lists, a masque in prospect; he likes even more the idea that his former wife is lying in the fens gasping her last. ‘Come, Chapuys,’ he says. ‘We will have private conference in my chamber.’ He draws the ambassador with him and, over his head, winks.
But Chapuys stops dead. The king must stop too. ‘Majesty, we can speak of this hereafter. My mission now brooks no delay. I beg for permission to ride where the…where Katherine is. And I implore you to allow her daughter to see her. It may be for the last time.’
‘Oh, I could not be moving the Lady Mary around without my council’s advice. And I see no hope of convening them today. The roads, you know. As for you, how do you propose to travel? Have you wings?’ The king chuckles. He reasserts his grip and bears the ambassador away. A door closes. He, Cromwell, stands glaring at it. What further lies will be told behind it? Chapuys will have to bargain his mother’s bones away to match these great offers Henry claims he has from the French.
He thinks, what would the cardinal do? Wolsey used to say, ‘Never let me hear you claim, “You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.” Find out.’
So. He is going to think of some reason to follow them in there. But here is Norris blocking his path. In his Moorish drapery, his face blacked, he is playful, smiling, but still vigilant. Prime Christmas game: let’s fuck about with Cromwell. He is about to spin away Norris by his silken shoulder, when a small dragon comes waggling along. ‘Who is in that dragon?’ he asks.
Norris snorts. ‘Francis Weston.’ He pushes back his woolly wig to reveal his noble forehead. ‘Said dragon is going to waggle waggle to the queen’s apartments to beg for sweetmeats.’
He grins. ‘You sound bitter, Harry Norris.’
Why would he not? He’s served his time at the queen’s door. On her threshold.
Norris says, ‘She will play with him and pat his little rump. She’s fond of puppy dogs.’
‘Did you find out who killed Purkoy?’
‘Don’t say that,’ the Moor beseeches. ‘It was an accident.’
At his elbow, causing him to turn, is William Brereton. ‘Where’s that thrice-blasted dragon?’ he enquires. ‘I’m supposed to get after it.’
Brereton is dressed as an antique huntsman, wearing the skin of one of his victims. ‘Is that real leopard skin, William? Where did you catch it, up in Chester?’ He feels it critically. Brereton seems to be naked beneath it. ‘Is that proper?’ he asks.
Brereton snarls, ‘It’s the season of licence. If you were forced to impersonate an antique hunter, would you wear a jerkin?’
‘As long as the queen is not treated to the sight of your attributi.’
The Moor giggles. ‘He wouldn’t be showing her anything she hasn’t seen.’
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Has she?’
Norris blushes easily, for a Moor. ‘You know what I meant. Not William’s. The king’s.’
He holds up a hand. ‘Please take note, I am not the one who introduced this topic. By the way, the dragon went in that direction.’
He remembers last year, Brereton swaggering through Whitehall, whistling like a stable boy; breaking off to say to him, ‘I hear the king, when he does not like the papers you bring in to him, knocks you well about the pate.’
You’ll be knocked, he had said to himself. Something in this man makes him feel he is a boy again, a sullen belligerent little ruffian fighting on the riverbank at Putney. He has heard it before, this rumour put about to demean him. Anyone who knows Henry knows it is impossible. He is the first gentleman of Europe, his courtesy unflawed. If he wants someone stricken, he employs a subject to do it; he would not sully his own hand. It is true they sometimes disagree. But if Henry were to touch him, he would walk away. There are princes in Europe who want him. They make him offers; he could have castles.
Now he watches Brereton, as he heads towards the queen’s suite, bow slung over his furry shoulder. He turns to speak to Norris, but his voice is drowned out by a metallic clatter, a clash as of guardsmen: shouts of ‘Make way for my lord the Duke of Suffolk.’
The duke’s upper body is still armed; perhaps he has been out there in the yard, jousting by himself. His large face is flushed, his beard – more impressive year on year – spreads over his breastplate. The valiant Moor steps forward to say, ‘His Majesty is in conference with –’ but Brandon knocks him aside, as if he were on a crusade.
