Wolf Hall tct-1

by Hilary Mante

  That is not precisely his memory of the conversation.

  ‘And does Call-Me think I would do it?’

  ‘Yes. He thinks you would do anything.’

  At New Year he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

  ‘From Venice!’ She is pleased. She holds them up, so the handles catch and splinter the light.

  He has brought another present, for her to pass on. It is wrapped in a piece of sky-blue silk. ‘It is for the little girl who always cries.’

  Anne's mouth opens a little. ‘Don't you know?’ Her eyes brim with black glee. ‘Come, so I can tell you in your ear.’ Her cheek brushes his. Her skin is faintly perfumed: amber, rose. ‘Sir John Seymour? Dear Sir John? Old Sir John, as people call him?’ Sir John is not, perhaps, more than a dozen years older than himself, but amiability can be ageing; with his sons Edward and Tom now the young men about court, he does give the impression of having eased into retirement. ‘Now we understand why we never see him,’ Anne murmurs. ‘Now we know what he does down in the country.’

  ‘Hunting, I thought.’

  ‘Yes, and he has netted Catherine Fillol, Edward's wife. They were taken in the act, but I cannot find out where, whether in her bed, or his, or in a meadow, a hayloft – yes, cold, to be sure, but they were keeping each other warm. And now Sir John has confessed it all, man to man, telling his son to his face that he's had her every week since the wedding, so that's about two years and, say, six months, so …’

  ‘You could round it off to a hundred and twenty times, assuming they abstain at the major feasts …’

  ‘Adulterers don't stop for Lent.’

  ‘Oh, and I thought they did.’

  ‘She's had two babies, so allow respite for her lying-in … And they are boys, you know. So Edward is …’ He imagines how Edward is. That pure hawk's profile. ‘He is cutting them out of the family. They are to be bastards. She, Catherine Fillol, she's to be put in a convent. I think he should put her in a cage! He is asking for an annulment. As for dear Sir John, I think we will not see him at court soon.’

  ‘Why are we whispering? I must be the last person in London to hear.’

  ‘The king hasn't heard. And you know how proper he is. So if someone is to come to him joking about it, let it not be me or you.’

  ‘And the daughter? Jane, is it?’

  Anne sniggers. ‘Pasty-face? Gone down to Wiltshire. Her best move would be to follow the sister-in-law into a nunnery. Her sister Lizzie married well, but no one wants Milksop, and now no one will.’ Her eyes fall on his present; she says, suddenly anxious, jealous, ‘What is it?’

  ‘Only a book of needlework patterns.’

  ‘As long as it is nothing to tax her wits. Why would you send her a present?’

  ‘I feel sorry for her.’ More now, of course.

  ‘Oh. You don't like her, do you?’ The correct answer is, no, my lady Anne, I only like you. ‘Because, is it proper for you to send her a present?’

  ‘It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.’

  She laughs. ‘They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.’

  * * *

  Thomas Hitton, a priest, was burned just as February went out; taken up by Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, as a smuggler of Tyndale's scriptures. Soon afterwards, rising from the bishop's frugal table, a dozen guests had collapsed, vomiting, rigid with pain, and been taken, pale and almost pulseless, to their beds and the ministrations of the doctors. Dr Butts said the broth had done it; from testimony of the waiting-boys, it was the only dish they had tasted in common.

  There are poisons nature herself brews, and he, before putting the bishop's cook to the torture, would have visited the kitchens and passed a skimmer over the stockpot. But no one else doubts there has been a crime.

  Presently the cook admits to adding to the broth a white powder, which someone gave him. Who? Just a man. A stranger who had said it would be a good joke, to give Fisher and his guests a purge.

  The king is beside himself: rage and fear. He blames heretics. Dr Butts, shaking his head, pulling his lower lip, says that poison is what Henry fears worse than Hell itself.

  Would you put poison in a bishop's dinner because a stranger told you it would be a laugh? The cook won't say more, or perhaps he has reached a stage beyond saying. The interrogation has been mismanaged then, he says to Butts; I wonder why. The doctor, a man who loves the gospel, laughs sourly and says, ‘If they wanted the man to talk, they should have called in Thomas More.’

