‘What is the use?’ She is scornful. ‘When we married he said he was doing his best for me. It is what fathers say. He paid less mind to contracting me to Boleyn than he would to selling a hound puppy. If you think there’s a warm kennel and a dish of broken meats, what more do you need to know? You don’t ask the animal what it wants.’
‘So you have never thought you might be released from your marriage?’
‘No, Master Cromwell. My father went into everything thoroughly. Just as thoroughly as you would expect, of a friend of yours. No previous promise, no pre-contract, no shadow of one. Even you and Cranmer between you couldn’t get us an annulment. On the wedding day we sat at our supper with our friends, and George told me, I am only doing this because my father says I must. That was good hearing, you will agree, for a girl of twenty who cherished hopes of love. And I defied him, I said the same back to him: I said, if my father did not enforce me, I would be far from you, sir. So then the light faded and we were put to bed. He put his hand out and flipped my breast and said, I have seen plenty of these, and many better. He said, lie down, open your body, let us do our duty and make my father a grandfather, and then if we have a son we can live apart. I said to him, then do it if you think you can, pray God you may set seed tonight, and then you may take your dibber away and I need not look at it again.’ A little laugh. ‘But I am barren, you see. Or so I must believe. It may be that my husband’s seed is bad or weak. God knows, he spends it in some dubious places. Oh, he is a gospeller, is George, St Matthew be his guide and St Luke protect him. No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out “Glory be” and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He’d go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.’
For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog.
She says, ‘I am afraid he has given me a disease and that is why I have never conceived a child. I think there is something destroying me from the inside. I think I might die of it one day.’
She had asked him once, if I die suddenly, have them cut open my corpse to look inside. In those days she thought Rochford might poison her; now she is sure he has done so. He murmurs, my lady, you have borne a great deal. He looks up. ‘But this is not to the point. If George knows something about the queen that the king should be told, I can bring him to witness, but I cannot know he will speak out. I can hardly compel the brother against the sister.’
She says, ‘I am not talking about his being a witness. I am telling you he spends time in her chamber. Alone with her. And the door closed.’
‘In conversation?’
‘I have been to the door and heard no voices.’
‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘they join in silent prayer.’
‘I have seen them kiss.’
‘A brother may kiss his sister.’
‘He may not, not in that way.’
He picks up his pen. ‘Lady Rochford, I cannot write down, “He kissed her in that way.”’
‘His tongue in her mouth. And her tongue in his.’
‘You want me to record that?’
‘If you fear you won’t remember it.’
He thinks, if this comes out in a law court the city will be in an uproar, if it is mentioned in Parliament the bishops will be frigging themselves on their benches. He waits, his pen poised. ‘Why would she do this, such a crime against nature?’
‘The better to rule. Surely you see it? She is lucky with Elizabeth, the child is like her. But suppose she gets a boy and it has Weston’s long face? Or it looks like Will Brereton, what might the king say to that? But they cannot call it a bastard if it looks like a Boleyn.’
Brereton too. He makes a note. He remembers how Brereton once joked with him he could be in two places at once: a chilly joke, a hostile joke, and now, he thinks, now at last, I laugh. Lady Rochford says, ‘Why do you smile?’
‘I have heard that in the queen’s rooms, among her lovers, there was talk of the king’s death. Did George ever join in with it?’
‘It would kill Henry if he knew how they laugh at him. How his member is discussed.’
‘I want you to think hard,’ he says. ‘Be sure of what you are doing. If you give evidence against your husband, in a court of law or to the council, you may find yourself a lonely woman in the years to come.’
Her face says, am I now so rich in friends? ‘I will not bear the blame,’ she says. ‘You will, Master Secretary. I am thought a woman of no great wit or penetration. And you are what you are, a man of resource who spares no one. It will be thought that you drew the truth out of me, whether I was willing or no.’
It seems to him little more need be said. ‘In order to sustain that notion, it will be necessary for you to contain your pleasure and feign distress. Once George is arrested, you must petition for mercy for him.’
‘I can do that.’ Jane Rochford puts out the tip of her tongue, as if the moment were sugared and she can taste it. ‘I am safe, for the king will take no notice, I can guarantee.’
‘Be advised by me. Talk to no one.’
‘Be advised by me. Talk to Mark Smeaton.’
He tells her, ‘I am going to my house at Stepney. I have asked Mark for supper.’
‘Why not entertain him here?’
‘There has been disturbance enough, don’t you think?’
‘Disturbance? Oh, I see,’ she says.