He, Cromwell, follows on the duke’s heels. If he had a net, he would drop it over him. Brandon bangs once on the king’s door with his fist, then throws it open before him. ‘Leave what you’re doing, Majesty. You want to hear this, by God. You’re quit of the old lady. She is on her deathbed. You will soon be a widower. Then you can get rid of the other one, and marry into France, by God, and lay your hands on Normandy as dowry…’ He notices Chapuys. ‘Oh. Ambassador. Well, you can take yourself off. No use you staying for scraps. Go home and make your own Christmas, we don’t want you here.’
Henry has turned white. ‘Think what you are saying.’ He approaches Brandon as if he might knock him down; which, if he had a poleaxe, he could. ‘My wife is carrying a child. I am lawfully married.’
‘Oh.’ Charles blows out his cheeks. ‘Yes, as far as that goes. But I thought you said –’
He, Cromwell, hurls himself towards the duke. Where in the name of Satan’s sister did Charles get this notion? Marry into France? It must be the king’s plan, as Brandon has none of his own. It looks as if Henry is carrying on two foreign policies: one he knows about and one he doesn’t. He takes a grip on Brandon. He is a head shorter. He doesn’t think he can move half a ton of idiot, still padded and partly armed. But it seems he can, he can move him fast, fast, and try to get him out of earshot of the ambassador, whose face is astonished. Only when he has propelled Brandon across the presence chamber does he stop and demand, ‘Suffolk, where do you get this from?’
‘Ah, we noble lords know more than you do. The king makes plain to us his real intentions. You think you know all his secrets, but you are mistaken, Cromwell.’
‘You heard what he said. Anne is carrying his child. You are mad if you think he will turn her out now.’
‘He’s mad if he thinks it’s his.’
‘What?’ He pulls back from Brandon as if the breastplate were hot. ‘If you know anything against the queen’s honour, you are bound as a subject to speak plainly.’
Brandon wrenches his arm away. ‘I spoke plain before and look where it got me. I told him about her and Wyatt, and he kicked me out of the court and back to the east country.’
‘Drag Wyatt into this, and I’ll kick you to China.’
The duke’s face is congested with rage. How has it come to this? Only weeks ago, Brandon was asking him to be godfather to the son he has with his new little wife. But now the duke snarls, ‘Get back to your abacus, Cromwell. You are only for fetching in money, when it comes to the affairs of nations you cannot deal, you are a common man of no status, and the king himself says so, you are not fit to talk to princes.’
Brandon’s hand in his chest, shoving him back: once again, the duke is making for the king’s person. It is Chapuys, frozen in dignity and sorrow, who imposes some order, stepping between the king and the heaving, boiling mass of the duke. ‘I take my leave, Majesty. As always I find you a most gracious prince. If I am in time, as I trust I shall be, my master will be consoled to have news of his aunt’s final hours from the hand of his own envoy.’
‘I can do
no less,’ Henry says, sobered. ‘God speed.’
‘I ride at first light,’ Chapuys tells him; rapidly, they walk away, through the morris men and the bobbing hobby horses, through a merman and his shoal, skirting round a castle that rumbles towards them, painted masonry on oiled wheels.
Outside on the quay Chapuys turns to him. Within his mind, oiled wheels must be revolving; what he has heard about the woman he calls the concubine, he will already be coding into dispatches. They cannot pretend between them that he did not hear; when Brandon bawls, trees fall in Germany. It would not be surprising if the ambassador were cawing in triumph: not at the thought of a French marriage, to be sure, but at the thought of Anne’s eclipse.
But Chapuys keeps his countenance; he is very pale, very earnest. ‘Cremuel,’ he says, ‘I note the duke’s comments. About your person. About your position.’ He clears his throat. ‘For what it is worth, I am myself a man of humble origins. Though not perhaps so low…’
He knows Chapuys’s history. His people are petty lawyers, two generations away from the soil.
‘And again for what it is worth, I believe you are fit to deal. I would back you in any assemblage this side of Heaven. You are an eloquent and learned man. If I wanted an advocate to argue for my life, I would give you the brief.’
‘You dazzle me, Eustache.’
‘Go back to Henry. Move him that the princess might see her mother. A dying woman, what policy can it hurt, what interest…’ One angry, dry sob breaks out of the poor man’s throat. In a moment he recovers himself. He removes his hat, stares at it, as if he cannot think where he got it. ‘I do not think I should wear this hat,’ he says. ‘It is more a Christmas hat, would you say? Still, I am loath to lose it, it is quite unique.’
