‘You see devils?’
She nods.
‘They appear how?’
‘Birds.’
‘A relief,’ Audley says drily.
‘No, sir. Lucifer stinks. His claws are deformed. He comes as a cockerel smeared in blood and shit.’
He looks up at Alice. He is ready to send her out. He thinks, what has been done to this woman?
Cranmer says, ‘That must be disagreeable for you. But it is a characteristic of devils, I understand, to show themselves in more than one way.’
‘Yes. They do it to deceive you. He comes as a young man.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Once he brought a woman. To my cell at night.’ She pauses. ‘Pawing her.’
Riche: ‘He is known to have no shame.’
‘No more than you.’
‘And what then, Dame Elizabeth? After the pawing?’
‘Pulled up her skirts.’
‘And she didn't resist?’ Riche says. ‘You surprise me.’
Audley says, ‘Prince Lucifer, I don't doubt he has a way with him.’
‘Before my eyes, he had to do with her, on my bed.’
Riche makes a note. ‘This woman, did you know her?’ No answer. ‘And the devil did not try the same with you? You can speak freely. It will not be held against you.’
‘He came to sweet-talk me. Swaggering in his blue silk coat, it's the best he has. And new hose with diamonds down his legs.’
‘Diamonds down his legs,’ he says. ‘Now that must have been a temptation?’
She shakes her head.
‘But you are a fine young woman – good enough for any man, I'd say.’
She looks up; a flicker of a smile. ‘I am not for Master Lucifer.’
‘What did he say when you refused him?’
‘He asked me to marry him.’ Audley puts his head in his hands. ‘I said I was vowed to chastity.’
‘Was he not angry when you would not consent?’
‘Oh yes. He spat in my face.’
‘I would expect no better of him,’ Riche says.
‘I wiped his spit off with a napkin. It's black. It has the stench of Hell.’
‘What is that like?’
‘Like something rotting.’
‘Where is it now, the napkin? I suppose you didn't send it to the laundry?’
‘Dom Edward has it.’
‘Does he show it to people? For money?’
‘For offerings.’
‘For money.’
Cranmer takes his face from his hands. ‘Shall we pause?’
‘A quarter hour?’ Riche says.
Audley: ‘I told you he was young and hearty.’
‘Perhaps we will meet tomorrow,’ Cranmer says. ‘I need to pray. And a quarter of an hour will not do it.’
‘But tomorrow is Sunday,’ the nun says. ‘There was a man who went out hunting on a Sunday and he fell down a bottomless pit into Hell. Imagine that.’
‘How was it bottomless,’ Riche asks, ‘if Hell was there to receive him?’
‘I wish I were going hunting,’ Audley says. ‘Christ knows, I'd take a chance on it.’
Alice rises from her stool and signals for her escort. The Maid gets to her feet. She is smiling broadly. She has made the archbishop flinch, and himself grow cold, and the Solicitor General all but weep with her talk of scalded babies. She thinks she is winning; but she is losing, losing, losing all the time. Alice puts a gentle hand on her arm, but the Maid shakes it off.
Outside, Richard Riche says, ‘We should burn her.’
Cranmer says, ‘Much as we may mislike her talk of the late cardinal appearing to her, and devils in her bedchamber, she speaks in this way because she has been taught to ape the claims of certain nuns who have gone before her, nuns whom Rome is pleased to recognise as saints. I cannot convict them of heresy, retrospectively. Nor have I evidence to try her for heresy.’
‘Burned for treason, I meant.’
It is the woman's penalty; where a man is half-hanged and castrated, then slowly gutted by the executioner.
He says, ‘There is no overt action. She has only expressed an intent.’
‘Intent to raise rebellion, to depose the king, should that not be treason? Words have been construed as treasons, there are precedents, you know them.’
‘I should be astonished,’ Audley says, ‘if they have escaped Cromwell's attention.’
It is as if they can smell the devil's spit; they are almost jostling each other to get into the air, which is mild, damp: a faint scent of leaves, a green-gold, rustling light. He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.
‘I think new laws are needed,’ Riche says.
‘I have it in hand.’
‘And I think this woman is too leniently kept. We are too soft. We are just playing with her.’
Cranmer walks away, shoulders stooped, his trailing habit brushing up the leaves. Audley turns to him, bright and resolute, a man keen to change the subject. ‘So, the princess, you say she was well?’
The princess, unswaddled, had been placed on cushions at Anne's feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature. It seems stories have been put about that Anne's child was born with teeth, has six fingers on each hand, and is furred all over like a monkey, so her father has shown her off naked to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display in the hope of countering the rumours. The king has chosen Hatfield for her seat, and Anne says, ‘It seems to me waste might be saved, and the proper order of things asserted, if Spanish Mary's household were broken up and she were to become a member of the household of the princess Elizabeth my daughter.’
‘In the capacity of …?’ The child is quiet; only, he notes, because she has crammed a fist into her maw, and is cannibalising herself.
‘In the capacity of my daughter's servant. What else should she be? There can be no pretence at equality. Mary is a bastard.’
The brief respite is over; the princess sets up a screech that would bring out the dead. Anne's glance slides away sideways, and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, and she leans down towards her daughter, but at once women swoop, flapping and bustling; the screaming creature is plucked up, wrapped up, swept away, and the queen's eyes follow pitifully as the fruit of her womb exits, in procession. He says gently, ‘I think she was hungry.’
Saturday evening: supper at Austin Friars for Stephen Vaughan, so often in transit: William Butts, Hans, Kratzer, Call-Me Risley. Conversation is in various tongues and Rafe Sadler translates adroitly, smoothly, his head turning from side to side: high topics and low, statecraft and gossip, Zwingli's theology, Cranmer's wife. About the latter, it has not been possible to suppress the talk at the Steelyard and in the city; Vaughan says, ‘Can Henry
