by Hilary Mante
Not a stitch have the women added to their sewing since he has been in the room.
‘One may resume?’ he asks, persuading her. ‘There is a moment left?’
‘Oh yes,’ Anne says. ‘But a moment only: in Lent I ration my patience.’
He tells her to dismiss the slanderers who claim that the cardinal obstructed her cause. He tells her how it distresses the cardinal that the king should not have his heart's desire, which was ever the cardinal's desire too. He tells her how all the king's subjects repose their hopes in her, for an heir to the throne; and how he is sure they are right to do so. He reminds her of the many gracious letters she has written to the cardinal in times past: all of which he has on file.
‘Very nice,’ she says, when he stops. ‘Very nice, Master Cremuel, but try again. One thing. One simple thing we asked of the cardinal, and he would not. One simple thing.’
‘You know it was not simple.’
‘Perhaps I am a simple person,’ Anne says. ‘Do you feel I am?’
‘You may be. I hardly know you.’
The reply incenses her. He sees her sister smirk. You may go, Anne says: and Mary jumps up, and follows him out.
Once again Mary's cheeks are flushed, her lips are parted. She's brought her sewing with her, which he thinks is strange; but perhaps, if she leaves it behind, Anne pulls the stitches out. ‘Out of breath again, Lady Carey?’
‘We thought she might run up and slap you. Will you come again? Shelton and I can't wait.’
‘She can stand it,’ he says, and Mary says, indeed, she likes a skirmish with someone on her own level. What are you working there? he asks, and she shows him. It is Anne's new coat of arms. On everything, I suppose, he says, and she smiles broadly, oh yes, her petticoats, her handkerchiefs, her coifs and her veils; she has garments that no one ever wore before, just so she can have her arms sewn on, not to mention the wall hangings, the table napkins …
‘And how are you?’
She looks down, glance swivelling away from him. ‘Worn down. Frayed a little, you might say. Christmas was …’
‘They quarrelled. So one hears.’
‘First he quarrelled with Katherine. Then he came here for sympathy. Anne said, what! I told you not to argue with Katherine, you know you always lose. If he were not a king,’ she says with relish, ‘one could pity him. For the dog's life they lead him.’
‘There have been rumours that Anne –’
‘Yes, but she's not. I would be the first to know. If she thickened by an inch, it would be me who let out her clothes. Besides, she can't, because they don't. They haven't.’
‘She'd tell you?’
‘Of course – out of spite!’ Still Mary will not meet his eyes. But she seems to feel she owes him information. ‘When they are alone, she lets him unlace her bodice.’
‘At least he doesn't call you to do it.’
‘He pulls down her shift and kisses her breasts.’
‘Good man if he can find them.’
Mary laughs; a boisterous, unsisterly laugh. It must be audible within, because almost at once the door opens and the small hiding girl manoeuvres herself around it. Her face is grave, her reserve complete; her skin is so fine that it is almost translucent. ‘Lady Carey,’ she says, ‘Lady Anne wants you.’
She speaks their names as if she is making introductions between two cockroaches.
Mary snaps, oh, by the saints! and turns on her heel, whipping her train behind her with the ease of long practice.
To his surprise, the small pale girl catches his glance; behind the retreating back of Mary Boleyn, she raises her own eyes to Heaven.
Walking away – eight antechambers back to the rest of his day – he knows that Anne has stepped forward to a place where he can see her, the morning light lying along the curve of her throat. He sees the thin arch of her eyebrow, her smile, the turn of her head on her long slender neck. He sees her speed, intelligence and rigour. He didn't think she would help the cardinal, but what do you lose by asking? He thinks, it is the first proposition I have put to her; probably not the last.
There was a moment when Anne gave him all her attention: her skewering dark glance. The king, too, knows how to look; blue eyes, their mildness deceptive. Is this how they look at each other? Or in some other way? For a second he understands it; then he doesn't. He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn't. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
In Lent, there are butchers who will sell you red meat, if you know where to go. At Austin Friars he goes down to talk to his kitchen staff, and says to his chief man, ‘The cardinal is sick, he is dispensed from Lent.’