  The word is that the Lord Chancellor has become a master in the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God. When heretics are taken, he stands by at the Tower while the torture is applied. It is reported that in his gatehouse at Chelsea he keeps suspects in the stocks, while he preaches at them and harries them: the name of your printer, the name of the master of the ship that brought these books into England. They say he uses the whip, the manacles and the torment-frame they call Skeffing-ton's Daughter. It is a portable device, into which a man is folded, knees to chest, with a hoop of iron across his back; by means of a screw, the hoop is tightened until his ribs crack. It takes art to make sure the man does not suffocate: for if he does, everything he knows is lost.

  Over the next week, two dinner guests die; Fisher himself rallies. It is possible, he thinks, that the cook did speak, but that what he said was not for the ears of the ordinary subject.

  He goes to see Anne. A thorn between two roses, she is sitting with her cousin Mary Shelton, and her brother's wife Jane, Lady Rochford. ‘My lady, do you know the king has devised a new form of death for Fisher's cook? He is to be boiled alive.’

  Mary Shelton gives a little gasp, and flushes as if some gallant had pinched her. Jane Rochford drawls, ‘Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare.’ She translates for Mary: ‘Apt.’

  Anne's face wears no expression at all. Even a man as literate as he can find nothing there to read. ‘How will they do it?’

  ‘I did not ask about the mechanics. Would you like me to enquire? I think it will involve hoisting him up in chains, so that the crowd can see his skin peeling off and hear him screaming.’

  To be fair to Anne, if you walked up to her and said, you are to be boiled, she would probably shrug: c'est la vie.

  Fisher is in bed for a month. When he is up and about he looks like a walking corpse. The intercession of angels and saints has not sufficed to heal his sore gut and put the flesh back on his bones.

  These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest. Christ's sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass. Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you: only the merits of the living Christ.

  March: Lucy Petyt, whose husband is a master grocer and a member of the Commons, comes to see him at Austin Friars. She is wearing black lambskin – imported, at a guess – and a modest grey worsted gown; Alice receives her gloves and surreptitiously slides in a finger to appraise the silk lining. He rises from his desk and takes her hands, drawing her to the fire and pressing upon her a cup of warm spiced wine. Her hands shake as she cradles the cup and she says, ‘I wish John had this. This wine. This fire.’

  It was snowing at dawn on the day of the raid on Lion's Quay, but soon a wintery sun was up, scouring windowpanes and casting the panelled rooms of city houses into sharp relief, ravines of shadows and cold floods of light. ‘That is what I cannot get out of my mind,’ Lucy says, ‘the cold.’ And More himself, his face muffled in furs, standing at the door with his officers, ready to search the warehouse and their own rooms. ‘I was the first there,’ she says, ‘and I kept him hovering with pleasantries – I called up, my dear, here is the Lord Cha
ncellor come on parliamentary business.’ The wine floods into her face, loosens her tongue. ‘I kept saying, have you breakfasted, sir, are you sure, and the servants were weaving under his feet, impeding him’ – she gives a little, mirthless, whooping laugh – ‘and all the time John was stowing his papers behind a panel –’

  ‘You did well, Lucy.’

  ‘When they walked upstairs John was ready for him – oh, Lord Chancellor, welcome to my poor house – but the poor hapless man, he had cast his Testament under his desk, my eye went straight to it, I wonder their eyes didn't follow mine.’

  An hour's search realised nothing; so are you sure, John, the Chancellor said, that you have none of these new books, because I was informed you had? (And Tyndale lying there, like a poison stain on the tiles.) I don't know who could have told you that, said John Petyt. I was proud of him, Lucy says, holding out her cup for more wine, I was proud that he spoke up. More said, it is true I have found nothing today, but you must go with these men. Mr Lieutenant, will you take him?

  John Petyt is not a young man. At More's direction he sleeps on a pad of straw laid on the flagstones; visitors have been admitted only so that they can take back to his neighbours the news of how ill he looks. ‘We have sent food and warm clothes,’ Lucy says, ‘and been turned away on the Lord Chancellor's orders.’

