‘Now,’ he says, turning back to the company, ‘we had better get poor Mark to the Tower.’ The boy has shrunk to his knees, and is begging not to be put back with Christmas. ‘Give him a rest,’ he says to Richard, ‘in a room clear of phantoms. Offer him food. When he is coherent, take his formal statement, and have it well witnessed before he leaves here. If he proves difficult, leave him to Christophe and Master Wriothesley, it is business more fit for them than for you.’ Cromwells do not exhaust themselves on menial work; if they once did, that day has passed. He says, ‘If Mark tries to renege once he is out of here, they will know what to do at the Tower. Once you have his confession secure, and all the names you need, go down to the king at Greenwich. He will be expecting you. Trust the message to no one. Drop the word in his ear yourself.’
Richard pulls Mark Smeaton to his feet, handling him as one might handle a puppet: and with no more ill-will than one would spare for a marionette. Through his mind darts, unprompted, the image of old Bishop Fisher tottering to the scaffold, skeletal and obstinate.
It is already nine in the morning. The dews of May Day have burned from the grass. All over England, green boughs are carried in from the woods. He is hungry. He could eat a cut of mutton: with samphire, if any has been sent up from Kent. He needs to sit down for his barber. He has not perfected the art of dictating letters while being shaved. Perhaps I’ll grow my beard, he thinks. It would save time. Only then, Hans would insist on committing another portrait against me.
At Greenwich by this time, they will be sanding the arena for the jousts. Christophe says, ‘Will the king fight today? Will he fight the Lord Norris and slay him?’
No, he thinks, he will leave that to me. Past the workshops, the store rooms and the jetties, the natural haunt of men such as himself, the pages will be placing silk cushions for the ladies in the towers that overlook the tilt yard. Canvas and rope and tar give way to damask and fine linen. The oil and stench and din, the smell of the river, give way to the perfume of rosewater and the murmurings of the maids as they dress the queen for the day ahead. They sweep away the remnants of her small meal, the crumbs of white bread, the slices of sweet preserves. They bring her petticoats and kirtles and sleeves and she makes choice. She is laced and tied and trussed, she is polished and flounced and studded with gems.
The king – it would be three or four years back and to justify his first divorce – put out a book called A Glass of the Truth. Parts of it, they say, he wrote himself.
Now Anne Boleyn calls for her glass. She sees herself: her jaundiced skin, lean throat, collarbones like twin blades.
1 May 1536: this, surely, is the last day of knighthood. What happens after this – and such pageants will continue – will be no more than a dead parade with banners, a contest of corpses. The king will leave the field. The day will end, broken off, snapped like a shinbone, spat out like smashed teeth. George Boleyn, brother to the queen, will enter the silken pavilion to disarm, laying aside the favours and tokens, the scraps of ribbon the ladies have given him to carry. When he lifts off his helmet he will hand it to his squire, and see the world with misted eyes, falcons emblazoned, leopards couchant, claws, talons, teeth: he will feel his head on his shoulders wobbling as soft as jelly.
Whitehall: that night, knowing Norris is in custody, he goes to the king. A snatched word with Rafe in an outer room: how is he?
‘Well,’ Rafe says, ‘you would expect him to be storming about like Edgar the Peaceable, looking for someone to stick with a javelin.’ They exchange a smile, remembering the supper table at Wolf Hall. ‘But he is calm. Surprisingly so. As if he knew, long ago. In his heart. And by his express wish he is alone.’
Alone: but who would he be with? Useless to expect Gentle Norris whispering towards him. Norris was keeper of the king’s private purse; now one imagines the king’s money loose and rolling down the highway. The angels’ harps are slashed, and discord is general; purse strings are cut, and the silk ties of garments snapped to spill flesh.
As he stands on his threshold, Henry turns his eyes: ‘Crumb,’ he says heavily. ‘Come and sit.’ He waves away the attentions of the groom who hovers by the door. He has wine and pours it himself. ‘Your nephew will have told you what passed at the tilting ground.’ He says softly, ‘He is a good boy, Richard, is he not?’ His gaze is distant, as if he would like to wander off the point. ‘I was among the spectators today, not an actor at all. She of course was as ever: at ease among her women, her countenance very haughty, but then smiling and stopping to converse with this gentleman or that.’ He sniggers, a flat, incredulous sound. ‘Oh yes, she has had some conversation.’