His cook takes off his hat. ‘By the Pope?’
‘By me.’ He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, ‘Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?’
A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, ‘At this moment, master, I would have to say …’
‘No, but suppose I were making my way to Gray's Inn … Can you picture to yourself? Carrying a folio of papers and an inkhorn?’
‘I do suppose a clerk would be carrying those.’
‘So you can't picture it?’
Thurston takes off his hat again, and turns it inside out. He looks at it as if his brains might be inside it, or at least some prompt as to what to say next. ‘I see how you would look like a lawyer. Not like a murderer, no. But if you will forgive me, master, you always look like a man who knows how to cut up a carcase.’
He has the kitchen make beef olives for the cardinal, stuffed with sage and marjoram, neatly trussed and placed side by side in trays, so that the cooks at Richmond need do nothing but bake them. Show me where it says in the Bible, a man shall not eat beef olives in March.
He thinks of Lady Anne, her unslaked appetite for a fight; the sad ladies about her. He sends those ladies some flat baskets of small tarts, made of preserved oranges and honey. To Anne herself he sends a dish of almond cream. It is flavoured with rose-water and decorated with the preserved petals of roses, and with candied violets. He is above riding across the country, carrying food himself; but not that much above it. It's not so many years since the Frescobaldi kitchen in Florence; or perhaps it is, but his memory is clear, exact. He was clarifying calf's-foot jelly, chatting away in his mixture of French, Tuscan and Putney, when somebody shouted, ‘Tommaso, they want you upstairs.’ His movements were unhurried as he nodded to a kitchen child, who brought him a basin of water. He washed his hands, dried them on a linen cloth. He took off his apron and hung it on a peg. For all he knows, it is there still.
He saw a young boy – younger than him – on hands and knees, scrubbing the steps. He sang as he worked:
‘Scaramella va alla guerra
Colla lancia et la rotella
La zombero boro borombetta,
La boro borombo …’
‘If you please, Giacomo,’ he said. To let him pass, the boy moved aside, into the curve of the wall. A shift of the light wiped the curiosity from his face, blanking it, fading his past into the past, washing the future clean. Scaramella is off to war … But I've been to war, he thought.
He had gone upstairs. In his ears the roll and stutter of the song's military drum. He had gone upstairs and never come
down again. In a corner of the Frescobaldi counting house, a table was waiting for him. Scaramella fa la gala, he hummed. He had taken his place. Sharpened a quill. His thoughts bubbled and swirled, Tuscan, Putney, Castilian oaths. But when he committed his thoughts to paper they came out in Latin and perfectly smooth.
Even before he walks in from the kitchens at Austin Friars, the women of the house know that he has been to see Anne.
‘So,’ Johane demands. ‘Tall or short?’
‘Neither.’
‘I'd heard she was very tall. Sallow, is she not?’
‘Yes, sallow.’
‘They say she is graceful. Dances well.’
‘We did not dance.’
Mercy says, ‘But what do you think? A friend to the gospel?’
He shrugs. ‘We did not pray.’
Alice, his little niece: ‘What was she wearing?’
Ah, I can tell you that; he prices and sources her, hood to hem, foot to fingertip. For her headdress Anne affects the French style, the round hood flattering the fine bones of her face. He explains this, and though his tone is cool, mercantile, the women somehow do not appreciate it.
‘You don't like her, do you?’ Alice says, and he says it's not for him to have an opinion; or you either, Alice, he says, hugging her and making her giggle. The child Jo says, our master is in a good mood. This squirrel trim, Mercy says, and he says, Calabrian. Alice says, oh, Calabrian, and wrinkles her nose; Johane remarks, I must say, Thomas, it seems you got close.
‘Are her teeth good?’ Mercy says.
‘For God's sake, woman: when she sinks them into me, I'll let you know.’
