Wolf Hall tct-1

by Hilary Mante

  Some forgivable exaggeration here. King Henry had not been in that cell, but King Richard had; it was he who oversaw the heating of the knife, and listened, his head tilted slightly, as Henry Wyatt screamed; who sidled away, fastidious, from the odour of burning flesh, and ordered the knife to be reheated, and applied again.

  They say that Little Bilney, the night before he was burned, held his fingers in a candle flame, and called on Jesus to teach him how to endure the pain. That was not wise, to maim yourself before the event; wise or not, he thinks of it. ‘Now, Sir Henry,’ Mercy says, ‘you must tell us the lion tale, because we won't sleep if we don't hear it.’

  ‘Well, really that is my son's tale, he should be here.’

  ‘If he were,’ Richard says, ‘the ladies would all be making goggle eyes at him, and sighing – yes you would, Alice – and they would not care about any lion tale.’

  When Sir Henry was mended after his imprisonment he became a powerful man at court, and an admirer sent him a present of a lion cub. At Allington Castle I brought her up like my child, he says, till, as a girl will, she developed a mind of her own. One careless day, and mine the fault, she came out of her cage. Leontina, I called to her, stand till I lead you back; but then she crouched, quite silent, and sighted me, and her eyes were like fire. It was then I realised, he says, that I was not her father, for all that I had cherished her: I was her dinner.

  Alice says, a hand to her mouth, ‘Sir Henry, you thought your last hour had come.’

  ‘Indeed I did, and so it had, if it had not been that my son Thomas chanced to step into the courtyard. In a second he saw my peril, and called out to her, Leontina, here to me; and she turned her head. In that moment, her glare distracted, I stepped back a pace, and another. Look at me, Thomas called. Now that day he was dressed very brightly, with long fluttering sleeves, and a loose gown the wind got inside, and his hair being fair, you know, which he wore long, he must have looked like a flame, I think, tall and flickering in the sun, and for a moment she stood, puzzling, and I stepped away, back and back …’

  Leontina turns; she crouches; leaving the father, she begins to stalk the son. You can see her padding feet and feel the stink of blood on her breath. (Meanwhile he, Henry Wyatt, in a cold lather of fear, backs off, backs away, in the direction of help.) In his soft enchanting voice, in loving murmurs, in the accents of prayer, Tom Wyatt speaks to the lion, asking St Francis to open her brutish heart to grace. Leontina watches. She listens. She opens her mouth. She roars: ‘What does she say?’

  ‘Fee, fi, fo and fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.’

  Tom Wyatt stands still as a statue. Grooms with nets creep across the court. Leontina is within feet of him, but once again she checks, listening. She stands, uncertain, ears twitching. He can see the pink drool from her jaw and smell her musty fur. She crouches back on her haunches. He scents her breath. She is ready to spring. He sees her muscles quiver, her jaw stretch; she leaps – but she spins in the air, an arrow stinging her ribs. She whirls, smashes at the barb, cries out, moans; another arrow thuds into her dense flank, and as she circles again, whining, the nets drop over her. Sir Henry, striding calmly towards her, places his third arrow in her throat.

  Even as she dies she roars. She coughs blood and strikes out. One of the grooms bears her claw mark to this day. Her pelt can be seen on the wall at Allington. ‘And you will come and visit me, young ladies,’ Sir Henry says. ‘And you can see what a brute she was.’

  ‘Tom's prayers were not answered,’ Richard says, smiling. ‘St Francis did nothing about it, so far as I can see.’

  ‘Sir Henry,’ Jo pulls at his sleeve, ‘you have not said the best part.’

  ‘No. I forgot. So then my son Tom walks away, the hero of the hour, and is sick into a bush.’

  The children release their breath. They all applaud. In its time the story had reached court, and the king – he was younger then, sweet in disposition – was a little awed by it. When he sees Tom even now, he will nod, and murmur to himself, ‘Tom Wyatt. He can tame lions.’

  When Sir Henry, who is fond of soft fruit, has eaten some fat brambles with yellow cream, he says, ‘A word with you alone,’ and they withdraw. If I were in your place, Sir Henry says, I'd ask him to make you Keeper of the Jewel House. ‘From that post, when I had it, I found I had an overview of the revenue.’

  ‘Ask him how?’

