They talk alone. Rafe: ‘He’ll ask you to go and work for him.’
‘Yes. Perhaps not in so many words.’
He watches Rafe’s face as he weighs up the situation. Norfolk is already – unless you count the king’s bastard son – the realm’s premier nobleman. ‘I assured him,’ Rafe says, ‘of your respect, your … your reverence, your desire to be at his – erm –’
‘Commandment?’
‘More or less.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said, hmm.’
He laughs. ‘And was that his tone?’
‘It was his tone.’
‘And his grim nod?’
‘Yes.’
Very well. I dry my tears, those tears from All Hallows day. I sit with the cardinal, by the fire at Esher in a room with a smoking chimney. I say, my lord, do you think I would forsake you? I locate the man in charge of chimneys and hearths. I give him orders. I ride to London, to Blackfriars. The day is foggy, St Hubert’s Day. Norfolk is waiting, to tell me he will be a good lord to me.
The duke is now approaching sixty years old, but concedes nothing to the calendar. Flint-faced and keen-eyed, he is lean as a gnawed bone and as cold as an axe head; his joints seem knitted together of supple chain links, and indeed he rattles a little as he moves, for his clothes conceal relics: in tiny jewelled cases he has shavings of skin and snippets of hair, and set into medallions he wears splinters of martyrs’ bones. ‘Marry!’ he says, for an oath, and ‘By the Mass!’, and sometimes takes out one of his medals or charms from wherever it is hung about his person, and kisses it in a fervour, calling on some saint or martyr to stop his current rage getting the better of him. ‘St Jude give me patience!’ he will shout; probably he has mixed him up with Job, whom he heard about in a story when he was a little boy at the knee of his first priest. It is hard to imagine the duke as a little boy, or in any way younger or different from the self he presents now. He thinks the Bible a book unnecessary for laypeople, though he understands priests make some use of it. He thinks book-reading an affectation altogether, and wishes there were less of it at court. His niece is always reading, Anne Boleyn, which is perhaps why she is unmarried at the age of twenty-eight. He does not see why it’s a gentleman’s business to write letters; there are clerks for that.
Now he fixes an eye, red and fiery. ‘Cromwell, I am content you are a burgess in the Parliament.’
He bows his head. ‘My lord.’
‘I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine.’
‘Will they be the same, my lord?’
The duke scowls. He paces; he rattles a little; at last he bursts out, ‘Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a … person? It isn’t as if you could afford to be.’
He waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a person, he is a presence. He knows how to edge blackly into a room so that you don’t see him; but perhaps those days are over.
‘Smile away,’ says the duke. ‘Wolsey’s household is a nest of vipers. Not that …’ he touches a medal, flinching, ‘God forbid I should …’
Compare a prince of the church to a serpent. The duke wants the cardinal’s money, and he wants the cardinal’s place at the king’s side: but then again, he doesn’t want to burn in Hell. He walks across the room; he slaps his hands together; he rubs them; he turns. ‘The king is preparing to quarrel with you, master. Oh yes. He will favour you with an interview because he wishes to understand the cardinal’s affairs, but he has, you will learn, a very long and exact memory, and what he remembers, master, is when you were a burgess of the Parliament before this, and how you spoke against his war.’
‘I hope he doesn’t think still of invading France.’
‘God damn you! What Englishman does not! We own France. We have to take back our own.’ A muscle in his cheek jumps; he paces, agitated; he turns, he rubs his cheek; the twitch stops, and he says, in a voice perfectly matter-of-fact, ‘Mind you, you’re right.’
He waits. ‘We can’t win,’ the duke says, ‘but we have to fight as if we can. Hang the expense. Hang the waste – money, men, horses, ships. That’s what’s wrong with Wolsey, you see. Always at the treaty table. How can a butcher’s son understand –’
‘La gloire?’
‘Are you a butcher’s son?’
‘A blacksmith’s.’
‘Are you really? Shoe a horse?’
He shrugs. ‘If I were put to it, my lord. But I can’t imagine –’
‘You can’t? What can you imagine? A battlefield, a camp, the night before a battle – can you imagine that?’
‘I was a soldier myself.’
‘Were you so? Not in any English army, I’ll be bound. There, you see.’ The duke grins, quite without animosity. ‘I knew there was something about you. I knew I didn’t like you, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Where were you?’
‘Garigliano.’
‘With?’
‘The French.’
The duke whistles. ‘Wrong side, lad.’
‘So I noticed.’
‘With the French,’ he chuckles. ‘With the French. And how did you scramble out of that disaster?’
‘I went north. Got into …’ He’s going to say money, but the duke wouldn’t understand trading in money. ‘Cloth,’ he says. ‘Silk, mostly. You know what the market is, with the soldier over there.’
‘By the Mass, yes! Johnnie Freelance – he puts his money on his back. Those Switzers! Like a troupe of play-actors. Lace, stripes, fancy hats. Easy target, that’s all. Longbowman?’
‘Now and then.’ He smiles. ‘On the short side for that.’
‘Me too. Now, Henry draws a bow. Very nice. Got the height for it. Got the arm. Still. We won’t win many battles like that any more.’
‘Then how about not fighting any? Negotiate, my lord. It’s cheaper.’
‘I tell you, Cromwell, you’ve got face, coming here.’
‘My lord – you sent for me.’
‘Did I?’ Norfolk looks alarmed. ‘It’s come to that?’
The king’s advisers are preparing no fewer than forty-four charges against the cardinal. They range from the violation of the statutes of praemunire – that is to say, the upholding of a foreign jurisdiction within the king’s realm – to buying beef for his household at the same price as the king; from financial malfeasance to failing to halt the spread of Lutheran heresies.
The law of praemunire dates from another century. No one who is alive now quite knows what it means. From day to day it seems to mean what the king says it means. The matter is argued in every talking shop in Europe. Meanwhile, my lord cardinal sits, and sometimes mutters to himself, and sometimes speaks aloud, saying, ‘Thomas, my colleges! Whatever happens to my person, my colleges must be saved. Go to the king. Whatever vengeance, for whatever imagined injury, he would like to wreak on me, he surely cannot mean to put out the light of learning?’
In exile at Esher, the cardinal paces and frets. The great mind which once revolved the affairs of Europe now cogitates ceaselessly on its own losses. He lapses into silent inactivity, brooding as the light fails; for God’s sake, Thomas, Cavendish begs him, don’t tell him you’re coming if you’re not.
I won’t, he says, and I am coming,