When the cardinal had heard that the Duke of Norfolk was coming out to Richmond to tear him with his teeth, he had laughed and said, ‘Marry, Thomas, time to be going.’
But to go north, the cardinal needs funding. The problem is put to the king's council, who fall out, and continue the quarrel in his hearing. ‘After all,’ Charles Brandon says, ‘one can't let an archbishop creep away to his enthronement like a servant who's stolen the spoons.’
‘He's done more than steal the spoons,’ Norfolk says. ‘He's eaten the dinner that would have fed all England. He's filched the tablecloth, by God, and drunk the cellar dry.’
The king can be elusive. One day when he thinks he has an appointment to meet Henry, he gets Master Secretary instead. ‘Sit down,’ Gardiner says. ‘Sit down and listen to me. Contain yourself in patience, while I put you straight on a few matters.’
He watches him ranging to and fro, Stephen the noonday devil. Gardiner is a man with bones loose-jointed, his lines flowing with menace; he has great hairy hands, and knuckles which crack when he folds his right fist into his left palm.
He takes away the menace conveyed, and the message. Pausing in the doorway, he says mildly, ‘Your cousin sends greetings.’
Gardiner stares at him. His eyebrows bristle, like a dog's hackles. He thinks that Cromwell presumes –
‘Not the king,’ he says soothingly. ‘Not His Majesty. I mean your cousin Richard Williams.’
Aghast, Gardiner says, ‘That old tale!’
‘Oh, come,’ he says. ‘It's no disgrace to be a royal bastard. Or so we think, in my family.’
‘In your family? What grasp have they on propriety? I have no interest in this young person, recognise no kinship with him, and I will do nothing for him.’
‘Truly, you don't need to. He calls himself Richard Cromwell now.’ As he is going – really going, this time – he adds, ‘Don't let it keep you awake, Stephen. I have been into the matter. You may be related to Richard, but you are not related to me.’
He smiles. Inside, he is beside himself with rage, running with it, as if his blood were thin and full of dilute venom like the uncoloured blood of a snake. As soon as he gets home to Austin Friars, he hugs Rafe Sadler and makes his hair stand up in spikes. ‘Heaven direct me: boy or hedgehog? Rafe, Richard, I am feeling penitent.’
‘It is the season,’ Rafe says.
‘I want,’ he says, ‘to become perfectly calm. I want to be able to get into the coop without ruffling the chickens' feathers. I want to be less like Uncle Norfolk, and more like Marlinspike.’
He has a long soothing talk in Welsh with Richard, who laughs at him because old words are fading from his memory, and he is forever sliding through bits of English, with a sly borderlands intonation. He gives his little nieces the pearl and coral bracelets he bought them weeks ago, but forgot to give. He goes down to the kitchen and makes suggestions, all of them cheerful.
He calls his household staff together, his clerks. ‘We need to plan it,’ he says, ‘how the cardinal will be made comfortable on the road north. He wants to go slowly so the people can admire him. He needs to arrive in Peterborough for Holy Week, and from there shift by stages to Southwell, where he will plan his further progress to York. The archbishop's palace at Southwell has good rooms, but still we may need to get builders in …’
George Cavendish has told him that the cardinal has taken to spending time in prayer. There are some monks at Richmond whose company he has sought; they spell out to him the value of thorns in the flesh and salt in the wound, the merits of bread and water and the sombre delights of self-flagellation. ‘Oh, that settles it,’ he says, annoyed. ‘We have to get him on the road. He'd be better off in Yorkshire.’
He says to Norfolk, ‘Well, my lord, how shall we do this? Do you want him gone or not? Yes? Then come to the king with me.’
Norfolk grunts. Messages are sent. A day or so later, they find themselves together in an antechamber. They wait. Norfolk paces. ‘Oh, by St Jude!’ the duke says. ‘Shall we get some fresh air? Or don't you lawyers need it?’