  ‘Get Lady Anne to ask him.’

  ‘Perhaps your son could help by asking Anne.’

  Sir Henry laughs; or rather, he indicates with a little ahem that he knows a joke has been made. By the account of drinkers in Kent alehouses, and the backstairs servants at court (the musician Mark for one), Anne has done Thomas Wyatt all the favours a man might reasonably ask, even in a brothel.

  ‘I mean to retire from court this year,’ Sir Henry says. ‘It's time I wrote my will. May I name you as executor?’

  ‘You do me honour.’

  ‘There is no one I'd rather trust with my affairs. You've the steadiest hand I know.’

  He smiles, puzzled; nothing in his world seems steady to him.

  ‘I understand you,’ Wyatt says. ‘I know our old fellow in scarlet nearly brought you down. But look at you, eating almonds, with all your teeth in your head, and your household around you, and your affairs prospering, and men like Norfolk speaking to you civil.’ Whereas, he doesn't need to add, a year ago they were wiping their feet on you. Sir Henry breaks up, in his fingers, a cinnamon wafer, and dabs it on to his tongue, a careful, secular Eucharist. It is forty years, more, since the Tower, but his smashed-up jaw still stiffens and plagues him with pain. ‘Thomas, I have something to ask you … Will you keep an eye on my son? Be a father to him?’

  ‘Tom is, what, twenty-eight? He may not like another father.’

  ‘You cannot do worse than I did. I have much to regret, his marriage chiefly … He was seventeen, he did not want it, it was I who wanted it, because her father was Baron Cobham, and I wanted to keep my place up among my neighbours in Kent. Tom was always good to look at, a kind boy and courteous as well, you'd have thought he would have done for the girl, but I don't know if she was faithful to him a month. So then, of course, he paid her in kind … the place is full of his doxies, open a closet at Allington and some wench falls out of it. He roams off abroad and what comes of that? He ends up a prisoner in Italy, I shall never understand that affair. Since Italy he's had even less sense. Write you a piece of terza rima, of course, but sit down and work out where his money's gone …’ He rubs his chin. ‘But there you have it. When all's said, there is no braver boy than my boy.’

  ‘Will you come back now, and join the company? You know we take a holiday when you visit us.’

  Sir Henry levers himself upright. He is a portly man, though he lives on pottage and mashes. ‘Thomas, how did I get old?’

  When they return to the hall it is to find a play in progress. Rafe is acting the part of Leontina and the household is roaring him on. It is not that the boys don't believe the lion tale; it is just that they like to put their own words to it. He extends a peremptory hand to Richard, who has been standing on a joint-stool, squealing. ‘You are jealous of Tom Wyatt,’ he says.

  ‘Ah, don't be out of temper with us, master.’ Rafe resumes human form and throws himself on to a bench. ‘Tell us about Florence. Tell us what else you did, you and Giovannino.’

  ‘I don't know if I should. You will make a play of it.’

  Ah, do, they persuade him, and he looks around: Rafe encourages him with a purr. ‘Are we sure Call-Me-Risley is not here? Well … when we had a day off, we used to take down buildings.’

  ‘Take them down?’ Henry Wyatt says. ‘Did you so?’

  ‘What I mean is, blow them up. But not without the owner's permission. Unless we thought they were crumbling and a danger to passers-by. We only charged for explosive materials. Not for our expertise.’

  ‘Which was considerable, I suppose?’

  ‘It's a
lot of digging for a few seconds of excitement. But I knew some boys who went into it as a profession. In Florence,’ he says, ‘it was just what you might do for your recreation. Like fishing. It kept us out of trouble.’ He hesitates. ‘Well, no, it didn't. Not really.’

  Richard says, ‘Did Call-Me tell Gardiner? About your Cupid?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  The king had said to him, I hear you antiqued a statue. The king was laughing, but perhaps also making a note; laughing because the joke's against clerics, against cardinals, and he's in the mood for such a joke.

  Secretary Gardiner: ‘Statue, statute, not much difference.’

  ‘One letter is everything, in legislating. But my precedents are not faked.’

  ‘Stretched?’ Gardiner says.

  ‘Majesty, the Council of Constance granted your ancestor, Henry V, such control over the church in England as no other Christian king exercised in his realm.’

  ‘The concessions were not applied. Not with consistency. Why is that?’

