around the quarrel, reuniting in chattering parties at the other side.
‘By God,’ Brandon says. ‘You read me a lesson? I? A peer of the realm? And you, from the place where you come from?’
‘I stand just where the king has put me. I will read you any lesson you should learn.’
He thinks, Cromwell, what are you doing? Usually he is the soul of courtesy. But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?
He glances sideways at his son. We are three years older, less a month, than at Anne’s coronation. Some of us are wiser; some of us are taller. Gregory had said he could not do it, when told he should witness her death: ‘I cannot. A woman, I cannot.’ But his boy has kept his face arranged and his tongue governed. Each time you are in public, he has told Gregory, know that people are observing you, to see if you are fit to follow me in the king’s service.
They step aside to bow to the Duke of Richmond: Henry Fitzroy, the king’s bastard son. He is a handsome boy with his father’s fine flushed skin and red-blond hair: a tender plant, willowy, a boy who has not yet grown into his great height. He sways above them both. ‘Master Secretary? England is a better place this morning.’
Gregory says, ‘My lord, you also did not kneel. How is that?’
Richmond blushes. He knows he is in the wrong, and shows it as his father always does; but like his father, he will defend himself with a stout self-righteousness. ‘I would not be a hypocrite, Gregory. My lord father has declared to me how Boleyn would have poisoned me. He says she boasted she would do it. Well, now her monstrous adulteries are all found out, and she is properly punished.’
‘You are not ill, my lord?’ He is thinking, too much wine last night: toasting his future, no doubt.
‘I am only tired. I will go and sleep. Put this spectacle behind me.’
Gregory’s eyes follow Richmond. ‘Do you think he can ever be king?’
‘If he is, he’ll remember you,’ he says cheerfully.
‘Oh, he knows me already,’ Gregory says. ‘Did I do wrong?’
‘It is not wrong to speak your mind. On selected occasions. They make it painful for you. But you must do it.’
‘I don’t think I shall ever be a councillor,’ Gregory says. ‘I don’t think I could ever learn it – when to speak and when to keep silence, when I should look and when I should not. You told me, the moment you see the blade in the air, then she is dying – at that moment, you said, bow your head and close your eyes. But I saw you – you were looking.’
‘Of course I was.’ He takes his son’s arm. ‘It would be like the late queen to pin her head back on, pick up the sword and chase me to Whitehall.’ She may be dead, he thinks, but she can still ruin me.
Breakfast. Fine white loaves, wine of head-spinning strength. The Duke of Norfolk, the dead woman’s uncle, gives him a nod. ‘Most corpses wouldn’t fit in an arrow chest, eh? You’d have to hack the arms off. Do you think Kingston’s getting past it?’
Gregory is surprised. ‘Sir William is no older than yourself, my lord.’
A bark of laughter: ‘You think men of sixty should be put out to grass?’
‘He thinks they should be boiled for glue.’ He puts an arm around his son’s shoulders. ‘He’ll soon be boiling his father, won’t you?’
‘But you are far younger than my lord Norfolk.’ Gregory turns to the duke, the better to inform him. ‘My father is in sound health, if you except his special fever, which he got when he was in Italy. It is true he works long hours, but he believes long hours never killed anybody, he often says so. His doctor says you couldn’t fell him with a cannonball.’
By now the witnesses have seen the late queen nailed down and are packing in at the open doors. The city officers jostle, keen for a word with him. One question in their mouths: Master Secretary, when shall we see the new queen? When will Jane do us the honour? Will she ride through the streets, or sail in the royal barge? What arms and emblems will she take as queen, and what motto? When may we notify the painters and artificers and set them to work? Will there be a coronation soon? What present can we make her, that will find favour in her eyes?
‘A bag of money is always acceptable,’ he says. ‘I do not think we will see her in public till she and the king are married, but that will not be long. She is pious in the old style and any banners or painted cloths depicting the angels and saints, and the Holy Virgin, will be well-accepted by her.’
‘So,’ says the Lord Mayor, ‘we can look out what we have had in store since Queen Katherine’s time?’
‘That would be prudent, Sir John, and save the city’s funds.’
‘We have the life of St Veronica in panels,’ an elderly guildsman says. ‘On the first, she stands weeping by the route to Calvary, as Christ bears his cross. On the second –’
‘Of course,’ he murmurs.
‘– on the second, the saint wipes the face of our Saviour. On the third, she holds up the bloody cloth, and there we may see the image of Christ, printed clearly in his precious blood.’
‘My wife observed,’ says Constable Kingston, ‘that this morning the lady left aside her usual head-dress, and chose the style the late Katherine favoured. She wonders what she meant by it.’
Perhaps it was a courtesy, he thinks, from a dying queen to a dead one. They will be meeting this morning in another country, where no doubt they will have much to tell.
‘Would that my niece had imitated Katherine in other particulars,’ Norfolk says. ‘Had she been obedient, chaste and meek, her head might still be on her shoulders.’
Gregory is so amazed that he takes a step back, into the Lord Mayor. ‘But my lord, Katherine was not obedient! Did she not defy the king’s will year after year, when he told her to go away and be divorced? Did you yourself not go down to the country to enforce her, and she slammed into her chamber and turned the key, so you were obliged to spend the twelve days of Christmas shouting through a door?’
‘You’ll find that was my lord Suffolk,’ the duke says shortly. ‘Another useless dotard, eh, Gregory? That’s Charles Brandon over there – the mighty fellow with the big beard. I am the stringy fellow with the bad temper. See the difference?’
‘Ah,’ Gregory says, ‘I remember now. My father enjoyed the tale so much, we performed it as a play at Twelfth Night. My cousin Richard played my lord Suffolk, wearing a woolly beard to his waist. And Mr Rafe Sadler put on a skirt and played the queen, insulting the duke in the Spanish tongue. And my father took the part of the door.’
‘I wish I had seen it.’ Norfolk rubs the tip of his nose. ‘No, I tell you, Gregory, I honestly do.’ He and Charles Brandon are old rivals, and enjoy each other’s embarrassments. ‘I wonder what you’ll play this Christmas?’
Gregory opens his mouth and closes it again. The future is a curious blank. He, Cromwell, intervenes, before his son attempts to fill it. ‘Gentlemen, I can tell you what the new queen will take as her motto. It is Bound to Obey and Serve.’
There is a murmur of approbation that runs right around the room. Brandon’s big laugh booms out: ‘Better safe than sorry, eh?’
‘So say we all.’ Norfolk tips back his canary wine. ‘Whoever crosses the king in the years ahead, gentlemen, it will not be Thomas Howard here.’ He stabs a finger into his own breastbone, as if otherwise they might not know who he is. Then he slaps Master Secretary on the shoulder, with every appearance of comradeship. ‘So what now, Cromwell?’
Don’t be deceived. Uncle Norfolk is not our comrade or our ally or our friend. He is slapping us to appraise how solid we are. He is eyeing the Cromwell bull-neck. He is wondering what sort of blade you’d need,