an orphan. He told me you were brought up in a monastery.’
‘Ah. That was one of his little stories.’
‘He told me little stories?’ Several expressions chase each other across the king's face: annoyance, amusement, a wish to call back times past. ‘I suppose he did. He told me that you had a loathing of those in the religious life. That was why he found you diligent in his work.’
‘That was not the reason.’ He looks up. ‘May I speak?’ ‘Oh, for God's sake,’ Henry cries. ‘I wish someone would.’ He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that's nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war. Now that Wolsey's gone, there's not much scope for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe. And if you send for a priest, what does it come back to? To love; to Anne; to what you want and can't have.
‘If you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing than buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct. Nor do I take the monasteries to be the repositories of learning some believe they are. Was Grocyn a monk, or Colet, or Linacre, or any of our great scholars? They were university men. The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don't even teach them dog Latin. I don't grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness – their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.’
Henry appears to look straight through him, to the wall behind. He waits. Henry says, ‘Dogholes, then?’
He smiles.
Henry says, ‘Our history … As you know, I am gathering evidence. Manuscripts. Opinions. Comparisons, with how matters are ordered in other countries. Perhaps you would consult with those learned gentlemen. Put a little direction into their efforts. Talk to Dr Cranmer – he will tell you what is needed. I could make good use of the money that flows yearly to Rome. King François is richer by far than I am. I do not have a tenth of his subjects. He taxes them as he pleases. For my part, I must call Parliament. If I do not, there are riots.’ He adds, bitterly, ‘And riots if I do.’
‘Take no lessons from King François,’ he says. ‘He likes war too much, and trade too little.’
Henry smiles faintly. ‘You do not think so, but to me that is the remit of a king.’
‘There is more tax to be raised when trade is good. And if taxes are resisted, there may be other ways.’
Henry nods. ‘Very well. Begin with the colleges. Sit down with my lawyers.’
Harry Norris is there to show him out of the king's private rooms. Not smiling for once, rather stern, he says, ‘I wouldn't be his tax collector.’
He thinks, are the most remarkable moments of my life to be spent under the scrutiny of Henry Norris?
‘He killed his father's best men. Empson, Dudley. Didn't the cardinal get one of their houses?’
A spider scuttles from under a stool and presents him with a fact. ‘Empson's house on Fleet Street. Granted the ninth of October, the first year of this reign.’
‘This glorious reign,’ Norris says: as if he were issuing a correction.
Gregory is fifteen as summer begins. He sits a horse beautifully, and there are good reports of his swordsmanship. His Greek … well, his Greek is where it was.
But he has a problem. ‘People in Cambridge are laughing at my greyhounds.’
‘Why?’ The black dogs are a matched pair. They have curving muscled necks and dainty feet; they keep their eyes lowered, mild and demure, till they sight prey.
‘They say, why would you have dogs that people can't see at night? Only felons have dogs like that. They say I hunt in the forests, against the law. They say I hunt badgers, like a churl.’
‘What do you want?’ he asks. ‘White ones, or some spots of colour?’
‘Either would be correct.’
‘I'll take your black dogs.’ Not that he has time to go out, but Richard or Rafe will use them.
‘But what if people laugh?’
‘Really, Gregory,’ Johane says. ‘This is your father. I assure you, no one will dare laugh.’
When the weather is too wet to hunt, Gregory sits poring over The Golden Legend; he likes the lives of the saints. ‘Some of these things are true,’ he says, ‘some not.’ He reads Le Morte d'Arthur, and because it is the new edition they crowd around him, looking over his shoulder at the title page. ‘Here beginneth the first book of the most noble and worthy prince King Arthur sometime King of Great Britain …’ In the forefront of the picture, two couples embrace. On a high-stepping horse is a man with a mad hat, made of coiled tubes like fat serpents. Alice says, sir, did you wear a hat like that when you were young, and he says, I had a different colour for each day in the week, but mine were bigger.
Behind this man, a woman rides pillion. ‘Do you think this represents Lady Anne?’ Gregory asks. ‘They say the king does not like to be parted from her, so he perches her up behind him like a farmer's wife.’ The woman has big eyes, and looks sick from jolting; it might just be Anne. There is a small castle, not much taller than a man, with a plank for a drawbridge. The birds, circling above, look like flying daggers. Gregory says, ‘Our king takes his descent from this Arthur. He was never really dead but waited in the forest biding his time, or possibly in a lake. He is several centuries old. Merlin is a wizard. He comes later. You will see. There are twenty-one chapters. If it keeps on raining I mean to read them all. Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.’
When the king next calls him to court, he wants a message sent to Wolsey. A Breton merchant whose ship was seized by the English eight years ago is complaining he has not had the compensation promised. No one can find the paperwork. It was the cardinal who handled the case – will he remember it? ‘I'm sure he will,’ he says. ‘That will be the ship with powdered pearls for ballast, the hold packed with unicorns' horns?’
God forbid! says Charles Brandon; but the king laughs and says, ‘That will be the one.’
‘If the sums are in doubt, or indeed the whole case, may I look after it?’
The king hesitates. ‘I'm not sure you have a locus standi in the matter.’
It is at this moment that Brandon, quite unexpectedly, gives him a testimonial. ‘Harry, let him. When this fellow has finished, the Breton will be paying you.’
Dukes revolve in their spheres. When they confer, it is not for pleasure in each other's society; they like to be surrounded by their own courts, by men who reflect them and are subservient to them. For pleasure, they are as likely to be found with a kennel-man as another duke; so it is that he spends an amiable hour with Brandon, looking over the king's hounds. It is not yet the season for hunting the hart, so the running dogs are well fed in their kennels; their musical barking rises into the evening air, and the tracking dogs, silent as they are trained to be, rise on their hind legs and watch, dripping saliva, the progress of their suppers. The kennel children are carrying baskets of bread and bones, buckets of offal and basins of pigs'-blood pottage. Charles Brandon inhales, appreciative: like a dowager in a rose garden.
A huntsman calls forward a favourite bitch, white patched with chestnut, Barbada, four years