and her black hair falls, virgin-style, in snaky locks to her waist. He, Cromwell, has organised the income from fifteen manors to support her dignity.
A Te Deum is sung. A sermon is preached. When the ceremony is over, and the women stoop to pick up her train, he sees a flash of blue, like a kingfisher, and glances up to see John Seymour's little daughter among the Howard ladies. A warhorse raises his head at the sound of trumpets, and great ladies look up and smile; but as the musicians play a flourish, and the procession leaves St George's Chapel, she keeps her pale face down-turned, her eyes on her toes as if she fears tripping.
At the feast Anne sits beside Henry on the dais, and when she turns to speak to him her black lashes brush her cheeks. She is almost there now, almost there, her body taut like a bowstring, her skin dusted with gold, with tints of apricot and honey; when she smiles, which she does often, she shows small teeth, white and sharp. She is planning to commandeer Katherine's royal barge, she tells him, and have the device ‘H&K’ burned away, all Katherine's badges obliterated. The king has sent for Katherine's jewels, so she can wear them on the projected trip to France. He has spent an afternoon with her, two afternoons, three, in the fine September weather, with the king's goldsmith beside her making drawings, and he as master of the jewels adding suggestions; Anne wants new settings made. At first Katherine had refused to give up the jewels. She had said she could not part with the property of the Queen of England and put it into the hands of the disgrace of Christendom. It had taken a royal command to make her hand over the loot.
Anne refers everything to him; she says, laughing, ‘Cromwell, you are my man.’ The wind is set fair and the tide is running for him. He can feel the tug of it under his feet. His friend Audley must surely be confirmed as Chancellor; the king is getting used to him. Old courtiers have resigned, rather than serve Anne; the new comptroller of the household is Sir William Paulet, a friend of his from Wolsey days. So many of the new courtiers are his friends from Wolsey days. And the cardinal didn't employ fools.
After the Mass and Anne's installation, he attends the Bishop of Winchester as he disrobes, gets out of his canonicals into gear more suitable for secular celebrations. ‘Are you going to dance?’ he asks him. He sits on a stone window ledge, half-attentive to what is going on in the courts below, the musicians carrying in pipes and lutes, harps and rebecs, hautboys, viols and drums. ‘You could cut a good figure. Or don't you dance now you're a bishop?’
Stephen's conversation is on a track of its own. ‘You'd think it would be enough for any woman, wouldn't you, to be made a marquess in her own right? She'll give way to him now. Heir in the belly, please God, before Christmas.’
‘Oh, you wish her success?’
‘I wish his temper soothed. And some result out of this. Not to do it all for nothing.’
‘Do you know what Chapuys is saying about you? That you keep two women in your household, dressed up as boys.’
‘Do I?’ He frowns. ‘Better, I suppose, than two boys dressed up as women. Now that would be opprobrious.’ Stephen gives a bark of laughter. They stroll together towards the feast. Trollylolly, the musicians sing. ‘Pastime with good company, I love and shall until I die.’ The soul is musical by nature, the philosophers say. The king calls up Thomas Wyatt to sing with him, and the musician Mark. ‘Alas, what shall I do for love? For love, alas, what shall I do?’
‘Anything he can think of,’ Gardiner says. ‘There is no limit, that I can see.’
He says, ‘The king is good to those who think him good.’ He floats it to the bishop, below the music.
‘Well,’ Gardiner says, ‘if your mind is infinitely flexible. As yours, I see, would have to be.’
He speaks to Mistress Seymour. ‘Look,’ she says. She holds up her sleeves. The bright blue with which she has edged them, that kingfisher flash, is cut from the silk in which he wrapped her present of needlework patterns. How do matters stand now at Wolf Hall, he asks, as tactfully as he can: how do you ask after a family, in the wake of incest? She says in her clear little voice, ‘Sir John is very well. But then Sir John is always very well.’
‘And the rest of you?’
‘Edward angry, Tom restless, my lady mother grinding her teeth and banging the doors. The harvest coming in, the apples on the bough, the maids in the dairy, our chaplain at his prayers, the hens laying, the lutes in tune, and Sir John … Sir John as always is very well. Why don't you make some business in Wiltshire and ride down to inspect us? Oh, and if the king gets a new wife, she will need matrons to attend her, and my sister Liz is coming to court. Her husband is the Governor of Jersey, you know him, Anthony Oughtred? I would rather go up-country to the queen, myself. But they say she is moving again, and her household is being reduced.’
‘If I were your father … no …’ he rephrases it, ‘if I were to advise you, it would be to serve Lady Anne.’
‘The marquess,’ she says. ‘Of course, it is good to be humble. She makes sure we are.’
‘Just now it is difficult for her. I think she will soften, when she has her heart's desire.’ Even as he says it, he knows it is not true.
Jane lowers her head, looks up at him from under her eyelids. ‘That is my humble face. Do you think it will serve?’
He laughs. ‘It would take you anywhere.’
When the dancers are resting, fanning themselves, from the galliards, pavanes and almanes, he and Wyatt sing the little soldiers' air: Scaramella to the war has gone, with his shield, his lance. It is melancholy, as songs are, whatever the words, when the light is failing and the human voice, unaccompanied, fades in the shadows of the room. Charles Brandon asks him, ‘What is it about, that song, is it about a lady?’
‘No, it is just about a boy who goes off to war.’
‘What are his fortunes?’
Scaramella fa la gala. ‘It's all one big holiday to him.’
‘Those were better days,’ the duke says. ‘Soldiering.’
The king sings to the lute, his voice strong, true, plangent: ‘As I Walked the Woods So Wild.’ Some women weep, a little the worse for strong Italian wines.
At Canterbury, Archbishop Warham lies cold on a slab; coins of the realm are laid on his eyelids, as if to seal into his brain for eternity the image of his king. He is waiting to go down under the pavement of the cathedral, in the dank charnel vacancy by Becket's bones. Anne sits still as a statue, her eyes on her lover. Only her restless fingers move; she clutches on her lap one of her little dogs, and her hands run over and over its fur, twisting its curls. As the last note dies, candles are brought in.
October, and we are going to Calais – a train two thousand strong, stretched from Windsor to Greenwich, from Greenwich across the green fields of Kent to Canterbury: to a duke an entourage of forty, to a marquess thirty-five, to an earl twenty-four, while a viscount must scrape by with twenty, and he with Rafe and any clerks he can pack into the ships' rat-holes. The king is to meet his brother France, who intends to oblige him by speaking to the Pope in favour of his new marriage. François has offered to marry one of his three sons – his three sons, how God must love him – to the Pope's niece, Catherine de' Medici; he says he will make it a precondition of the match that Queen Katherine is refused leave to appeal her case to Rome, and that his brother England is allowed to settle his marital affairs in his own jurisdiction, using his own bishops.
These two potent monarchs will see each other for the first time since the meeting called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which the cardinal arranged. The king says the trip must cost less than that occasion, but when he is questioned on specifics he wants more of that and two of those – everything bigger, plusher, more lavish, and with more gilding. He is taking his own cooks and his own bed, his ministers and musicians, his horses, dogs and falcons, and his new marquess, whom Europe calls his concubine. He is taking the possible claimants to the throne, including the Yorkist Lord Montague, and the Lancastrian Nevilles, to show how tame they are and how secure are the Tudors. He is taking