He sees Bess, in sympathy, raise her eyes to her sister. ‘But Master Cromwell,’ Bess says, ‘it cannot always be acts of Parliament and dispatches to ambassadors and revenue and Wales and monks and pirates and traitorous devices and Bibles and oaths and trusts and wards and leases and the price of wool and whether we should pray for the dead. There must sometimes be other topics.’
He is struck by her overview of his situation. It is as if she has understood his life. He is taken by an impulse to clasp her hand and ask her to marry him; even if they did not get on in bed, she seems to have a gift for precis that eludes most of his clerks.
‘Well?’ Jane says. ‘Are there? Other topics?’
He can’t think. He squashes his soft hat between his hands. ‘Horses,’ he says. ‘Henry likes to know about trades and crafts, simple things. In my youth I learned to shoe a horse, he likes to know about that, the right shoe for the job, so he can confound his own smiths with secret knowledge. The archbishop, too, he is a man who will ride any horse that comes to his hand, he is a timid man but horses like him, he learned to manage them when he was young. When he is tired of God and men we speak of these matters with the king.’
‘And?’ Bess says. ‘You are together many hours.’
‘Dogs, sometimes. Hunting dogs, their breeding and virtues. Fortresses. Building them. Artillery. The range of it. Cannon foundries. Dear God.’ He runs his hand through his hair. ‘We sometimes say, we will have a day out together, ride down to Kent, to the weald, to see the ironmasters there, study their operations, and propose them new ways of casting cannon. But we never do it. Something is always in our way.’
He feels irredeemably sad. As if he has been plunged into mourning. And at the same time he feels, if someone tossed a feather bed into the room (which is unlikely) he would throw Bess on to it, and have to do with her.
‘Well, that’s that,’ Jane says, her tone resigned. ‘I could not found a cannon to save my life. I am sorry to have taken your time, Master Secretary. You had better get back to Wales.’
He knows what she means.
Next day, the king’s love letter is brought to Jane, with a heavy purse. It is a scene staged before witnesses. ‘I must return this purse,’ Jane says. (But she does not say it before she has weighed it, fondled it, in her tiny hand.) ‘I must beg the king, if he wishes to make me a present of money, to send it again when I should contract an honourable marriage.’
Given the king’s letter, she declares she had better not open it. For well she knows his heart, his gallant and ardent heart. For herself, her only possession is her womanly honour, her maidenhead. So – no, really – she had better not break the seal.
And then, before she returns it to the messenger, she holds it in her two hands: and places, on the seal, a chaste kiss.
‘She kissed it!’ Tom Seymour cries. ‘What genius possessed her? First his seal. Next,’ he sniggers, ‘his sceptre!’
In a fit of joy, he knocks his brother Edward’s hat off. He has been playing this joke for twenty years or more, and Edward has never been amused. But just this once, he fetches up a smile.
When the king gets the letter back from Jane, he listens closely to what his messenger has to tell him, and his face lights up. ‘I see I was wrong to send it. Cromwell here has spoken to me of her innocence and her virtue, and with good reason, as it appears. From this point I will do nothing that will offend her honour. In fact, I shall only speak to her in the presence of her kin.’
If Edward Seymour’s wife were to come to court, they could make a family party, with whom the king could take supper without any affront to Jane’s modesty. Perhaps Edward should have a suite in the palace? Those rooms of mine at Greenwich, he reminds Henry, that communicate directly with yours: what if I were to move out and let the Seymours move in? Henry beams at him.
He has been studying the Seymour brothers intently since the visit to Wolf Hall. He will have to work with them; Henry’s women come trailing families, he does not find his brides in the forest hiding under a leaf. Edward is grave, serious, yet he is ready to unfold his thoughts to you. Tom is close, that’s what he thinks; close and cunning, brain busily working beneath that show of bonhomie. But it’s perhaps not the best brain. Tom Seymour will give me no trouble, he thinks, and Edward I can carry with me. His mind is already moving ahead, to a time when the king indicates his pleasure. Gregory and the Emperor’s ambassador, between them, have suggested the way forward. ‘If he can annul twenty years with his true wife,’ Chapuys has said to him, ‘I am sure it is not beyond your wit to find some grounds to free him from his concubine. No one has ever believed the marriage was good in the first place, except those who are employed to say yes to him.’
He wonders, though, about the ambassador’s ‘no one’. No one in the Emperor’s court, perhaps: but all England has sworn to the marriage. It is not a light matter, he tells his nephew Richard, to undo it legally, even if the king commanded it. We shall wait a little, we will not go to anyone, let them come to us.
He asks for a document to be drawn up, showing all grants to the Boleyns since 1524. ‘Such a thing would be good to have at my hand, in case the king calls for it.’
He does not mean to take anything away. Rather, enhance their holdings. Load them with honours. Laugh at their jokes.
Though you must be careful what you laugh at. Master Sexton, the king’s jester, has jested about Anne and called her a ribald. He thought he had licence, but Henry lumbered across the hall and clouted him, banged his head on the panelling and banished him the court. They say Nicholas Carew gave the man refuge, out of pity.
Anthony is aggrieved about Sexton. One jester does not like to hear of the downfall of another; especially, Anthony says, when his only vice is foresight. Oh, he says, you have been listening to the gossip in the kitchen. But the fool says, ‘Henry kicks out the truth and Master Sexton with it. But these days it has a way of creeping under the bolted door and down the chimney. One day he will give in and invite it to stand by the hearth.’
William Fitzwilliam comes to the Rolls House and sits down with him. ‘So how does the queen, Crumb? Still perfect friends, though you dine with the Seymours?’
He smiles.
Fitzwilliam jumps up, wrenches the door open to see no one is lurking, then sits down again, and resumes. ‘Cast your mind back. This Boleyn courtship, this Boleyn marriage. How did the king look, in the eyes of grown men? Like one who only studies his own pleasures. Like a child, that is to say. To be so impassioned, to be so enslaved by a woman, who after all is made just as other women are – some said it was unmanly.’
