‘You must stretch your credulity, madam.’
She looks down at him from her plinth: she is Clarence's daughter, old King Edward's niece. In her time, men like him knelt down to speak to women like her. ‘I was in Katherine the queen's suite on the day she was married. To the princess, I stand as a second mother.’
‘Blood of Christ, madam, you think she needs a second? The one she has will kill her.’
They stare at each other, across an abyss. ‘Lady Margaret, if I may advise you … your family's loyalty is suspect.’
‘So you say. This is why you are parting me from Mary, as punishment. If you have matter enough to indict me, then send me to the Tower with Elizabeth Barton.’
‘That would be much against the king's wishes. He reveres you, madam. Your ancestry, your great age.’
‘He has no evidence.’
‘In June last year, just after the queen was crowned, your son Lord Montague and your son Geoffrey Pole dined with Lady Mary. Then a scant two weeks later, Montague dined with her again. I wonder what they discussed?’
‘Do you really?’
‘No,’ he says, smiling. ‘The boy who carried in the dish of asparagus, that was my boy. The boy who sliced the apricots was mine too. They talked about the Emperor, about the invasion, how he might be brought to it. So you see, Lady Margaret, all your family owes much to my forbearance. I trust they will repay the king with future loyalty.’
He does not say, I mean to use your sons against their trouble-making brother abroad. He does not say, I have your son Geoffrey on my payroll. Geoffrey Pole is a violent, unstable man. You do not know how he will turn. He has paid him forty pounds this year to turn the Cromwell way.
The countess curls her lip. ‘The princess will not leave her home quietly.’
‘My lord of Norfolk intends to ride to Beaulieu, to tell her of the change in her circumstances. She may defy him, of course.’
He had advised the king, leave Mary in possession of her style as princess, do not diminish anything. Do not give her cousin the Emperor a reason to make war.
Henry had shouted, ‘Will you go to the queen, and suggest to her that Mary keep her title? For I tell you, Master Cromwell, I am not going to do it. And if you put her in a great passion, as you will, and she falls ill and miscarries her child, you will be responsible! And I shall not incline to mercy!’
Outside the door of the presence chamber, he leans on the wall. He rolls his eyes and says to Rafe, ‘God in Heaven, no wonder the cardinal was old before his time. If he thinks her pique will dislodge it, it cannot be stuck very fast. Last week I was his brother-in-arms, this week he is threatening me with a bloody end.’
Rafe says, ‘It is a good thing you are not like the cardinal.’
Indeed. The cardinal expected the gratitude of his prince, in which matter he was bound to be disappointed. For all his capacities he was a man whose emotions would master him and wear him out. He, Cromwell, is no longer subject to vagaries of temperament, and he is almost never tired. Obstacles will be removed, tempers will be soothed, knots unknotted. Here at the close of the year 1533, his spirit is sturdy, his will strong, his front imperturbable. The courtiers see that he can shape events, mould them. He can contain the fears of other men, and give them a sense of solidity in a quaking world: this people, this dynasty, this miserable rainy island at the edge of the world.
By way of recreation at the end of the day, he is looking into Katherine's land holdings and judging what he can redistribute. Sir Nicholas Carew, who does not like him and does not like Anne, is amazed to receive from him a package of grants, including two fat Surrey manors to adjoin his existing holdings in the county. He seeks an interview to express his thanks; he has to ask Richard, who keeps the Cromwell diary now, and Richard fits him in after two days. As the cardinal used to say, deference means making people wait.
When Carew comes in he is arranging his face. Chilly, self-absorbed, the complete courtier, he works at turning up the corners of his mouth. The result is a maidenly simper, incongruous above a luxuriant beard.
‘Oh, I am sure you are deserving,’ he says, shrugging it off. ‘You are a boyhood friend of His Majesty and nothing gives him greater pleasure than to reward his old friends. Your wife is in touch with the Lady Mary, is she not? They are close? Ask her,’ he says gently, ‘to give the young woman good advice. Warn her to be conformable to the king in all things. His temper is short these days and I cannot answer for the consequences of defiance.’
Deuteronomy tells us, gifts blind the eyes of the wise. Carew is not particularly wise, in his opinion, but the principle holds good; and if not exactly blinded, at least he looks dazed. ‘Call it an early Christmas present,’ he tells him, smiling. He pushes the papers across his desk.
At Austin Friars they are cleaning out store rooms and building strong rooms. They will keep the feast at Stepney. The angel's wings are moved there; he wants to keep them, till there is another child in the house of the right size. He sees them going, shivering in their shroud of fine linen, and watches the Christmas star loaded on to a cart. Christophe asks, ‘How would one work it, that savage machine that is all over points?’
He draws off one of the canvas sleeves, shows him the gilding. ‘Jesus Maria,’ the boy says. ‘The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an engine for torture.’
Norfolk goes down to Beaulieu to tell Lady Mary she must move to the manor at Hatfield, and be an attendant to the little princess, and live under the governance of Lady Anne Shelton, aunt to the queen. What ensues, he reports back in aggrieved tones.
‘Aunt to the queen?’ says Mary. ‘There is but one queen, and that is my mother.’
‘Lady Mary …’ Norfolk says, and the words make her burst into tears, and run to her room and lock herself in.
Suffolk goes up the country to Buckden, to convince Katherine to move to another house. She has heard that they mean to send her somewhere even damper than Buckden, and she says the damp will kill her, so she too shuts herself up, rattling the bolts into place and shouting at Suffolk in three languages to go away. She will go nowhere, she says, unless he is prepared to break down the door and bind her with ropes and carry her. Which Charles thinks is a little extreme.
Brandon sounds so sorry for himself when he writes back to London for instructions: a man with a bride of fourteen awaiting his attentions, to spend the holiday like this! When his letter is read out to the council, he, Cromwell, bursts out laughing. The sheer joy of it carries him into the new year.
There is a young woman walking the roads of the kingdom, saying she is the princess Mary, and that her father has turned her out to beg. She has been seen as far north as York and as far east as Lincoln, and simple people in these shires are lodging and feeding her and giving her money to see her on her way. He has people keeping an eye out for her, but they haven't caught her yet. He doesn't know what he would do with her if he did catch her. It is punishment enough, to take on the burden of a prophecy, and to be out unprotected on the winter roads. He pictures her, a dun-coloured, dwindling figure, tramping away towards the horizon over the flat muddy fields.
Chapter III.
A Painter's Eye.
When Hans brings the finished portrait to Austin Friars he feels shy of it. He remembers when Walter would say, look me in the face, boy, when you tell me a lie.
He looks at the picture's lower edge, and allows his gaze to creep upwards. A quill, scissors, papers, his seal in a little bag, and a heavy volume, bound in blackish green: the leather tooled in gold, the pages gilt-edged. Hans had asked to see his Bible, rejected it as too plain, too thumbed. He had scoured the house and found the finest volume he owned on the desk of Thomas Avery. It is the monk Pacioli's work, the book on how to keep your books, sent to him by his kind friends in Venice.
He sees his painted hand, resting on the desk before him, holding a paper in a loose fist. It is uncanny, as if
