by Hilary Mante
Mary Boleyn says, ‘What is the use of calling in Master Cromwell, and not telling him what has already occurred? The king has already spoken to my lady sister.’
‘I deny everything,’ Anne says. It is as if the king is standing before her.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Good.’
‘That the earl spoke to me of love, I allow. He wrote me verse, and I being then a young girl, and thinking no harm of it –’
He almost laughs. ‘Verse? Harry Percy? Do you still have it?’
‘No. Of course not. Nothing written.’
‘That makes it easier,’ he says gently. ‘And of course there was no promise, or contract, or even talk of them.’
‘And,’ Mary says, ‘no consummation of any kind. There could not be. My sister is a notorious virgin.’
‘And how was the king, was he –’
‘He walked out of the room,’ Mary says, ‘and left her standing.’
Monseigneur looks up. He clears his throat. ‘In this exigency, there are a variety, and number of approaches, it seems to me, that one might –’
Norfolk explodes. He pounds up and down on the floor, like Satan in a Corpus Christi play. ‘Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus! While you are selecting an approach, my lord, while you are taking a view, your lady daughter is slandered up and down the country, the king's mind is poisoned, and this family's fortune is unmaking before your eyes.’
‘Harry Percy,’ George says; he holds up his hands. ‘Listen, will you let me speak? As I understand it, Harry Percy was persuaded once to forget his claims, so if he was fixed once –’
‘Yes,’ Anne says, ‘but the cardinal fixed him, and most unfortunately the cardinal is dead.’
There is a silence: a silence sweet as music. He looks, smiling, at Anne, at Monseigneur, at Norfolk. If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it. To prolong the moment, he crosses the room and picks up the fallen hanging. Narrow loom. Indigo ground. Asymmetrical knot. Isfahan? Small animals march stiffly across it, weaving through knots of flowers. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘Do you know what these are? Peacocks.’
Mary Shelton comes to peer over his shoulder. ‘What are those snake things with legs?’
‘Scorpions.’
‘Mother Mary, do they not bite?’
‘Sting.’ He says, ‘Lady Anne, if the Pope cannot stop you becoming queen, and I do not think he can, Harry Percy should not be in your way.’
‘So shift him out of it,’ Norfolk says.
‘I can see why it would not be a good idea for you, as a family –’
‘Do it,’ Norfolk says. ‘Beat his skull in.’
‘Figuratively,’ he says. ‘My lord.’
Anne sits down. Her face is turned away from the women. Her little hands are drawn into fists. Monseigneur shuffles his papers. George, lost in thought, takes off his cap and plays with its jewelled pin, testing the point against the pad of his forefinger.
He has rolled the hanging up, and he presents it gently to Mary Shelton. ‘Thank you,’ she whispers, blushing as if he had proposed something intimate. George squeaks; he has succeeded in pricking himself. Uncle Norfolk says bitterly, ‘You fool of a boy.’
Francis Bryan follows him out.
‘Please feel you can leave me now, Sir Francis.’
‘I thought I would go with you. I want to learn what you do.’
He checks his stride, slaps his hand flat into Bryan's chest, spins him sideways and hears the thud of his skull against the wall. ‘In a hurry,’ he says.
Someone calls his name. Master Wriothesley rounds a corner. ‘Sign of Mark and the Lion. Five minutes' walk.’
Call-Me has had men following Harry Percy since he came to London. His concern has been that Anne's ill-wishers at court – the Duke of Suffolk and his wife, and those dreamers who believe Katherine will come back – have been meeting with the earl and encouraging him in a view of the past that would be useful, from their point of view. But seemingly no meetings have occurred: unless they are held in bath-houses on the Surrey bank.
Call-Me turns sharply down an alley, and they emerge into a dirty inn yard. He looks around; two hours with a broom and a willing heart, and you could make it respectable. Mr Wriothes-ley's handsome red-gold head shines like a beacon. St Mark, creaking above his head, is tonsured like a monk. The lion is small and blue and has a smiling face. Call-Me touches his arm: ‘In there.’ They are about to duck into a side door, when from above there is a shrill whistle. Two women lean out of a window, and with a whoop and a giggle flop their bare breasts over the sill. ‘Jesu,’ he says. ‘More Howard ladies.’