Then the bouts began, the heralds calling out each rider. Henry Norris had some ill-luck. His horse, startled by something, jibbed and laid back its ears, danced and tried to shed its rider. (Horse can fail. Boys can fail. Nerve can fail.) The king sent a message down to Norris, advising him to retire; a substitute would be sent to him, one of the king’s own string of fighting horses, still kept trimmed and tacked in case it should be his sudden pleasure to take the field.
‘It was a usual courtesy,’ Henry explains; and shifts in his chair, like one called to justify himself. He nods: of course, sir. Whether Norris did in fact return to the lists, he is unsure. It was mid-afternoon when Richard Cromwell made his way through the crowds to the gallery, and knelt before the king; and at a word, approached to whisper in his ear. ‘He explained how the musician Mark was taken,’ the king says. ‘He had confessed all, your nephew said. What, confessed freely? I asked him. Your nephew said, nothing was done against Mark. Not a hair of his head harmed.’
He thinks, but I shall have to burn the peacock wings.
‘And then…’ the king says. For a moment he baulks, as Norris’s horse did: and falls silent.
He will not continue. But he, Cromwell, already knows what occurred. Upon hearing the word from Richard, the king rose from his place. His servants eddied about him. He signed to a page, ‘Find out Henry Norris, and tell him I ride to Whitehall, now. I want his company.’
He gave no explanation. He did not tarry. He did not speak to the queen. But covered the miles back, Norris beside him: Norris puzzled, Norris astonished, Norris almost slipping from the saddle with fright. ‘I taxed him with the matter,’ Henry says. ‘With the boy Mark’s confession. He would say nothing, but of his innocence.’ Again that flat, scornful little laugh. ‘But since then, Master Treasurer has questioned him. Norris admits it, he says he loved her. But when Fitz put it to him that he is an adulterer, that he desired my death so he could marry her, he said no, no and no. You will put questions to him, Cromwell, but when you do, tell him again what I told him as we rode. There can be mercy. There may be mercy, if he confesses and names the others.’
‘We have names from Mark Smeaton.’
‘I would not trust him,’ Henry says contemptuously. ‘I would not trust some little fiddle-player with the lives of men I have called my friends. I await some corroboration of his story. We will see what the lady says when she is taken.’
‘Their confessions will be enough, sir, surely. You know who is suspected. Let me take them all in ward.’
But Henry’s mind has strayed. ‘Cromwell, what does it mean, when a woman turns herself about and about in the bed? Offering herself, this way and that? What would put it into her head to do such a thing?’
There is only one answer. Experience, sir. Of men’s desires and her own. He does not need to say it.
‘One way is apt for the procreation of children,’ Henry says. ‘The man lies on her. Holy church sanctions it, on the permitted days. Some churchmen say that though it is a grievous thing for a brother to copulate with a sister, it is still more grievous should a woman sit astride a man, or should a man approach a woman as if she were a bitch. For these practices, and others I will not name, Sodom was destroyed. I fear that any Christian man or woman who is in thrall to such vices will incur a judgement: what do you say? Where would a woman, no
t bred in a whorehouse, get knowledge of such things?’
‘Women talk among themselves,’ he says. ‘As men do.’
‘But a sober, a godly matron, whose only duty is to get a child?’
‘I suppose she might want to pique her good man’s interest, sir. So he does not venture to Paris Garden or some other ill-reputed place. If, let’s say, they were long married.’
‘But three years? Is that long?’
‘No, sir.’
‘It is not even three.’ For a moment the king has forgotten that we are not talking about himself, but about some notional, God-fearing Englishman, some forester or ploughman. ‘Where would she get the idea?’ he persists. ‘How would she know the man would like it?’
He bites back the obvious answer: perhaps she talked to her sister, who was in your bed first. Because now the king has wandered away from Whitehall and back to the country, to the blunt-fingered cottar and his wife in apron and cap: the man who crosses himself and asks leave of the Pope before he pinches out the light and sombrely tups his spouse, her knees to the roof beams and his backside bobbing. Afterwards, this godly couple, they kneel by their bed: they join in prayer.
