is not, perhaps, more than a dozen years older than himself, but amiability can be ageing; with his sons Edward and Tom now the young men about court, he does give the impression of having eased into retirement. ‘Now we understand why we never see him,’ Anne murmurs. ‘Now we know what he does down in the country.’
‘Hunting, I thought.’
‘Yes, and he has netted Catherine Fillol, Edward's wife. They were taken in the act, but I cannot find out where, whether in her bed, or his, or in a meadow, a hayloft – yes, cold, to be sure, but they were keeping each other warm. And now Sir John has confessed it all, man to man, telling his son to his face that he's had her every week since the wedding, so that's about two years and, say, six months, so …’
‘You could round it off to a hundred and twenty times, assuming they abstain at the major feasts …’
‘Adulterers don't stop for Lent.’
‘Oh, and I thought they did.’
‘She's had two babies, so allow respite for her lying-in … And they are boys, you know. So Edward is …’ He imagines how Edward is. That pure hawk's profile. ‘He is cutting them out of the family. They are to be bastards. She, Catherine Fillol, she's to be put in a convent. I think he should put her in a cage! He is asking for an annulment. As for dear Sir John, I think we will not see him at court soon.’
‘Why are we whispering? I must be the last person in London to hear.’
‘The king hasn't heard. And you know how proper he is. So if someone is to come to him joking about it, let it not be me or you.’
‘And the daughter? Jane, is it?’
Anne sniggers. ‘Pasty-face? Gone down to Wiltshire. Her best move would be to follow the sister-in-law into a nunnery. Her sister Lizzie married well, but no one wants Milksop, and now no one will.’ Her eyes fall on his present; she says, suddenly anxious, jealous, ‘What is it?’
‘Only a book of needlework patterns.’
‘As long as it is nothing to tax her wits. Why would you send her a present?’
‘I feel sorry for her.’ More now, of course.
‘Oh. You don't like her, do you?’ The correct answer is, no, my lady Anne, I only like you. ‘Because, is it proper for you to send her a present?’
‘It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.’
She laughs. ‘They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.’
Thomas Hitton, a priest, was burned just as February went out; taken up by Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, as a smuggler of Tyndale's scriptures. Soon afterwards, rising from the bishop's frugal table, a dozen guests had collapsed, vomiting, rigid with pain, and been taken, pale and almost pulseless, to their beds and the ministrations of the doctors. Dr Butts said the broth had done it; from testimony of the waiting-boys, it was the only dish they had tasted in common.
There are poisons nature herself brews, and he, before putting the bishop's cook to the torture, would have visited the kitchens and passed a skimmer over the stockpot. But no one else doubts there has been a crime.
Presently the cook admits to adding to the broth a white powder, which someone gave him. Who? Just a man. A stranger who had said it would be a good joke, to give Fisher and his guests a purge.
The king is beside himself: rage and fear. He blames heretics. Dr Butts, shaking his head, pulling his lower lip, says that poison is what Henry fears worse than Hell itself.
Would you put poison in a bishop's dinner because a stranger told you it would be a laugh? The cook won't say more, or perhaps he has reached a stage beyond saying. The interrogation has been mismanaged then, he says to Butts; I wonder why. The doctor, a man who loves the gospel, laughs sourly and says, ‘If they wanted the man to talk, they should have called in Thomas More.’
The word is that the Lord Chancellor has become a master in the twin arts of stretching and compressing the servants of God. When heretics are taken, he stands by at the Tower while the torture is applied. It is reported that in his gatehouse at Chelsea he keeps suspects in the stocks, while he preaches at them and harries them: the name of your printer, the name of the master of the ship that brought these books into England. They say he uses the whip, the manacles and the torment-frame they call Skeffing-ton's Daughter. It is a portable device, into which a man is folded, knees to chest, with a hoop of iron across his back; by means of a screw, the hoop is tightened until his ribs crack. It takes art to make sure the man does not suffocate: for if he does, everything he knows is lost.
Over the next week, two dinner guests die; Fisher himself rallies. It is possible, he thinks, that the cook did speak, but that what he said was not for the ears of the ordinary subject.
He goes to see Anne. A thorn between two roses, she is sitting with her cousin Mary Shelton, and her brother's wife Jane, Lady Rochford. ‘My lady, do you know the king has devised a new form of death for Fisher's cook? He is to be boiled alive.’
Mary Shelton gives a little gasp, and flushes as if some gallant had pinched her. Jane Rochford drawls, ‘Vere dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare.’ She translates for Mary: ‘Apt.’
Anne's face wears no expression at all. Even a man as literate as he can find nothing there to read. ‘How will they do it?’
‘I did not ask about the mechanics. Would you like me to enquire? I think it will involve hoisting him up in chains, so that the crowd can see his skin peeling off and hear him screaming.’
To be fair to Anne, if you walked up to her and said, you are to be boiled, she would probably shrug: c'est la vie.
Fisher is in bed for a month. When he is up and about he looks like a walking corpse. The intercession of angels and saints has not sufficed to heal his sore gut and put the flesh back on his bones.
These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest. Christ's sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass. Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you: only the merits of the living Christ.
March: Lucy Petyt, whose husband is a master grocer and a member of the Commons, comes to see him at Austin Friars. She is wearing black lambskin – imported, at a guess – and a modest grey worsted gown; Alice receives her gloves and surreptitiously slides in a finger to appraise the silk lining. He rises from his desk and takes her hands, drawing her to the fire and pressing upon her a cup of warm spiced wine. Her hands shake as she cradles the cup and she says, ‘I wish John had this. This wine. This fire.’
It was snowing at dawn on the day of the raid on Lion's Quay, but soon a wintery sun was up, scouring windowpanes and casting the panelled rooms of city houses into sharp relief, ravines of shadows and cold floods of light. ‘That is what I cannot get out of my mind,’ Lucy says, ‘the cold.’ And More himself, his face muffled in furs, standing at the door with his officers, ready to search the warehouse and their own rooms. ‘I was the first there,’ she says, ‘and I kept him hovering with pleasantries – I called up, my dear, here is the Lord Chancellor come on parliamentary business.’ The wine floods into her face, loosens her tongue. ‘I kept saying, have you breakfasted, sir, are you sure, and the servants were weaving under his feet, impeding him’ – she gives a little, mirthless, whooping laugh – ‘and all the time John was stowing his papers behind a panel –’
‘You did well, Lucy.’
‘When they walked upstairs John was ready for him – oh, Lord Chancellor, welcome to my poor house – but the poor hapless man, he had cast his Testament under his desk, my eye went straight to it, I wonder their eyes didn't follow mine.’
An hour's search realised nothing; so are you sure, John, the Chancellor said, that you have none of these new books, because