Inside Mark and the Lion, various men in Percy livery are slumped over tables and lying under them. The Earl of Northumberland is drinking in a private room. It would be private, except there is a serving hatch through which faces keep leering. The earl sees him. ‘Oh. I was half expecting you.’ Tense, he runs his hands through his cropped hair, and it stands up in bristles all over his head.
He, Cromwell, goes to the hatch, holds up one finger to the spectators, and slams it in their face. But he is soft-voiced as ever when he sits down with the boy and says, ‘Now, my lord, what is to be done here? How can I help you? You say you can't live with your wife. But she is as lovely a lady as any in this kingdom, if she has faults I never heard of them, so why can you not agree?’
But Harry Percy is not here to be handled like a timid falcon. He is here to shout and weep. ‘If I could not agree with her on our wedding day, how can I agree now? She hates me because she knows we are not properly married. Why has only the king a conscience in the matter, why not I, if he doubts his marriage he shouts about it to the whole of Christendom, but when I doubt mine he sends the lowest man in his employ to sweet-talk me and tell me to go back home and make the best of it. Mary Talbot knows I was pledged to Anne, she knows where my heart lies and always will. I told the truth before, I said we had made a compact before witnesses and therefore neither of us was free. I swore it and the cardinal bullied me out of it; my father said he would strike me out of his line, but my father is dead and I am not afraid to speak the truth any more. Henry may be king but he is stealing another man's wife; Anne Boleyn is rightfully my wife, and how will he stand on the day of judgment, when he comes before God naked and stripped of his retinue?’
He hears him out. The slide and tumble into incoherence … true love … pledges … swore she would give her body to me, allowed me such freedom as only a betrothed woman would allow …
‘My lord,’ he says. ‘You have said what you have to say. Now listen to me. You are a man whose money is almost spent. I am a man who knows how you have spent it. You are a man who has borrowed all over Europe. I am a man who knows your creditors. One word from me, and your debts will be called in.’
‘Oh, and what can they do?’ Percy says. ‘Bankers have no armies.’
‘Neither have you armies, my lord, if your coffers are empty. Look at me now. Understand this. You hold your earldom from the king. Your task is to secure the north. Percys and Howards between them defend us against Scotland. Now suppose Percy cannot do it. Your men will not fight for a kind word –’
‘They are my tenants, it is their duty to fight.’
‘But my lord, they need supply, they need provision, they need arms, they need walls and forts in good repair. If you cannot ensure these things you are worse than useless. The king will take your title away, and your land, and your castles, and give them to someone who will do the job you cannot.’
‘He will not. He respects all ancient titles. All ancient rights.’
‘Then let's say I will.’ Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends.
How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. N
ot from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.
‘I picture you without money and title,’ he says. ‘I picture you in a hovel, wearing homespun, and bringing home a rabbit for the pot. I picture your lawful wife Anne Boleyn skinning and jointing this rabbit. I wish you every happiness.’
Harry Percy slumps over the table. Angry tears spring out of his eyes.
‘You were never pre-contracted,’ he says. ‘Any silly promises you made had no effect in law. Whatever understanding you think you had, you didn't have it. And there is another matter, my lord. If ever you say one more word about Lady Anne's freedom’ – he packs into one word a volume of disgust – ‘then you will answer to me and the Howards and the Boleyns, and George Rochford will have no tender care of your person, and my lord Wiltshire will humble your pride, and as for the Duke of Norfolk, if he hears the slightest imputation against his niece's honour he will drag you out of whatever hole you are cowering in and bite your bollocks off. Now,’ he says, resuming his former amiability, ‘is that clear, my lord?’ He crosses the room and opens the serving hatch again. ‘You can peer in again now.’ Faces appear; or, to be truthful, just bobbing foreheads, and eyes. In the doorway he pauses and turns back to the earl. ‘And I will tell you this, for the avoidance of doubt. If you think Lady Anne loves you, you could not be more mistaken. She hates you. The only service you can do her now, short of dying, is to unsay what you said to your poor wife, and take any oath that is required of you, to clear her path to become Queen of England.’