  ‘I don't know. Incompetence?’

  ‘But we have better councillors now?’

  ‘Better kings, Your Majesty.’

  Behind Henry's back, Gardiner makes a gargoyle face at him. He almost laughs.

  The legal term closes. Anne says, come and eat a poor Advent supper with me. We'll use forks.

  He goes, but he doesn't like the company. She has made pets of the king's friends, the gentlemen of his privy chamber: Henry Norris, William Brereton, those people, and her brother, of course, Lord Rochford. Anne is brittle in their company, and as ruthless with their compliments as a housewife snapping the necks of larks for the table. If her precise smile fades for a moment, they all lean forward, anxious to know how to please her. A bigger set of fools you would go far to seek.

  For himself, he can go anywhere, he has been anywhere. Brought up on the table talk of the Frescobaldi family, the Portinari family, and latterly at the cardinal's table among the savants and wits, he is unlikely to find himself at a loss among the pretty people Anne gathers around her. God knows, they do their best, the gentlemen, to make him uncomfortable; he imports his own comfort, his calm, his exact and pointed conversation. Norris, who is a witty man, and not young, stultifies himself by keeping such company: and why? Proximity to Anne makes him tremble. It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

  After that first occasion, Norris follows him out, touches his sleeve, and brings him to a standstill, face to face. ‘You don't see it, do you? Anne?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘So what would be your idea? Some fat frau from your travels?’

  ‘A woman I could love, would be a woman in whom the king has no interest at all.’

  ‘If that is a piece of advice, tell it to your friend Wyatt's son.’

  ‘Oh, I think young Wyatt has worked it out. He is a married man. He says to himself, from your deprivations make a verse. Don't we all grow wiser, from pinpricks to the amour propre?’

  ‘Can you look at me,’ Norris says, ‘and think I grow wiser?’

  He hands Norris his handkerchief. Norris mops his face and gives the handkerchief back. He thinks of St Veronica, swabbing with her veil the features of the suffering Christ; he wonders if, when he gets home, Henry's gentlemanly features will be imprinted on the cloth, and if so, will he hang the result on the wall? Norris turns away, with a little laugh: ‘Weston – young Weston, you know – he is jealous of a boy she brings in to sing for us some nights. He is jealous of the man who comes in to mend the fire, or the maid who pulls her stockings off. Every time she looks at you, he keeps count, he says, there, there, do you see, she is looking at that fat butcher, she looked at him fifteen times in two hours.’

  ‘It was the cardinal who was the fat butcher.’

  ‘To Francis, one tradesman's the same as the next.’

  ‘I quite see that. Give you good night.’

  Night, Tom, Norris says, batting him on the shoulder, absent, distracted, almost as if they were equals, as if they were friends; his eyes are turned back to Anne, his steps are turned back to his rivals.

  One tradesman the same as the next? Not in the real world. Any man with a steady hand and a cleaver can call himself a butcher: but without the smith, where does he get that cleaver? Without the man who works in metal, where are your hammers, your scythes, your sickles, scissors and planes? Your arms and armour, your arrowheads, your pikes and your guns? Where are your ships at sea and their anchors? Where are your grappling hooks, your nails, latches, hinges, pokers and tongs? Where are your spits, kettles, trivets, your harness rings, buckles and bits? Where are your knives?

  He remembers the day they heard the Cornish army was coming. He was – what – twelve? He was in the forge. He had cleaned the big bellows and he was oiling the leather. Walter came over and looked at it. ‘Wants caulking.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. (This was the kind of conversation he had with Walter.)

  ‘It won't do itself.’

  ‘I said, right, right, I'm doing it!’

  He looked up. Their neighbour Owen Madoc stood in the doorway. ‘They're on the march. Word's all down the river. Henry Tudor ready to fight. The queen and the little ones in the Tower.’

  Walter wipes his mouth. ‘How long?’

  Madoc says, ‘God knows. Those fuckers can fly.’

  He straightens up. Into his hand has floated a four-pound hammer with an ash shaft.

  The next few days they worked till they were ready to drop. Walter undertook body armour for his friends, and he to put an edge on anything that can cut, tear, lacerate rebel flesh. The men of Putney have no sympathy with these heathens. They pay their taxes: why not the Cornish? The women are afraid that the Cornishmen will outrage their honour. ‘Our priest says they only do it to their sisters,’ he says, ‘so you'll be all right, our Bet. But then again, the priest says they have cold scaly members like the devil, so you might want the novelty.’

