Wolf Hall tct-1

by Hilary Mante

  Alice sits down in his office. She yawns. ‘Excuse me – but she is hard work and the hours are long.’ She tucks a strand of hair into her hood. ‘She is ready to break,’ she says. ‘She is brave to your faces, but she cries at night, because she knows she is a fraud. And even while she is crying, she peeps under her eyelids to see what effect she is making.’

  ‘I want it over with now,’ he says. ‘For all the trouble she has caused, we do not find ourselves an edifying spectacle, three or four of us learned in the law and the scriptures, convening day after day to try to trip one chit of a girl.’

  ‘Why did you not bring her in before?’

  ‘I didn't want her to shut the prophecy shop. I wanted to see who would come to her whistle. And Lady Exeter has, and Bishop Fisher. And a score of monks and foolish priests whose names I know, and a hundred perhaps whose names I don't know yet.’

  ‘And will the king kill them all?’

  ‘Very few, I hope.’

  ‘You incline him to mercy?’

  ‘I incline him to patience.’

  ‘What will happen to her? Dame Eliza?’

  ‘We will frame charges.’

  ‘She will not go in a dungeon?’

  ‘No, I shall move the king to treat her with consideration, he is always – he is usually – respectful of any person in the religious life. But Alice,’ he sees that she is dissolving into tears, ‘I think this has all been too much for you.’

  ‘No, not at all. We are soldiers in your army.’

  ‘She has not been frightening you, talking about the devil's wicked offers?’

  ‘No, it's Thomas Rotherham's offers … he wants to marry me.’

  ‘So that's what's wrong with him!’ He is amused. ‘Could he not ask himself?’

  ‘He thought you would look at him in that way you have … as if you were weighing him.’

  Like a clipped coin? ‘Alice, he owns a fat slice of Bedfordshire, and his manors prosper very nicely since I have been looking after them. And if you like each other, how could I object? You are a clever girl, Alice. Your mother,’ he says softly, ‘and your father, they would be very pleased with you, if they were able to see.’

  This is why Alice is crying. She must ask her uncle's permission because this last year has left her orphaned. The day his sister Bet died, he was up-country with the king. Henry was receiving no messengers from London for fear of contagion, so she was dead and buried before he knew she was ill. When the news crept through at last, the king spoke to him with tenderness, a hand on his arm; he spoke of his own sister, the silver-haired lady like a princess in a book, removed from this life to gardens of Paradise, he had claimed, reserved for royal dead; for it is impossible, he had said, to think of that lady in any low place, any place of darkness, the barred charnel house of Purgatory with its flying cinders and sulphur reek, its boiling tar and roiling clouds of sleet.

  ‘Alice,’ he says, ‘dry your tears, find Thomas Rotherham, and end his pain. You need not come to Lambeth tomorrow. Jo can come, if she is as formidable as you say.’

  Alice turns in the doorway. ‘I will see her again, though? Eliza Barton? I should like to see her before …’

  Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just as well. Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.

  He hears Alice running upstairs. He hears her calling, Thomas, Thomas … It is a name that will bring half the house out, tumbling from their bedside prayers, from their very beds: yes, are you looking for me? He pulls his furred gown around him and goes outside to look at the stars. The precincts of his house are kept well lit; the gardens by torchlight are the site of excavations, trenches dug out for foundations, earth banked up into barrows and mounds. The vast timber frame of a new wing juts against the sky; in the middle distance, his new planting, a city orchard where Gregory, one day, will pick the fruit, and Alice, and Alice's sons. He has fruit trees already, but he wants cherries and plums like the ones he has eaten abroad, and late pears to use in the Tuscan fashion, to match their crisp metallic flesh with winter's salt cod. Then next year he means to make another garden at the hunting lodge he has at Canonbury, make it a retreat from the city, a summer house in the fields. He has work in hand at Stepney too, expansion; John Williamson is looking after the builders for him. Strange, but like a miracle the family's prosperity seems to have cured him of his killing cough. I like John Williamson, he thinks, why ever did I, with his wife … Beyond the gate, cries and shouts, London never still or quiet; so many in the graveyards, but the living parading in the streets, drunken fighters pitching from London Bridge, sanctuary men stealing out to thieve, Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.