On the way out he says to Wriothesley, ‘I feel sorry for him really.’ Call-Me laughs so hard he has to lean against the wall.
Next day he is early for the meeting of the king's council. The Duke of Norfolk takes his place at the head of the table, then shifts out of it when word comes that the king himself will preside. ‘And Warham is here,’ someone says: the door opens, nothing happens, then slowly very slowly the ancient prelate shuffles in. He takes his seat. His hands tremble as they rest on the cloth before him. His head trembles on his neck. His skin is parchment-coloured, like the drawing that Hans made of him. He looks around the table with a slow lizard blink.
He crosses the room and stands across the table from Warham, enquiring after his health, by way of a formality; it is clear he is dying. He says, ‘This prophetess you harbour in your diocese. Eliza Barton. How is she getting on?’
Warham barely looks up. ‘What is it you want, Cromwell? My commission found nothing against the girl. You know that.’
‘I hear she is telling her followers that if the king marries Lady Anne he has only a year to reign.’
‘I could not swear to that. I have not heard it with my own ears.’
‘I understand Bishop Fisher has been to see her.’
‘Well … or she to see him. One or the other. Why should he not? She is a blessed young woman.’
‘Who is controlling her?’
Warham's head looks as if it will wobble off his shoulders. ‘She may be unwise. She may be misled. After all, she is a simple country girl. But she has a gift, I am sure of it. When people come into her company, she can tell them at once what is troubling them. What sins are weighing on their conscience.’
‘Indeed? I must go and see her. I wonder if she would know what's troubling me?’
‘Peace,’ Thomas Boleyn says. ‘Harry Percy is here.’
The earl comes in between two of his minders. His eyes are red, and a whiff of stale vomit suggests he has resisted the efforts of his people to scrub him down. The king comes in. It is a warm day and he wears pale silks. Rubies cluster on his knuckles like bubbles of blood. He takes his seat. He rests his flat blue eye on Harry Percy.
Thomas Audley – standing in as Lord Chancellor – leads the earl through his denials. Pre-contracted? No. Promises of any kind? No carnal – I so regret to mention – knowledge? Upon my honour, no, no and no.
‘Sad to say, we shall need more than your word of honour,’ the king says. ‘Matters have gone so far, my lord.’
Harry Percy looks panic-stricken. ‘Then what more must I do?’
He says softly, ‘Approach His Grace of Canterbury, my lord. He is holding out the Book.’
This, anyway, is what the old man is trying to do. Monseigneur tries to assist him, and Warham bats his hands away. Gripping the table, making the cloth slide, he hauls himself to his feet. ‘Harry Percy, you have chopped and changed in this matter, you have asserted it, denied it, asserted it, now you are brought here to deny it again, but this time not only in the sight of men. Now … will you put your hand on this Bible, and swear before me and in the presence of the king and his council that you are free from unlawful knowledge of Lady Anne, and free from any marriage contract with her?’
Harry Percy rubs his eyes. He extends his hand. His voice shakes. ‘I swear.’
‘All done,’ the Duke of Norfolk says. ‘You'd wonder how the whole thing got about in the first place, wouldn't you?’ He walks up to Harry Percy and grips him by the elbow. ‘We shall hear no more of this, boy?’
The king says, ‘Howard, you have heard him take his oath, cease to trouble him now. Some of you assist the archbishop, you see he is not well.’ His mood softened, he smiles around at his councillors. ‘Gentlemen, we will go to my private chapel, and see Harry Percy take Holy Communion to seal his oath. Then Lady Anne and I will spend the afternoon in reflection and prayer. I shall not want to be disturbed.’