  ‘There's a tariff for bribes. You pay the gaolers. You need ready money?’

  ‘If I do I shall come to you.’ She puts the cup down on his desk. ‘He cannot lock us all up.’

  ‘He has prisons enough.’

  ‘For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.’ Her cheeks glow. She glances down to the drawings on his desk. ‘What are these, Master Cromwell?’

  ‘The plans for my garden. I am hoping to buy some of the houses at the back of here, I want the land.’

  She smiles. ‘A garden … It is the first pleasant thing I have heard of in a while.’

  ‘I hope you and John will come and enjoy it.’

  ‘And this … You are going to build a tennis court?’

  ‘If I get the ground. And here, you see, I mean to plant an orchard.’

  Tears well into her eyes. ‘Speak to the king. We count on you.’

  He hears a footstep: Johane's. Lucy's hand flies to her mouth. ‘God forgive me … For a moment I took you for your sister.’

  ‘The mistake is made,’ Johane says. ‘And sometimes persists. Mistress Petyt, I am very sorry to hear your husband is in the Tower. But you have brought this on yourselves. You people were the first to throw calumnies at the late cardinal. But now I suppose you wish you had him back.’

  Lucy goes out without a further word, only one long look over her shoulder. Outside he hears Mercy greet her; she will get a more sisterly word there. Johane walks to the fire and warms her hands. ‘What does she think you can do for her?’

  ‘Go to the king. Or to Lady Anne.’

  ‘And will you? Do not,’ she says, ‘do not do it.’ She scrubs away a tear with her knuckle; Lucy has upset her. ‘More will not rack him. Word will get out, and the city would not have it. But he may die anyway.’ She glances up at him. ‘She is quite old, you know, Lucy Petyt. She ought not to wear grey. Do you see how her cheeks have fallen in? She won't have any more children.’

  ‘I get the point,’ he says.

  Her hand clenches on her skirt. ‘But what if he does? What if he does rack him? And he gives names?’

  ‘What's that to me?’ He turns away. ‘He already knows my name.’

  He speaks to Lady Anne. What can I do? she asks, and he says, you know how to please the king, I suppose; she laughs and says, what, my maidenhead for a grocer?

  He speaks to the king when he is able, but the king gives him a blank stare and says the Lord Chancellor knows his business. Anne says, I have tried, I myself as you know have put Tyndale's books into his hand, his royal hand; could Tyndale, do you think, come back into this kingdom? In winter they negotiated, letters crossing the Channel. In spring, Stephen Vaughan, his man in Antwerp, set up a meeting: evening, the concealing dusk, a field outside the city walls. Cromwell's letter put into his hand, Tyndale wept: I want to come home, he said, I am sick of this, hunted city to city and house to house. I want to come home and if the king would just say yes, if he would say yes to the scriptures in our mother tongue, he can choose his translator, I will never write more. He can do with me what he pleases, torture me or kill me, but only let the people of England hear the gospel.

  Henry has not said no. He had not said, never. Though Tyndale's translation and any other translation is banned, he may, one day, permit a translation to be made by a scholar he approves. How can he say less? He wants to please Anne.

  But summer comes, and he, Cromwell, knows he has gone to the brink and must feel his way back. Henry is too timid, Tyndale too intransigent. His letters to Stephen sound a note of panic: abandon ship. He does not mean to sacrifice himself to Tyndale's truculence; dear God, he says, More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men. Tyndale will not come out in favour of Henry's divorce; nor, for that matter, will the monk Luther. You'd think they'd sacrifice a fine point of principle, to make a friend of the King of England: but no.

  And when Henry demands, ‘Who is Tyndale to judge me?’ Tyndale snaps a message back, quick as word can fly: one Christian man may judge another.