‘Give it to me. I will have it sent to your house and you can wear it on your return.’ When you are out of mourning, he thinks. ‘Look…I will not raise your hopes about Mary.’
‘You being an Englishman, who never lies or deceives.’ Chapuys gives a bark of laughter. ‘Jesu-Maria!’
‘The king will not permit any meeting that could strengthen Mary’s spirit of disobedience.’
‘Even if her mother is on her deathbed?’
‘Especially then. We do not wants oaths, deathbed promises. You see that?’
He speaks to his bargemaster: I shall stay here and see how it goes with the dragon, whether he eats the hunter or what. Convey the ambassador up to London, he must prepare for a journey. ‘But how will you get back yourself?’ Chapuys says.
‘Crawl, if Brandon has his way.’ He puts his hand on the little man’s shoulder. Says softly, ‘This clears the way, you know? For an alliance with your master. Which will be very good for England and her trade, and is what you and I both want. Katherine has come between us.’
‘And what about the French marriage?’
‘There will be no French marriage. It is a fairy tale. Go. It will be dark in an hour. I hope you rest tonight.’
Already, twilight steals across the Thames; there are crepuscular deeps in the lapping waves, and a blue dusk creeps along the banks. He says to one of the boatmen, do you think the roads north will be open? God help me, sir, the man says: I only know the river, and anyway I’ve never stirred north of Enfield.
When he arrives back in Stepney torchlight spills out of the house, and the singing children, in a state of high excitement, are carolling in the garden; dogs are barking, black shapes bobbing against the snow, and a dozen mounds, ghostly white, tower over the frozen hedges. One, taller than the rest, wears a mitre; it has a stub of blue-tinged carrot for its nose, and a smaller stub for its cock. Gregory pitches towards him, a swirl of excitement: ‘Look, sir, we have made the Pope out of snow.’
‘First we made the Pope.’ The glowing face beside him belongs to Dick Purser, the boy who keeps the watchdogs. ‘We made the Pope, sir, and then he looked harmless by himself and so we made a set of cardinals. Do you like them?’
His kitchen boys swarm about him, frosted and dripping. The whole household has turned out, or at least everyone under thirty. They have lit a bonfire – well away from the snowmen – and appear to be dancing around it, led by his boy Christophe.
Gregory gets his breath. ‘We only did it for the better setting forth of the king’s supremacy. I do not think it is wrong, because we can blow a trumpet then kick them flat, and cousin Richard said we may, and he himself moulded the Pope’s head, and Master Wriothesley who was here looking for you thrust in the Pope’s little member and laughed at it.’
‘Such children you are!’ he says. ‘I like them very much. We will have the fanfare tomorrow when there’s more light, shall we?’
‘And can we fire a cannon?’
‘Where would I get a cannon?’
‘Speak to the king, sir.’ Gregory is laughing; he knows the cannon is a step too far.
Dick Purser’s sharp eye has fallen on the ambassador’s hat. ‘Might we borrow that? We have done ill with the Pope’s tiara, because we did not know how it should look.’
He spins the hat in his hand. ‘You’re right, this is more the sort of thing Farnese wears. But no. This hat is a sacred charge. I have to answer to the Emperor for it. Now, let me go,’ he says, laughing, ‘I must write letters, we look for great changes soon.’
‘Stephen Vaughan is here,’ Gregory says.
‘Is he? Ah. Good. I have a use for him.’
He tramps towards the house, firelight licking his heels. ‘Pity Master Vaughan,’ Gregory says. ‘I think he came for his supper.’
‘Stephen!’ A hasty embrace. ‘No time,’ he says. ‘Katherine is dying.’
‘What?’ his friend says. ‘I heard nothing of this in Antwerp.’
Vaughan is always in transit. He is about to be in transit again. He is Cromwell’s servant, he is the king’s servant, he is the king’s eyes and ears across the Narrow Sea; nothing passes with the Flemish merchants or the guilds at Calais that Stephen does not know and report. ‘I am bound to say, Master Secretary, you keep a disorderly household. One might as well eat supper in a field.’
‘You are in a field,’ he says. ‘More or less. Or you soon will be. You must get on the road.’
‘But I am just off the ship!’