  He goes inside. His desk draws him back. In a small chest he keeps his wife's book, her book of hours. Inside it are prayers on loose papers which she has inserted. Say the name of Christ a thousand times and it keeps fever away. But it doesn't, does it? The fever comes anyway and kills you. Beside the name of her first husband, Thomas Williams, she has written his own name, but she never, he notices, crossed Tom Williams out. She has recorded the births of her children, and he has written in beside them the dates of his daughters' deaths. He finds a space where he will note the marriages of his sisters' children: Richard to Frances Murfyn, Alice to his ward.

  He thinks, perhaps I have got over Liz. It didn't seem possible that weight would ever shift from inside his chest, but it has lightened enough to let him get on with his life. I could marry again, he thinks, but is this not what people are always telling me? He says to himself, I never think of Johane Williamson now: not Johane as she was for me. Her body once had special meaning, but that meaning is now unmade; the flesh created beneath his fingertips, hallowed by desire, becomes just the ordinary substance of a city wife, a fading woman with no particular looks. He says to himself, I never think of Anselma now; she is just the woman in the tapestry, the woman in the weave.

  He reaches for his pen. I have got over Liz, he says to himself. Surely? He hesitates, the quill in his hand, weighted by ink. He holds the pages down flat, and strikes out the name of her first husband. He thinks, I've meant to do that for years.

  It is late. Upstairs he closes the shutter, where the moon gapes in hollow-eyed, like a drunk lost in the street. Christophe, folding garments, says, ‘Is there loups? In this kingdom?’

  ‘I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.’

  Sunday: in rose-tinted light they set out from Austin Friars, his men in their new livery of grey marbled cloth collecting the party from the city house where the nun has been held. It would be convenient, he thinks, if I had Master Secretary's barge, instead of making ad hoc arrangements when we have to cross the river. He has already heard Mass; Cranmer insists they all hear another. He watches the girl and sees her tears flow. Alice is right; she is at the end of her invention.

  By nine o'clock she is unwinding the threads she has spent years ravelling up. She confesses in style, so hard and fast that Riche can hardly keep track, and she appeals to them as men of the world, as people with their way to make: ‘You know how it is. You mention something and people are at you, what do you mean, what do you mean? You say you've had a vision and they won't leave you alone.’

  ‘You can't disappoint people?’ he says; she agrees, that's it, you can't. Once you start you have to keep going. If you try to go back they'll slaughter you.

  She confesses that her visions are inventions. She never spoke to heavenly persons. Or raised the dead; that was all a fraud. She never had a hand in miracles. The letter from Mary Magdalene, Father Bocking wrote it, and a monk put gilding on the letters, in a minute she'll think of his name. The angels came out of her own invention, she seemed to see them but she knows now that they were just flashes of light against the wall. The voices she heard were not their voices, they were not disti
nct voices at all, just the sounds of her sisters singing in the chapel, or a woman in the road crying because she has been beaten and robbed, or perhaps the meaningless clatter of dishes from the kitchen; and those groans and cries, that seemed to come from the throats of the damned, it was someone above scraping a trestle across the floor, it was the whimper of a lost dog. ‘I know now, sirs, that those saints were not real. Not in the way you are real.’

  Something has broken inside her, and he wonders what that thing is.

  She says, ‘Is there any chance I could go home again to Kent?’

  ‘I'll see what can be arranged.’

  Hugh Latimer is sitting with them, and he gives him a hard look, as if he's making false promises. No, really, he says. Leave it with me.

  Cranmer tells her gently, ‘Before you can go anywhere, it will be necessary for you to make public acknowledgement of your imposture. Public confession.’

