‘You do not trap me that way. Any man you name, I will say nothing against him and nothing for him. I have no opinion on George Boleyn.’
‘What, no opinion on incest? If you take it so quietly and without objection, I am forced to conjecture there may be truth in it.’
‘And if I were to say, I think there might be guilt in that case, you would say to me, “Why, Norris! Incest! How can you believe such an abomination? Is it a ploy to lead me away from your own guilt?”’
He looks at Norris with admiration. ‘Not for nothing have you known me twenty years, Harry.’
‘Oh, I have studied you,’ Norris says. ‘As I studied your master Wolsey before you.’
‘That was politic in you. Such a great servant of the state.’
‘And such a great traitor at the end.’
‘I must take your mind back. I do not ask you to remember the manifold favours you received at the cardinal’s hands. I only ask you to recall an entertainment, a certain interlude played at court. It was a play in which the late cardinal was set upon by demons and carried down to Hell.’
He sees Norris’s eyes move, as the scene rises before him: the firelight, the heat, the baying spectators. Himself and Boleyn grasping the victim’s hands, Brereton and Weston laying hold of him by his feet. The four of them tossing the scarlet figure, tumbling him and kicking him. Four men, who for a joke turned the cardinal into a beast; who took away his wit, his kindness and his grace, and made him a howling animal, grovelling on the boards and scrabbling with his paws.
It was not truly the cardinal, of course. It was the jester Sexton in a scarlet robe. But the audience catcalled as if it had been real, they yelled and shook their fists, they swore and mocked. Behind a screen the four devils pulled off their masks and their hairy jerkins, cursing and laughing. They saw Thomas Cromwell leaning against the panelling, silent, wrapped in a robe of mourning black.
Now, Norris gapes at him: ‘And that is why? It was a play. It was an entertainment, as you said yourself. The cardinal was dead, he could not know. And while he was alive, was I not good to him in his trouble? Did I not, when he was exiled from court, ride after him, and come to him on Putney Heath with a token from the king’s own hand?’
He nods. ‘I concede that others behaved worse. But you see, none of you behaved like Christians. You behaved like savages instead, falling on his estates and possessions.’
He sees he need not continue. The indignation on Norris’s face is replaced by a look of blank terror. At least, he thinks, the fellow has the wit to see what this is about: not one year’s grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down. He says, ‘Life pays you out, Norris. Don’t you find? And,’ he adds gently, ‘it is not all about the cardinal, either. I would not want you to think I am without motives of my own.’
Norris raises his face. ‘What has Mark Smeaton done to you?’
‘Mark?’ He laughs. ‘I don’t like the way he looks at me.’
Would Norris understand if he spelled it out? He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.
A silence falls. He sits, he waits, his eyes on the dying man. He is already thinking what he will do with Norris’s offices, his Crown grants. He will try to oblige the humble applicants, like the man with fourteen children, who wants the keeping of a park at Windsor and a post in the administration of the castle. Norris’s offices in Wales can be parcelled out to young Richmond, and that will bring the posts in effect back to the king and under his own supervision. And Rafe could have the Norris estate at Greenwich, he could house Helen and the children there when he has to be at court. And Edward Seymour has mentioned he would like Norris’s house in Kew.
Harry Norris says, ‘I assume you will not just lead us out to execution. There will be a process, a trial? Yes? I hope it will be quick. I suppose it will. The cardinal used to say, Cromwell will do in a week what will take another man a year, it is not worth your while to block him or oppose him. If you reach out to grip him he will not be there, he will have ridden twenty miles while you are pulling your boots on.’ He looks up. ‘If you intend to kill me in public, and mount a show, be quick. Or I may die of grief alone in this room.’
He shakes his head. ‘You’ll live.’ He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
Norris touches his ribs. ‘The pain is here. I felt it last night. I sat up, breathless. I durst not lie down again.’
‘When he was brought down, the cardinal said the same. The pain was like a whetstone, he said. A whetstone, and the knife was drawn across it. And it ground away, till he was dead.’
He rises, picks up his papers: inclining his head, takes his leave. Henry Norris: left forepaw.
William Brereton. Gentleman of Cheshire. Servant in Wales to the young Duke of Richmond, and a bad servant too. A turbulent, arrogant, hard-as-nails man, from a turbulent line.
‘Let’s go back,’ he says, ‘let’s go back to the cardinal’s time, because I do remember someone of your household killed a man during a bowls match.’
‘The game can get very heated,’ Brereton says. ‘You know yourself. You play, I hear.’
‘And the cardinal thought, it is time for a reckoning; and your family were fined because they impeded the investigation. I ask myself, has anything changed since then? You think you can do anything because you are the Duke of Richmond’s servant, and because Norfolk favours you –’
‘The king himself favours me.’
He raises his eyebrows. ‘Does he? Then you should complain to him. Because you are ill-lodged, are you not? Sadly for you, the king is not here, so you must make do with me and my long memory. But let us not cast back for instances. Look, for instance, at the case of the Flintshire gentleman, John ap Eyton. That is so recent you have not forgot it.’
‘So that is why I am here,’ Brereton says.