But one day when the cottar is about his employment, the woodsman’s little apprentice sneaks in and takes out his tool: now Joan, he says, now Jenny, bend over the table and let me teach you a lesson your mother never taught you. And so she trembles; and so he teaches her; and when the honest cottar comes home and mounts her that night, she thinks with every thrust and grunt of a newer way of doing things, a sweeter way, a dirtier way, a way that makes her eyes widen with surprise and another man’s name jerk out of her mouth. Sweet Robin, she says. Sweet Adam. And when her husband recalls that his own name is Henry, does that not cause him to scratch his pate?
It is dusk now, outside the king’s windows; his kingdom is growing chilly, his councillor too. They need lights and a fire. He opens the door and at once the room is full of folk: around the king’s person, the grooms dart and swerve like early swallows in the twilight. Henry barely notices their presence. He says, ‘Cromwell, do you suppose the rumours did not come to me? When every ale wife knew them? I am a simple man, you see. Anne told me she was untouched and I chose to believe her. She lied to me for seven years that she was a maid pure and chaste. If she could carry on such a deceit, what else might she be capable of? You can arrest her tomorrow. And her brother. Some of these acts alleged against her are not fit for discussion among decent people, lest they are moved by examples to sins they would not otherwise have dreamed to exist. I ask you and all my councillors to be close and discreet.’
‘It is easy,’ he says, ‘to be deceived about a woman’s history.’
For suppose Joan, suppose Jenny, had another life before her cottage life? You thought she grew up in a clearing at the other side of the wood. Now you hear, from reliable sources, that she came to womanhood in a harbour town, and danced naked on a table for sailors.
Did Anne, he will wonder later, understand what was coming? You would have thought that at Greenwich she would have been praying, or writing letters to her friends. Instead, if reports are true, she has walked blindly through her last morning, doing what she always used to do: she has been to the tennis courts, where she placed bets on the outcome of the matches. Late morning, a messenger came to ask her to appear before the king’s council, sitting in His Majesty’s absence: in the absence, too, of Master Secretary, who is busy elsewhere. The councillors told her that she would be charged with adultery with Henry Norris and Mark Smeaton: and with one other gentleman, for the moment unnamed. She must go to the Tower, pending proceedings against her. Her manner, Fitzwilliam tells him later, was incredulous and haughty. You cannot put a queen on trial, she said. Who is competent to try her? But then, when she was told that Mark and Henry Norris had confessed, she burst into tears.
From the council chamber, she is escorted to her own rooms, to dine. At two o’clock, he is heading there, with Audley the Lord Chancellor, and Fitzwilliam by his side. Mr Treasurer’s affable face is creased with strain. ‘I was not happy this morning in council, to hear her told so bluntly that Harry Norris has confessed. He confessed to me he loved her. He didn’t confess to any act.’
‘So what did you do, Fitz?’ he asks him. ‘Did you speak up?’
‘No,’ Audley says. ‘He fidgeted and stared into the middle distance. Didn’t you, Master Treasurer?’
‘Cromwell!’ It is Norfolk who is roaring, swatting his way through the throng of courtiers towards him. ‘Now, Cromwell! I hear the singer has sung to your tune. What did you do to him? I wish I had been there. This will furnish a pretty ballad from the printer’s shop. Henry fingering the lute, while the lutenist fingers his wife’s quim.’
‘If you hear of any such printer,’ he says, ‘tell me and I will close him down.’
Norfolk says, ‘But listen to me, Cromwell. I do not intend this bag of bones to be the ruin of my noble house. If she has misconducted herself, it must not bear on the Howards, only the Boleyns. And I don’t need Wiltshire finished off. I just want his foolish title taken off him. Monseigneur, if you please.’ The duke bares his teeth in glee. ‘I want to see him diminished, after his pride these past years. You will recall that I never promoted this marriage. No, Cromwell, that was you. I always warned Henry Tudor of her character. Perhaps this will teach him that in the future he should listen to me.’