They stroll in the gardens; or, he strolls, the duke stamps. ‘When do the flowers come out?’ the duke says. ‘When I was a boy, we never had flowers. It was Buckingham, you know, who brought in this knot garden sort of stuff. Oh dear, it was fancy!’
The Duke of Buckingham, keen gardener, had his head cut off for treason. That was 1521: less than ten years ago. It seems sad to mention it now, in the presence of the spring: singing from every bush, every bough.
A summons is received. As they proceed to their interview, the duke baulks and jibs; his eye rolls and his nostrils distend, his breath comes short. When the duke lays a hand on his shoulder, he is forced to slow his pace, and they scuffle along – he resisting his impulse to pull away – like two war veterans in a beggars' procession. Scaramella va alla guerra … Norfolk's hand is trembling.
But it is only when they get into the presence that he fully understands how it rattles the old duke to be in a room with Henry Tudor. The gilded ebullience makes him shrink inside his clothes. Henry greets them cordially. He says it is a wonderful day and pretty much a wonderful world. He spins around the room, arms wide, reciting some verses of his own composition. He will talk about anything except the cardinal. Frustrated, Norfolk turns a dusky red, and begins to mutter. Dismissed, they are backing out. Henry calls, ‘Oh, Cromwell …’
He and the duke exchange glances. ‘By the Mass …’ mutters the duke.
Hand behind his back, he indicates, be gone, my lord Norfolk, I'll catch up with you later.
Henry stands with arms folded, eyes on the ground. He says nothing till he, Cromwell, has come close. ‘A thousand pounds?’ Henry whispers.
It is on the tip of his tongue to say, that will be a start on the ten thousand which, to the best of my knowledge and belief, you have owed the Cardinal of York for a decade now.
He doesn't say it, of course. At such moments, Henry expects you to fall to your knees – duke, earl, commoner, light and heavy, old and young. He does it; scar tissue pulls; few of us, by our forties, are not carrying injuries.
The king signals, you can get up. He adds, his tone curious, ‘The Duke of Norfolk shows you many marks of friendship and favour.’
The hand on the shoulder, he means: the minute and unexpected vibration of ducal palm against p
lebeian muscle and bone. ‘The duke is careful to preserve all distinctions of rank.’ Henry seems relieved.
An unwelcome thought creeps into his head: what if you, Henry Tudor, were to be taken ill and fall at my feet? Am I allowed to pick you up, or must I send for an earl to do it? Or a bishop?
Henry walks away. He turns and says, in a small voice, ‘Every day I miss the Cardinal of York.’ There is a pause. He whispers, take the money with our blessing. Don't tell the duke. Don't tell anyone. Ask your master to pray for me. Tell him it is the best I can do.
The thanks he makes, still from his kneeling situation, is eloquent and extensive. Henry looks at him bleakly and says, dear God, Master Cromwell, you can talk, can't you?
He goes out, face composed, fighting the impulse to smile broadly. Scaramella fa la gala … ‘Every day I miss the Cardinal of York.’
Norfolk says, what, what, what did he say? Oh, nothing, he says. Just some special hard words he wants me to convey to the cardinal.
* * *
The itinerary is drawn up. The cardinal's effects are put on coastal barges, to be taken to Hull and go overland from there. He himself has beaten the bargees down to a reasonable rate.
He tells Richard, you know, a thousand pounds isn't much when you have a cardinal to move. Richard asks, ‘How much of your own money is sunk in this enterprise?’
Some debts should never be tallied, he says. ‘I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.’
To Cavendish he says, ‘How many servants is he taking?’
‘Only a hundred and sixty.’
‘Only.’ He nods. ‘Right.’
Hendon. Royston. Huntingdon. Peterborough. He has men riding ahead, with precise instructions.
That last night, Wolsey gives him a package. Inside it is a small and hard object, a seal or ring. ‘Open it when I'm gone.’
People keep walking in and out of the cardinal's private chamber, carrying chests and bundles of papers. Cavendish wanders through, holding a silver monstrance.