  ‘A cat may look at a king,’ he says. He is cradling Marlinspike in his arms, and talking to Thomas Avery, the boy he's teaching his trade. Avery has been with Stephen Vaughan, so he can learn the practice among the merchants over there, but any boat may bring him to Austin Friars with his little bag, inside it a woollen jerkin, a few shirts. When he comes clattering in he shouts out for Mercy, for Johane, for the little girls, for whom he brings comfits and novelties from street traders. On Richard, on Rafe, on Gregory if he's about, he lands a few punches by way of saying I'm back, but always he keeps his bag tucked under his arm.

  The boy follows him into his office. ‘Did you never feel homesick, master, when you were on your travels?’

  He shrugs: I suppose if I'd had a home. He puts the cat down, opens the bag. He fishes up on his finger a string of rosary beads; for show, says Avery, and he says, good boy. Marlinspike leaps on to his desk; he peers into the bag, dabbing with a paw. ‘The only mice in there are sugar ones.’ The boy pulls the cat's ears, tussles with him. ‘We don't have any little pets in Master Vaughan's house.’

  ‘He's all business, Stephen. And very stern, these days.’

  ‘He says, Thomas Avery, what time did you get in last night? Have you written to your master? Been to Mass? As if he cares for the Mass! It's all but, how's your bowels?’

  ‘Next spring you can come home.’

  As they speak he is unrolling the jerkin. With a shake he turns it inside out, and with a small pair of scissors begins to slit open a seam. ‘Neat stitching … Who did this?’

  The boy hesitates; he colours. ‘Jenneke.’

  He draws out from the lining the thin, folded paper. Unwraps it: ‘She must have good eyes.’

  ‘She does.’

  ‘And lovely eyes too?’ He glances up, smiling. The boy looks him in the face. For a moment he seems startled, and as if he will speak; then he drops his gaze and turns away.

  ‘Just tormenting you, Tom, don't take it to heart.’ He is reading Tyndale's letter. ‘If she is a good girl, and in Stephen's household, what harm?’

  ‘What does Tyndale say?’

  ‘You carried it without reading it?’

  ‘I would rather not know. In case.’

  In case you found yourself Thomas More's guest. He holds the letter in his left hand; his right hand curls loosely into a fist. ‘Let him come near my people. I'll drag him out of his court at Westminster an
d beat his head on the cobbles till I knock into him some sense of the love of God and what it means.’

  The boy grins and flops down on a stool. He, Cromwell, glances again at the letter. ‘Tyndale says, he thinks he can never come back, even if my lady Anne were queen … a project he does nothing to aid, I must say. He says he would not trust a safe conduct, even if the king himself were to sign it, while Thomas More is alive and in office, because More says you need not keep a promise you have made to a heretic. Here. You may as well read. Our Lord Chancellor respects neither ignorance nor innocence.’

  The boy flinches, but he takes the paper. What a world is this, where promises are not kept. He says gently, ‘Tell me who is Jenneke. Do you want me to write to her father for you?’

  ‘No.’ Avery looks up, startled; he is frowning. ‘No, she's an orphan. Master Vaughan keeps her at his own charge. We are all teaching her English.’

  ‘No money to bring you, then?’

  The boy looks confused. ‘I suppose Stephen will give her a dowry.’

  The day is too mild for a fire. The hour is too early for a candle. In lieu of burning, he tears up Tyndale's message. Marlin-spike, his ears pricked, chews a fragment of it. ‘Brother cat,’ he says. ‘He ever loved the scriptures.’

  Scriptura sola. Only the gospel will guide and console you. No use praying to a carved post or lighting a candle to a painted face. Tyndale says ‘gospel’ means good news, it means singing, it means dancing: within limits, of course. Thomas Avery says, ‘Can I truly come home next spring?’

  John Petyt at the Tower is to be allowed to sleep in a bed: no chance, though, that he will go home to Lion's Quay.

  Cranmer said to him, when they were talking late one night, St Augustine says we need not ask where our home is, because in the end we all come home to God.

  Lent saps the spirits, as of course it is designed to do. Going in again to Anne, he finds the boy Mark, crouched over his lute and picking at something doleful; he flicks a finger against his head as he breezes past, and says, ‘Cheer it up, can't you?’