Warham shuffles up to the king. ‘Winchester is robing to say Mass for you. I am going home to my diocese.’ With a murmur, Henry leans to kiss his ring. ‘Henry,’ the archbishop says, ‘I have seen you promote within your own court and council persons whose principles and morals will hardly bear scrutiny. I have seen you deify your own will and appetite, to the sorrow and scandal of Christian people. I have been loyal to you, to the point of violation of my own conscience. I have done much for you, but now I have done the last thing I will ever do.’
* * *
At Austin Friars, Rafe is waiting for him. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘So now?’
‘Now Harry Percy can borrow more money, and edge himself nearer his ruin. A progress which I shall be pleased to facilitate.’ He sits down. ‘I think one day I will have that earldom off him.’
‘How would you do that, sir?’ He shrugs: don't know. ‘You would not want the Howards to have more sway in the borders than they do already.’
‘No. No, possibly not.’ He broods. ‘Can you look out the papers about Warham's prophetess?’
While he waits, he opens the window and looks down into the garden. The pink of the roses in his arbours has been bleached out by the sun. I am sorry for Mary Talbot, he thinks; her life will not be easier after this. For a few days, a few days only, she instead of Anne was the talk of the king's court. He thinks of Harry Percy, walking in to arrest the cardinal, keys in his hand: the guard he set, around the dying man's bed.
He leans out of the window. I wonder if peach trees would be possible? Rafe brings in the bundle.
He cuts the tape and straightens out the letters and memoranda. This unsavoury business all started six years ago, at a broken-down chapel on the edge of Kentish marshland, when a statue of the Virgin began to attract pilgrims, and a young woman by name Elizabeth Barton started to put on shows for them. What did the statue do in the first place, to get attention? Move, probably: or weep blood. The girl is an orphan, brought up in the household of one of Warham's land agents. She has a sister, no other family. He says to Rafe, ‘Nobody took any notice of her till she was twenty or so, and then she had some kind of illness, and when she got better she started to have visions, and speak in alien voices. She says she's seen St Peter at the gates of Heaven with his keys. She's seen St Michael weighing
souls. If you ask her where your dead relatives are, she can tell you. If it's Heaven, she speaks in a high voice. If it's Hell, in a deep voice.’
‘The effect could be comic,’ Rafe says.
‘Do you think so? What irreverent children I have brought up.’ He reads, then looks up. ‘She sometimes goes without food for nine days. Sometimes she falls suddenly to the ground. Not surprising, is it? She suffers spasms, torsions and trances. It sounds most displeasant. She was interviewed by my lord cardinal, but …’ his hand sifts the papers, ‘nothing here, no record of the meeting. I wonder what happened. Probably he tried to get her to eat her dinner, she wouldn't have liked that. By this …’ he reads, ‘… she is in a convent in Canterbury. The broken-down chapel has got a new roof and money is rolling in to the local clergy. There are cures. The lame walk, the blind see. Candles light by themselves. The pilgrims are thick upon the roads. Why do I feel I have heard this story before? She has a flock of monks and priests about her, who direct the people's eyes heavenwards whilst picking their pockets. And we can presume it is these same monks and priests who have instructed her to hawk around her opinion on the subject of the king's marriage.’
‘Thomas More has met her. As well as Fisher.’
‘Yes, I keep that in mind. Oh, and … look here … Mary Magdalene has sent her a letter, illuminated in gold.’
‘Can she read it?’
‘Yes, it seems she can.’ He looks up. ‘What do you think? The king will endure being called names, if it is by a holy virgin. I suppose he is used to it. Anne berates him often enough.’
‘Possibly he is afraid.’
Rafe has been to court with him; evidently, he understands Henry better than some people who have known him all his life. ‘Indeed he is. He believes in simple maids who can talk to saints. He is disposed to believe in prophecies, whereas I … I think we let it run for a time. See who visits her. Who makes offerings. Certain noble ladies have been in touch with her, wanting their fortunes told and their mothers prayed out of Purgatory.’
‘My lady Exeter,’ Rafe says.
