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