  Bet throws something at him. He dodges. It's always the excuse for breakages, in that house: I threw it at Thomas. ‘Well, I don't know what you like,’ he says.

  That week, rumours proliferate. The Cornishmen work under the ground, so their faces are black. They are half-blind and so you can catch them in a net. The king will give you a shilling for each you catch, two shillings if it's a big one. Just how big are they? Because they shoot arrows a yard long.

  Now all household objects are seen in a new light. Skewers, spits, larding needles: anything for defence at close quarters. The neighbours are paying out to Walter's other business, the brewery, as if they think the Cornishmen mean to drink England dry. Owen Madoc comes in and commissions a hunting knife, hand-guard, blood gutter and twelve-inch blade. ‘Twelve-inch?’ he says. ‘You'll be flailing around and cut your ear off.’

  ‘You'll not be so pert when the Cornish seize you. They spit children like you and roast them on bonfires.’

  ‘Can't you just slap them with an oar?’

  ‘I'll slap your jaw shut,’ Owen Madoc bellows. ‘You little fucker, you had a bad name before you were born.’

  He shows Owen Madoc the knife he has made for himself, slung on a cord under his shirt: its stub of blade, like a single, evil tooth. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Christ,’ Madoc says. ‘Be careful who you leave it in.’

  He says to his sister Kat – just resting his four-pound hammer on her windowsill at the Pegasus – why did I have a bad name before I was born?

  Ask Morgan Williams, she says. He'll tell you. Oh, Tom, Tom, she says. She grabs his head and kisses it. You don't put yourself out there. Let him fight.

  She hopes the Cornish will kill Walter. She doesn't say so, but he knows it.

  When I am the man of this family, he says, things will be different, I can tell you.

  Morgan tells him – blushing, for he is a very proper man – that boys used to follow his mother in the street, shouting ‘Look at the old mare in foal!’

 
His sister Bet says, ‘Another thing those Cornish have got, they have got a giant called Bolster, who's in love with St Agnes and he follows her around and the Cornish bear her image on their flags and so he's coming to London after them.’

  ‘Bolster?’ he sneers. ‘I expect he's that big.’

  ‘Oh, you will see,’ Bet says. ‘Then you won't be so quick with your answers.’

  The women of the district, Morgan says, clucked around his mother pretending concern: what will it be when it's born, she's like the side of a house!

  Then when he came into this world, bawling, with clenched fists and wet black curls, Walter and his friends reeled through Putney, singing. They shouted, ‘Come and get it, girls!’ and ‘Barren wives served here!’

  They never noted the date. He said to Morgan, I don't mind. I don't have a natal chart. So I don't have a fate.

  As fate had it, there was no battle in Putney. For the outriders and escapees, the women were ready with bread knives and razors, the men to bludgeon them with shovels and mattocks, to hollow them with adzes and to spike them on butchers' steels. The big fight was at Blackheath instead: Cornishmen cut up into little pieces, minced by the Tudor in his military mincing machine. All of them safe: except from Walter.

  His sister Bet says, ‘You know that giant, Bolster? He hears that St Agnes is dead. He's cut his arm and in sorrow his blood has flowed into the sea. It's filled up a cave that can never be filled, which goes into a hole, which goes down beneath the bed of the sea and into the centre of the earth and into Hell. So he's dead.’

  ‘Oh, good. Because I was really worried about Bolster.’

  ‘Dead till next time,’ his sister says.

  So on a date unknown, he was born. At three years old, he was collecting kindling for the forge. ‘See my little lad?’ Walter would say, batting him fondly around the head. His fingers smelled of burning, and his palm was solid and black.

  In recent years, of course, scholars have tried to give him a fate; men learned in reading the heavens have tried to work him back from what he is and how he is, to when he was born. Jupiter favourably aspected, indicating prosperity. Mercury rising, offering the faculty of quick and persuasive speech. Kratzer says, if Mars is not in Scorpio, I don't know my trade. His mother was fifty-two and they thought she could neither conceive nor deliver a child. She hid her powers and disguised him under draperies, deep inside her, for as long as she could contrive. He came out and they said, what is it?