‘My lord,’ he says, ‘do you have the warrant?’
Norfolk flourishes a parchment. When they enter Anne’s rooms, her gentlemen servants are just rolling away the great tablecloth, and she is still seated under her canopy of estate. She is wearing crimson velvet and she turns – the bag of bones – the perfect ivory oval of her face. Hard to think she has eaten anything; there is a fretful silence in the room, strain visible on every face. They must wait, the councillors, until the rolling is performed, till the folding of the napery is accomplished, and the correct reverences made.
‘So you are here, uncle,’ she says. Her voice is small. One by one she acknowledges them. ‘Lord Chancellor. Master Treasurer.’ Other councillors are pushing in behind them. Many people, it seems, have dreamed of this moment; they have dreamed that Anne would plead with them on her knees. ‘My lord Oxford,’ she says. ‘And William Sandys. How are you, Sir William?’ It is as if she finds it soothing, to name them all. ‘And you, Cremuel.’ She leans forward. ‘You know, I created you.’
‘And he created you, madam,’ Norfolk snaps. ‘And be sure he repents him of it.’
‘But I was sorry first,’ Anne says. She laughs. ‘And I am sorry more.’
‘Ready to go?’ Norfolk says.
‘I do not know how to be ready,’ she says simply.
‘Just come with us,’ he says: he, Cromwell. He holds out a hand.
‘I would rather not go to the Tower.’ The same small voice, empty of everything except politeness. ‘I would rather go to see the king. Can I not be taken up to Whitehall?’
She knows the answer. Henry never says goodbye. Once, on a summer’s day of still heat, he rode away from Windsor and left Katherine behind; he never saw her again.
She says, ‘Surely, masters, you will not take me like this, as I stand? I have no necessities, not a change of shift, and I should have my women with me.’
‘Your clothes will be brought to you,’ he says. ‘And women to serve you.’
‘I had rather have my own ladies of my privy chamber.’
Glances are exchanged. She seems not to know it is these women who have given evidence against her, these women who crowd around Master Secretary everywhere he moves, keen to tell him anything he wants, desperate to protect themselves. ‘Well, if I cannot have my choice…some persons at least from my household. So I can keep my proper state.’
Fitz clears his throat. ‘Madam, your household is to be dissolved.’
She flinches. ‘Cremuel will find them places,’ she says lightly. ‘He is good about servants.’
Norfolk nudges the Lord Chancellor. ‘Because he grew up with them, eh?’ Audley turns his face away: he is always Cromwell’s man.
‘I do not think I shall come with any of you,’ she says. ‘I will go with William Paulet, if he is pleased to escort me, because in the council this morning you all abused me, but Paulet was a very gentleman.’
‘By God,’ Norfolk chuckles. ‘Go with Paulet, is it? I’ll lock you under my arm and drag you to the boat with your arse in the air. Is that what you want?’
With one accord, the councillors turn on him, and glare. ‘Madam,’ Audley says, ‘be assured, you will be handled as befits your status.’
She stands. Gathers her crimson skirts, raising them, fastidious, as if she will not now touch the common ground. ‘Where is my lord brother?’
Last seen at Whitehall, she is told: which is true, though by now the guards may have come for him. ‘And my father Monseigneur? This is what I do not understand,’ she says. ‘Why is Monseigneur not here with me? Why does he not sit down with you gentlemen and resolve this?’
‘No doubt there will be resolution hereafter.’ The Lord Chancellor is almost purring. ‘Everything will be provided to keep you in comfort. It is arranged.’
‘But arranged for how long?’
No one answers her. Outside the chamber, William Kingston waits for her, the Constable of the Tower. Kingston is a huge man, the king’s own build; he conducts himself nobly, but his office, and his appearance, have struck terror into the hearts of the strongest men. He remembers Wolsey, when Kingston went up-country to arrest him: the cardinal’s legs went from under him, and he had to sit down on a chest to recover. We should have left Kingston at home, he whispers to Audley, and taken her ourselves. Audley murmurs, ‘We could have, certainly; but don’t you think, Master Secretary, that you’re frightening enough on your own account?’
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