that is what the nun has seen.’
‘You don't believe these visions?’
‘I think perhaps she can't tell what she sees in the outside world from what is inside her head. Some people are like that. She is to be pitied, perhaps. Though not too much.’
The king frowns. ‘But I loved my mother,’ he says. Then: ‘Buckingham set much store by visions. He had a friar who prophesied for him. Told him he would be king.’ He does not need to add, Buckingham was a traitor and is more than ten years dead.
When the court sails for France he is in the king's party, on the Swallow. He stands on deck watching England recede, with the Duke of Richmond, Henry's bastard, excited to be on his first sea voyage, and to be in his father's company too. Fitzroy is a handsome boy of thirteen, fair-haired, tall for his age but slender: Henry as he must have been as a young prince, and endowed with a proper sense of himself and his own dignity. ‘Master Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I have not seen you since the cardinal came down.’ A moment's awkwardness. ‘I am glad you prosper. Because it is said in the book called The Courtier that in men of base degree we often see high gifts of nature.’
‘You read Italian, sir?’
‘No, but parts of that book have been put into English for me. It is a very good book for me to read.’ A pause. ‘I wish’ – he turns his head, lowering his voice – ‘I wish the cardinal were not dead. Because now the Duke of Norfolk is my guardian.’
‘And I hear Your Grace is to marry his daughter Mary.’
‘Yes. I do not want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘I have seen her. She has no breasts.’
‘But she has a good wit, my lord. And time may remedy the other matter, before you live together. If your people will translate for you that part of Castiglione's book that relates to gentlewomen and their qualities, I'm sure you will find that Mary Howard has all of them.’
Let's hope, he thinks, it won't turn out like Harry Percy's match, or George Boleyn's. For the girl's sake too; Castiglione says that everything that can be understood by men can be understood by women, that their apprehension is the same, their faculties, no doubt their loves and hates. Castiglione was in love with his wife Ippolita, but she died when he had only had her four years. He wrote a poem for her, an elegy, but he wrote it as if Ippolita was writing: the dead woman speaking to him.
In the ship's wake the gulls cry like lost souls. The king comes on deck and says his headache has cleared. He says, ‘Majesty, we were talking of Castiglione's book. You have found time to read it?’
‘Indeed. He extols sprezzatura. The art of doing everything gracefully and well, without the appearance of effort. A quality princes should cultivate, too.’ He adds, rather dubious, ‘King Francis has it.’
‘Yes. But besides sprezzatura one must exhibit at all times a dignified public restraint. I was thinking I might commission a translation as a gift for my lord Norfolk.’
It must be in his mind, the picture of Thomas Howard in Canterbury, threatening to punch the holy nun. Henry grins. ‘You should do it.’
‘Well, if he would not take it as a reproach. Castiglione recommends that a man should not curl his hair nor pluck his eyebrows. And you know my lord does both.’
The princeling frowns at him. ‘My lord of Norfolk?’ Henry unleashes an unregal yell of laughter, neither dignified nor restrained. It is welcome to his ears. The ship's timbers creak. The king steadies himself with a hand on his shoulder. The wind stiffens the sails. The sun dances over the water. ‘An hour and we will be in port.’
Calais, this outpost of England, her last hold on France, is a town where he has many friends, many customers, many clients. He knows it, Watergate and Lantern Gate, St Nicholas Church and Church of Our Lady, he knows its towers and bulwarks, its markets, courts and quays, Staple Inn where the Governor lodges, and the houses of the Whethill and Wingfield families, houses with shady gardens where gentlemen live in pleasant retreat from an England they claim they no longer understand. He knows the fortifications – crumbling – and beyond the city walls the lands of the Pale, its woods, villages and marshes, its sluices, dykes and canals. He knows the road to Boulogne, and the road to Gravelines, which is the Emperor's territory, and he knows that either monarch, Francis or Charles, could take this town with one determined push. The English have been here for two hundred years, but in the streets now you hear more French and Flemish spoken.
The Governor greets His Majesty; Lord Berners, old soldier and scholar, is the pattern of old-fashioned virtue, and if it were not for his limp, and his evident anxiety about the vast expenses he is about to incur, he would be straight out of the book called The Courtier. He has even arranged to lodge the king and the marquess in rooms with an interconnecting door. ‘I think that will be very suitable, my lord,’ he says. ‘As long as there is a sturdy bolt on both sides.’
Because Mary told him, before they left dry land, ‘Till now she wouldn't, but now she would, but he won't. He tells her he must be sure that if she gets a child it's born in wedlock.’
The monarchs are to meet for five days in Boulogne, then five days in Calais. Anne is aggrieved at the thought of being left behind. He can see by her restlessness that she knows this is a debatable land, where things might happen you cannot foretell. Meanwhile he has private business to transact. He leaves even Rafe behind, and slips away to an inn in a back court off Calk-well Street.
It is a low sort of place, and smells of wood smoke, fish and mould. On a side wall is a watery mirror through which he glimpses his own face, pale, only his eyes alive. For a moment it shocks him; you do not expect to see your own image in a hovel like this.
He sits at a table and waits. After five minutes there is a disturbance of the air at the back of the room. But nothing happens. He has anticipated they will keep him waiting; to pass the time, he runs over in his head the figures for last year's receipts to the king from the Duchy of Cornwall. He is about to move on to the figures submitted by the Chamberlain of Chester, when a dark shape materialises, and resolves itself into the person of an old man in a long gown. He totters forward, and in time two others follow him. You could change any one for the other: hollow coughs, long beards. According to some precedence which they negotiate by grunting, they take their seats on a bench opposite. He hates alchemists, and these look like alchemists to him: nameless splashes on their garments, watering eyes, vapour-induced sniffles. He greets them in French. They shudder, and one of them asks in Latin if they are not going to have anything to drink. He calls for the boy, and asks him without much hope what he suggests. ‘Drink somewhere else?’ the boy offers.
A jug of something vinegary comes. He lets the old men drink deeply before he asks, ‘Which of you is Maître Camillo?’
They exchange glances. It takes them as long as it takes the Graiae to pass their single shared eye.
‘Maître Camillo has gone to Venice.’
‘Why?’
Some coughing. ‘For consultations.’
‘But he does mean to return to France?’
‘Quite likely.’
‘The thing you have, I want it for my master.’
A silence. How would it be, he thought, if I take the wine away till they say something useful? But one pre-empts him, snatching up the jug; his hand shakes, and the wine washes over the table. The others bleat with irritation.
‘I thought you might bring drawings,’ he says.
They look at each other. ‘Oh, no.’
‘But there are drawings?’
‘Not as such.’
The spilt wine begins to soak into the splintered wood. They sit in miserable silence and watch this happen. One of them occupies himself in working his finger through a moth hole in his sleeve.
He