  ‘She's not shy of crowds, are you?’ These many years she's been on the road, a travelling show, and will be again, though now the nature of the show has changed; he means to display her, repentant, at Paul's Cross, and perhaps outside London too. He feels that she will take to the role of fraud, with the same relish with which she took to her role as saint.

  He says to Riche, Niccolò tells us unarmed prophets always fail. He smiles and says, I mention this, Ricardo, because I know you like to have it by the book.

  Cranmer leans forward and says to the Maid, these men about you, Edward Bocking and the rest, which of them were your lovers?

  She is shocked: perhaps because the question has come from him, the sweetest of her interrogators. She just stares at him, as if one of them were stupid.

  He says, murmuring, she may think lovers is not the word.

  Enough. To Audley, to Latimer, to Riche, he says, ‘I shall begin bringing in her followers, and her leaders. She has ruined many, if we care to press for their ruin. Fisher certainly, Margaret Pole perhaps, Gertrude and her husband for sure. Lady Mary the king's daughter, quite possibly. Thomas More no, Katherine no, but a fat haul of Franciscans.’

  The court rises, if court is what you call it. Jo stands up. She has been sewing – or rather, unsewing, teasing out the pomegranate border from a crewel-work panel – these remnants of Katherine, of the dusty kingdom of Granada, linger in England still. She folds her work, dropping her scissors into her pocket, pinching up her sleeve and feeding her needle into the fabric for later use. She walks up to the prisoner and puts a hand on her arm. ‘We must say adieu.’

  ‘William Hawkhurst,’ the girl says, ‘I remember the name now. The monk who gilded the letter from Mary Magdalene.’

  Richard Riche makes a note.

  ‘Do not say any more today,’ Jo advises.

  ‘Will you come with me, mistress? Where I am going?’ ‘Nobody will come with you,’ Jo says. ‘I do not think you have the sense of it, Dame Eliza. You are going to the Tower, and I am going home to my dinner.’

  This summer of 1533 has been a summer of cloudless days, of strawberry feasts in London gardens, the drone of fumbling bees, warm evenings to stroll under rose arbours and hear from the allées the sound of young gentlemen quarrelling over their bowls. The grain harvest is abundant even in the north. The trees are bowed under the weight of ripening fruit. As if he has decreed that the heat must continue, the king's court burns bright through the autumn. Monseigneur the queen's father shines like the sun, and around him spins a smaller but still blazing noonday planet, his son George Rochford. But it is Brandon who leads the dancing, galloping through the halls towing his new bride, whose age is fourteen. She is an heiress, and was betrothed to his son, but Charles thought an experienced man like him could turn her to better use.

  The Seymours have put their family scandal behind them, and their fortunes are mending. Jane Seymour says to him, looking at her feet, ‘Master Cromwell, my brother Edward smiled last week.’

  ‘That was rash of him, what made him do so?’

  ‘He heard his wife is sick. The wife he used to have. The one that my father, you know.’

  ‘Is she likely to die?’

  ‘Oh, very likely. Then he will get a new one. But he will keep her at his house in Elvetham, and never let her come within a mile of Wolf Hall. And when my father visits Elvetham, she will be locked in the linen room till he has gone again.’

  Jane's sister Lizzie is at court with her husband, the Governor of Jersey, who is some connection of the new queen's. Lizzie comes packaged into her velvet and lace, her outlines as firm as her sister's are indefinite and blurred, her eyes bold and hazel and eloquent. Jane whispers in her wake; her eyes are the colour of water, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too small for hook or net.

  It is Jane Rochford – whose mind, in his view, is underoccupied – who sees him watching the sisters. ‘Lizzie Seymour must have a lover,’ she says, ‘it cannot be her husband who puts that glow in her cheeks, he is an old man. He was old when he was in the Scots wars.’ The two sisters are just a little alike, she points out; they have the same habit of dipping their head and drawing in their underlip. ‘Otherwise,’ she says, smirking, ‘you would think their mother had been up to the same tricks as her husband. She was a beauty in her day, you know, Margery Wentworth. And nobody knows what goes on down in Wiltshire.’

