FIVE
The two children sit on a bench in the hall of Austin Friars. They are so small that their legs stick straight out in front of them, and as they are still in smocks one cannot tell their sex. Under their caps, their dimpled faces beam. That they look so fat and contented is a credit to the young woman, Helen Barre, who now unwinds the thread of her tale: daughter of a bankrupt small merchant out of Essex, wife of one Matthew Barre who beat her and deserted her, ‘leaving me,’ she says, indicating, ‘with that one in my belly.’ The neighbours are always coming at him with parish problems. Unsafe cellar doors. A noisome goose house. A husband and wife who shout and bang pans all night, so the next house can't get to sleep. He tries not to fret if these things cut into his time, and he minds Helen less than a goose house. Mentally, he takes her out of cheap shrunken wool and re-dresses her in some figured velvet he saw yesterday, six shillings the yard. Her hands, he sees, are skinned and swollen from rough work; he supplies kid gloves. ‘Though when I say he deserted me, it may be that he is dead. He was a great drinker and a brawler. A man who knew him told me he came off worst in a fight, and I should seek him at the bottom of the river. But someone else saw him on the quays at Tilbury, with a travelling bag. So which am I – wife or widow?’ ‘I will look into it. Though I think you would rather I didn't find him. How have you lived?’ ‘When he went first I was stitching for a sailmaker. Since I came up to London to search, I've been hiring out by the day. I have been in the laundry at a convent near Paul's, helping at the yearly wash of their bed linen. They find me a good worker, they say they will give me a pallet in the attics, but they won't take the children.’ Another instance of the church's charity. He runs up against them all the time. ‘We cannot have you a slave to a set of hypocrite women. You must come here. I am sure you will be useful. The house is filling up all the time, and I am building, as you see.’ She must be a good girl, he thinks, to turn her back on making a living in the obvious way; if she walked along the street, she wouldn't be short of offers. ‘They tell me you would like to learn to read, so you can read the gospel.’ ‘Some women I met took me to what they call a night school. It was in a cellar at Broadgate. Before that, I knew Noah, the Three Kings, and father Abraham, but St Paul I had never heard of. At home on our farm we had pucks who used to turn the milk and blow up thunderstorms, but I am told they are not Christians. I wish we had stayed farming, for all that. My father was no hand at town life.’ Her eyes, anxious, follow the children. They have launched themselves off the bench and toddled across the flagstones to see the picture that is growing on the wall, and their every step causes her to hold her breath. The workman is a German, a young boy Hans recommended for a simple job, and he turns around – he speaks no English – to explain to the children what he is doing. A rose. Three lions, see them jump. Two black birds. ‘Red,’ the elder child cries. ‘She knows colours,’ Helen says, pink with pride. ‘She is also beginning on one-two-three.’ The space where the arms of Wolsey used to be is being repainted with his own newly granted arms: azure, on a fess between three lions rampant or, a rose gules, barbed vert, between two Cornish choughs proper. ‘You see, Helen,’ he says, ‘those black birds were Wolsey's emblem.’ He laughs. ‘There are people who hoped they would never see them again.’ ‘There are other people, of our sort, who do not understand it.’ ‘You mean night school people?’ ‘They say, how can a man who loves the gospel, have loved such a man as that?’ ‘I never liked his haughty manners, you know, and his processions every day, the state he kept. And yet there was never a man more active in the service of England since England began. And also,’ he says sadly, ‘when you came into his confidence, he was a man of such grace and ease … Helen, can you come here today?’ He is thinking of those nuns and the yearly wash of their bed linen. He is imagining the cardinal's appalled face. Laundry women followed his train as whores follow an army, hot from their hour-by-hour exertions. At York Place he had a bath made, deep enough for a man to stand up in it, the room heated by a stove such as you find in the Low Countries, and many a time he had negotiated business with the cardinal's bobbing, boiled-looking head. Henry has taken it over now, and splashes about in it with favoured gentlemen, who submit to being ducked under the water and half-drowned by their lord, if his mood takes him that way. The painter offers the brush to the elder child. Helen glows. ‘Careful, darling,’ she says. A blob of blue is applied. You are a little adept, the painter says. Gefällt es Ihnen, Herr Cromwell, sind Sie stolz darauf?' He says to Helen, he asks if I am pleased and proud. She says, if you are not, your friends will be proud for you. I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person. Anne to Henry. Henry to Anne. Those days when he wants soothing, and she is as prickly as a holly bush. Those times – they do occur – when his gaze strays after another woman, and she follows it, and storms off to her own apartments. He, Cromwell, goes about like some public poet, carrying assurances of desire, each to each. It is hardly three o'clock, and already the room is half-dark. He picks up the younger child, who flops against his shoulder and falls asleep with the speed at which someone pushed falls off a wall. ‘Helen,’ he says, ‘this household is full of pert young men, and they will all put themselves forward in teaching you to read, bringing you presents and trying to sweeten your days. Do learn, and take the presents, and be happy here with us, but if anyone is too forward, you must tell me, or tell Rafe Sadler. He is the boy with the little red beard. Though I should not say boy.’ It will be twenty years, soon, since he brought Rafe in from his father's house, a lowering, dark day like this, rain bucketing from the heavens, the child slumped against his shoulder as he carried him into his hall at Fenchurch Street. The storms had kept them in Calais for ten days. Ships out of Boulogne were wrecked, Antwerp flooded, much of the countryside put under water. He would like to get messages to his friends, enquiring after their lives and property, but the roads are impassable, Calais itself a floating island upon which a happy monarch reigns. He goes to the king's lodgings to ask for an audience – business doesn't stop in bad weather – but he is told, ‘The king cannot see you this morning. He and Lady Anne are composing some music for the harp.’ Rafe catches his eye and they walk away. ‘Let us hope in time they have a little song to show for it.’ Thomas Wyatt and Henry Norris get drunk together in a low tavern. They swear eternal friendship. But their followers have a fight in the inn yard and roll each other in mud. He never sets eyes on Mary Boleyn. Presumably she and Stafford have found some bolt-hole where they can compose together. By candlelight, at noon, Lord Berners shows him his library, limping energetically from desk to desk, handling with care the old folios from which he has made his scholarly translations. Here is a romance of King Arthur: ‘When I started reading it I almost gave up the project. It was clear to me it was too fantastical to be true. But little by little, as I read, you know, it appeared to me that there was a moral in this tale.’ He does not say what it is. ‘And here is Froissart done into English, which His Majesty himself bade me undertake. I could not do other, for he had just lent me five hundred pounds. Would you like to see my translations from the Italian? They are private ones, I have not sent them to the printer.’ He spends an afternoon with the manuscripts, and they discuss them at supper. Lord Berners holds a position, chancellor of the exchequer, which Henry has given him for life, but because he is not in London and attending to it, it does not bring him in much money, or the influence it should. ‘I know you are a good man for business.
