her…however, you will only use that if you have to, I do not want unnecessary…’
He nods. You don’t want history to make a liar of you. In public before your courtiers you had me state that you had never had to do with Mary Boleyn, while you sat there and nodded. You removed all impediments: Mary Boleyn, Harry Percy, you swept them aside. But now our requirements have changed, and the facts have changed behind us.
‘So fare you well,’ Henry says. ‘Be very secret. I trust in your discretion, and your skill.’
How necessary, but how sad, to hear Henry apologise. He has developed a perverse respect for Norfolk, with his grunt of ‘All right, lad?’
In an antechamber Mr Wriothesley is waiting for him. ‘So do you have instructions, sir?’
‘Well, I have hints.’
‘Do you know when they might take form?’
He smiles. Call-Me says, ‘I hear that in council the king declared he will seek to marry Lady Mary to a subject.’
Surely that’s not what the meeting concluded? In a moment, he feels like himself again: hears himself laughing and saying, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Call-Me. Who told you that? Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I think it would save time and work if all the interested parties came to the council, including foreign ambassadors. The proceedings leak out anyway, and to save them mishearing and misconstruing they might as well hear everything at first hand.’
‘I’ve got it wrong, then?’ Wriothesley says. ‘Because I thought, marrying her to a subject, to some low man, that was a plan thought up by the queen that is now?’
He shrugs. The young man gives him a glassy look. It will be some years before he understands why.
Edward Seymour seeks an interview with him. There is no doubt in his mind that the Seymours will come to his table, even if they have to sit under it and catch the crumbs.
Edward is tense, hurried, nervous. ‘Master Secretary, taking the long view –’
‘In this matter, a day would be a long view. Get your girl out of it, let Carew take her to his house down in Surrey.’
‘Do not think I wish to know your secrets,’ Edward says, picking his words. ‘Do not think I wish to pry into matters that are not for me. But for my sister’s sake I would like to have some indication –’
‘Oh, I see, you want to know if she should order her wedding clothes?’ Edward gives him an imploring look. He says soberly, ‘We are going to seek an annulment. Just now I do not know on what grounds.’
‘But they will fight,’ Edward says. ‘The Boleyns if they go down will take us with them. I have heard of serpents that, though they are dying, exude poison through their skins.’
‘Did you ever pick up a snake?’ he asks. ‘I did once, in Italy.’ He holds out his palms. ‘I am unmarked.’
‘Then we must be very secret,’ Edward says. ‘Anne must not know.’
‘Well,’ he says wryly, ‘I do not think we can keep it from her for ever.’
But she will know all the sooner, if his new friends do not stop trapping him in anterooms, blocking his path and bowing to him; if they do not stop this whispering and eyebrow raising and digging each other with their elbows.
He says to Edward, I must go home and shut the door and consult with myself. The queen is plotting something, I know not what, something devious, something dark, perhaps so dark that she herself does not know what it is, and as yet is only dreaming of it: but I must be quick, I must dream it for her, I shall dream it into being.
According to Lady Rochford, Anne complains that since she rose from childbed Henry is always watching her; and not in the way he used to.
For a long time he has noticed Harry Norris watching the queen; and from some eminence, perched like a carved falcon over a doorway, he has seen himself watching Harry Norris.
For now, Anne seems oblivious to the wings that hover over her, to the eye that studies her path as she jinks and swerves. She chatters about her child Elizabeth, holding up on her fingers a tiny cap, a pretty ribboned cap, just come from the embroiderer.
Henry looks at her flatly as if to say, why are you showing me this, what is it to me?
Anne strokes the scrap of silk. He feels a needle point of pity, an instant of compunction. He studies the fine silk braid that edges the queen’s sleeve. Some woman with the skills of his dead wife made that braid. He is looking very closely at the queen, he feels he knows her as a mother knows her child, or a child its mother. He knows every stitch in her bodice. He notes the rise and fall of her every breath. What is in your heart, madam? That is the last door to be opened. Now he stands on the threshold and the key is in his hand and he is almost afraid to fit it into the lock. Because what if it doesn’t, what if it doesn’t fit and he has to fumble there, with Henry’s eyes on him, hear the impatient click of the royal tongue, as surely his master Wolsey once heard it?
Well, then. There was an occasion – in Bruges, was it? – when he had broken down a door. He wasn’t in the habit of breaking doors, but he had a client who wanted results and wanted them today. Locks can be picked, but that’s for the adept with time to spare. You don’t need skill and you don’t need time if you’ve got a shoulder and a boot. He thinks, I wasn’t thirty then. I was a youth. Absently his right hand rubs his left shoulder, his forearm, as if remembering the bruises. He imagines himself entering Anne, not as a lover but as a lawyer, and rolled in his fist his papers, his writs; he imagines himself entering the heart of the queen. In its chambers he hears the click of his own boot heels.
At home, he takes from his chest the Book of Hours that belonged to his wife. It was given to her by her first husband Tom Williams, who was a good enough fellow, but not a man of substance like himself. Whenever he thinks of Tom Williams now it is as a blank, a faceless waiting man dressed in the Cromwell livery, holding his coat or perhaps his horse. Now that he can handle, at his whim, the finest texts in the king’s library, the prayer book seems a poor thing; where is the gold leaf? Yet the essence of Elizabeth is in this book, his poor wife with her white cap, her blunt manner, her sideways smile and busy crafts-woman’s fingers. Once he had watched Liz making a silk