  ‘I'm surprised you don't, Lady Rochford. You seem to know everyone's business.’

  ‘You and me, we keep our eyes open.’ She lowers her head, and says, as if directing the words inward, to her own body, ‘I could keep my eyes open, if you like, in places you cannot go.’

  Dear God, what does she want? It can't be money, surely? The question comes out colder than he means: ‘Upon what possible inducement?’

  She lifts her eyes to his. ‘I should like your friendship.’

  ‘No conditions attach to that.’

  ‘I thought I might help you. Because your ally Lady Carey has gone down to Hever now to see her daughter. She is no longer wanted since Anne is back on duty in the bedchamber. Poor Mary.’ She laughs. ‘God dealt her a good enough hand but she never knew how to play it. Tell me, what will you do if the queen does not have another child?’

  ‘There is no reason to fear it. Her mother had a child a year. Boleyn used to complain it kept him poor.’

  ‘Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife?

  And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.’

  ‘It's the same in the gospels. The stony ground gets the blame.’

  The stony places, the thorny unprofitable waste. Jane Rochford is childless after seven years of marriage. ‘I believe my husband wishes I would die.’ She says it lightly. He does not know how to answer. He has not asked for her confidence. ‘If I do die,’ she says, in the same bright tone, ‘have my body opened. I ask you this in friendship. I am afraid of poison. My husband and his sister are closeted together for hours, and Anne knows all manner of poisons. She has boasted that she will give Mary a breakfast she will not recover from.’ He waits. ‘Mary the king's daughter, I mean. Though I am sure if it pleased Anne she would not scruple to make away with her own sister.’ She glances up again. ‘In your heart, if you are honest, you would like to know the things I know.’

  She is lonely, he thinks, and breeding a savage heart, like Leon-tina in her cage. She imagines everything is about her, every glance or secret conversation. She is afraid the other women pity her, and she hates to be pitied. He says, ‘What do you know of my heart?’

  ‘I know where you have disposed it.’

  ‘It is more than I know myself.’

  ‘That is not uncommon among men. I can tell you who you love. Why do you not ask for her, if you want her? The Seymours are not rich. They will sell you Jane, and be glad of the bargain.’

  ‘You are mistaken in the nature of my interest. I have young gentlemen
in my house, I have wards, their marriages are my business.’

  ‘Oh, fal la la,’ she says. ‘Sing another song. Tell it to infants in the nursery. Tell it to the House of Commons, you do most usually lie to them. But do not think you can deceive me.’

  ‘For a lady who offers friendship, you have rough manners.’

  ‘Get used to them, if you want my information. You go into Anne's rooms now, and what do you see? The queen at her priedieu. The queen sewing a smock for a beggar woman, wearing pearls the size of chickpeas.’

  It is hard not to smile. The portrait is exact. Anne has Cranmer entranced. He thinks her the pattern of pious womanhood.

  ‘So do you imagine that is what is really going on? Do you imagine she has given up communing with nimble young gentlemen? Riddles and verses and songs in praise of her, do you suppose she has given them up?’

  ‘She has the king to praise her.’

  ‘Not a good word will she hear from that quarter till her belly is big again.’

  ‘And what will hinder that?’

  ‘Nothing. If he is up to it.’

  ‘Be careful.’ He smiles.

  ‘I never knew it was treason to say what passes in a prince's bed. All Europe talked about Katherine, what body part was put where, was she penetrated, and if she was did she know?’ She sniggers. ‘Harry's leg pains him at night. He is afraid the queen will kick him in the throes of her passion.’ She puts her hand before her mouth, but the words creep out, narrow between her fingers. ‘But if she lies still under him he says, what, madam, are you so little interested in making my heir?’

  ‘I do not see what she is to do.’

  ‘She says she gets no pleasure with him. And he – as he fought seven years to get her, he can hardly admit it has staled so soon. It was stale before they came from Calais, that is what I think.’