they're dying. ‘Master Cromwell, you may assure the king I will not bring an army against him. Tell him I pray for him daily. Some people, those who do not know him as I do, they say, “Oh, he will work his will, he will have his desire at any price.” But I know that he needs to be on the side of the light. He is not a man like you, who just packs up his sins in his saddlebags and carries them from country to country, and when they grow too heavy whistles up a mule or two, and soon commands a train of them and a troop of muleteers. Henry may err, but he needs to be forgiven. I therefore believe, and will continue to believe, that he will turn out of this path of error, in order to be at peace with himself. And peace is what we all wish for, I am sure.’
‘What a placid end you make, madam. “Peace is what we all wish for.” Like an abbess. You are quite sure by the way that you would not think of becoming an abbess?’
A smile. Quite a broad smile. ‘I shall be sorry if I don't see you again. You are so much quicker in conversation than the dukes.’
‘The dukes will be back.’
‘I am braced. Is there news of my lady Suffolk?’
‘The king says she is dying. Brandon has no heart for anything.’
‘I can well believe it,’ she murmurs. ‘Her income as dowager queen of France dies with her, and that is the greater part of his revenue. Still, no doubt you will arrange him a loan, at some iniquitous rate of interest.’ She looks up. ‘My daughter will be curious to know I have seen you. She believes you were kind to her.’
He only remembers giving her a stool to sit on. Her life must be bleak, if she remembers that.
‘Properly, she should have remained standing, awaiting a sign from me.’
Her own pain-racked little daughter. She may smile, but she doesn't yield an inch. Julius Caesar would have had more compunction. Hannibal.
‘Tell me,’ she says, testing the ground. ‘The king would read a letter from me?’
Henry has taken to tearing her letters up unread, or burning them. He says they disgust him with their expressions of love. He does not have it in him to tell her this. ‘Then rest for an hour,’ she says, ‘while I write it. Unless you will stay a night with us? I should be glad of company at supper.’
‘Thank you, but I must start back, the council meets tomorrow. Besides, if I stayed, where would I put my mules? Not to mention my team of drivers.’
‘Oh, the stables are half-empty. The king makes sure I am kept short of mounts. He thinks that I will give my household the slip and ride to the coast and escape on a ship to Flanders.’
‘And will you?’
He has retrieved her thimble; he hands it back; she bounces it in her hand as if it were a die and she were ready to cast it.
‘No. I shall stay here. Or go where I am sent. As the king wills. As a wife should.’
Until the excommunication, he thinks. That will free you from all bonds, as wife, as subject. ‘This is yours too,’ he says. He opens his palm; in it a needle, tip towards her.
The word is about town that Thomas More has fallen into poverty. He laughs about it with Master Secretary Gardiner. ‘Alice was a rich widow when he married her,’ Gardiner says. ‘And he has land of his own; how can he be poor? And the daughters, he's married them well.’
‘And he still has his pension from the king.’ He is sifting through paperwork for Stephen, who is preparing to appear as leading counsel for Henry at Dunstable. He has filed away all the depositions from the Blackfriars hearings, which seem to have happened in another era.
‘Angels defend us,’ Gardiner says, ‘is there anything you don't file?’
‘If we keep on to the bottom of this chest I'll find your father's love letters to your mother.’ He blows dust off the last batch. ‘There you are.’ The papers hit the table. ‘Stephen, what can we do for John Frith? He was your pupil at Cambridge. Don't abandon him.’
But Gardiner shakes his head and busies himself with the documents, leafing through them, humming under his breath, exclaiming ‘Well, who'd have known!’ and ‘Here's a nice point!’
He gets a boat down to Chelsea. The ex-Chancellor is at ease in his parlour, daughter Margaret translating from the Greek in a drone barely audible; as he approaches, he hears him pick her up on some error. ‘Leave us, daughter,’ More says, when he sees him. ‘I won't have you in this devil's company.’ But Margaret looks up and smiles, and More rises from his chair, a little stiff as if his back is bad, and offers a hand.
It is Reginald Pole, lying in Italy, who says he is a devil. The point is, he means it; it's not an image with him, as in a fable, but something he takes to be true, as he takes the gospel to be true.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘We hear you can't come to the coronation because you can't afford a new coat. The Bishop of Winchester will buy you one himself if you'll show your face on the day.’
‘Stephen? Will he?’
‘I swear it.’ He relishes the thought of going back to London and asking Gardiner for ten pounds. ‘Or the guildsmen will make a collection, if you like, for a new hat and a doublet as well.’
‘And how are you to appear?’ Margaret speaks gently, as if she has been asked to mind two children for the afternoon.
‘They are making something for me. I leave it to others. If I only avoid exciting mirth, it will be enough.’
Anne has said, you shall not dress like a lawyer on my coronation day. She has called out to Jane Rochford, taking notes like a clerk: Thomas must go into crimson. ‘Mistress Roper,’ he says, ‘are you not yourself curious to see the queen crowned?’
Her father cuts in, talking over her: ‘It is a day of shame for the women of England. One can hear them say on the streets – when the Emperor comes, wives shall have their rights again.’
‘Father, I am sure they take care not to say that in Master Cromwell's hearing.’
He sighs. It's not much, to know that all the merry young whores are on your side. All the kept women, and the runaway daughters. Though now Anne is married, she sets herself up for an example. Already she has slapped Mary Shelton, Lady Carey tells him, for writing a riddle in her prayer book, and it was not even an indecent one. The queen sits very erect these days, child stirring in her belly, needlework in hand, and when Norris and Weston and their gentlemen friends come swarming into her apartments, she looks at them, when they lay compliments at her feet, as if they were strewing her hem with spiders. Unless you approach her with a Bible text in your mouth, better not approach her at all.
He says, ‘Has the Maid been up to see you again? The prophetess?’
‘She has,’ Meg says, ‘but we would not receive her.’
‘I believe she has been to see Lady Exeter. At her invitation.’
‘Lady Exeter is a foolish and ambitious woman,’ More says.
‘I understand the Maid told her that she would be Queen of England.’
‘I repeat my comment.’
‘Do you believe in her visions? Their holy nature, that is?’
‘No. I think she is an impostor. She does it for attention.’
‘Just that?’
‘You don't know what young women will do. I have a houseful of daughters.’
He pauses. ‘You are blessed.’
Meg glances up; she recalls his losses, though she never heard Anne Cromwell demand, why should Mistress More have the pre-eminence? She says, ‘There were holy maids before this. One at Ipswich. Only a little girl of twelve. She was of good family, and they say she did miracles, and she got nothing out of it, no personal profit, and she died young.’
‘But