This is how Stephen manifests his friendship: constant complaints, carping and grumbles. He turns and issues orders: feed Vaughan, water Vaughan, bed down Vaughan, have a good horse ready to go at dawn. ‘Don’t fret, you can sleep the night. Then you must escort Chapuys up to Kimbolton. You speak the languages, Stephen! Nothing must pass in French or Spanish or Latin, but I know every word.’
‘Ah. I see.’ Stephen draws his person together.
‘Because I think that if Katherine dies, Mary will be desperate to take ship for the Emperor’s domains. He is her cousin, after all, and though she should not trust him, she cannot be convinced of that. And we can hardly chain her to the wall.’
‘Keep her up-country. Keep her where there is no port in two days’ ride.’
‘If Chapuys saw an exit for her, she would fly on the wind and set to sea in a sieve.’
‘Thomas.’ Vaughan, a grave man, lays a hand upon him. ‘What is all this agitation? It is not like you. You are afraid of being bested by a little girl?’
He would like to tell Vaughan what has passed, but how to convey the texture of it: the smoothness of Henry’s lies, the solid weight of Brandon when he shoved him, dragged him, manhandled him away from the king; the raw wetness of the wind on his face, the taste of blood in his mouth. It will always be like this, he thinks. It will go on being like this. Advent, Lent, Whitsuntide. ‘Look,’ he sighs, ‘I must go and write to Stephen Gardiner in France. If this is the end of Katherine, I must make sure he knows it from me.’
‘No more grovelling to Frenchmen for our salvation,’ Stephen says. Is that a grin? It is a wolfish one. Stephen is a merchant, and he values the Low Countries trade. When relations with the Emperor founder, England runs out of money. When the
Emperor is on our side, we grow rich. ‘We can patch all the quarrels,’ Stephen says. ‘Katherine was the cause of all. Her nephew will be as relieved as we are. He never wanted to invade us. And now he has enough to do with Milan. Let him scrap with the French if he must. Our king will be free. A free hand to do as he likes.’
That is what worries me, he thinks. This free hand. He makes his apologies to Stephen. Vaughan stops him. ‘Thomas. You will wreck yourself with this pace you keep up. Do you ever consider, that half your years be spent?’
‘Half? Stephen, I am fifty.’
‘I forget.’ A little laugh. ‘Fifty already? I don’t know you have changed much since ever I knew you.’
‘That is an illusion,’ he says. ‘But I promise to take a rest, when you do.’
In his cabinet it is warm. He closes the shutters, insulating himself from the white glare without. He sits down to write to Gardiner, commending him. The king is very pleased with his embassy to France. He is sending funds.
He puts down his pen. Whatever possessed Charles Brandon? He knows there has been gossip that Anne’s child is not Henry’s. There has even been gossip that she is not with child at all, only pretending; and it is true she seems very uncertain when it will be born. But he had thought these rumours were blowing from France into England; and what would they know at the French court? He has dismissed it as empty malice. It is what Anne attracts; that is her misfortune, or one of them.
Under his hand there is a letter from Calais, from Lord Lisle. He feels exhausted at the thought of it. Lisle is telling him all about his Christmas Day, from his first waking in the frosty dawn. At some point in the festivities, Lord Lisle received an insult: the Mayor of Calais kept him waiting. So he, in his turn, kept the Mayor waiting…and now both parties are writing to him: which is more important, Master Secretary, governor or mayor? Say it is me, say it is me!
Arthur Lord Lisle is the pleasantest man in the world; except, clearly, when the mayor cuts across him. But he is in debt to the king and has not paid a penny in seven years. He should perhaps do something about that; the treasurer of the king’s chamber has sent him a note about it. And on that subject…Harry Norris, by virtue of his position in the king’s immediate household, by some custom the origin and use of which he has never fathomed, is in charge of the secret funds which the king has stashed in his principal houses, for use in some exigency; it is not clear what would free up these funds, or where they come from, or how much coin is stored, or who has access if Norris were to…if Norris were to be off duty when the need arose. Or if Norris were to meet with some accident. Once again he lays down his quill. He starts to imagine accidents. He puts his head in his hands, fingertips over tired eyes. He sees Norris flying from his horse. Sees Norris tumbled in the mud. Says to himself, ‘Get back to your abacus, Cromwell.’
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