dead.’
‘What, somebody else?’ he says. He picks up his sheaf of papers, throws them into a chest, turns the key on them and gives it to Rafe. From now on he leaves no secret unattended, no fresh ink exposed to the air. ‘Who have I to raise this time?’
You know what it’s like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man’s leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.
Later that day, 29 January, he will be on his way to Greenwich, shocked, apprehensive, at the news Fitzwilliam’s men had brought. People will tell him, ‘I was there, I was there when Anne broke off her talk, I was there when she put down her book, her sewing, her lute, I was there when she broke off her merriment at the thought of Katherine lowered into the ground. I saw her face change. I saw her ladies close about her. I saw them sweep her to her chamber and bolt the door, and I saw the trail of blood left on the ground as she walked.’
We need not believe that. Not the trail of blood. They saw it in their minds perhaps. He will ask, what time did the queen’s pains begin? But no one seemed able to tell him, despite their close knowledge of the incident. They have concentrated on the blood trail and left out the facts. It will take all day for the bad news to leak from the queen’s bedside. Sometimes women do bleed but the child clings on and grows. Not this time. Katherine is too fresh in her tomb to lie quiet. She has reached out and shaken Anne’s child free, so it is brought untimely into the world and no bigger than a rat.
At evening, outside the queen’s suite, the dwarf sits on the flags, rocking and moaning. She is pretending to be in labour, someone says: unnecessarily. ‘Can you not remove her?’ he asks the women.
Jane Rochford says, ‘It was a boy, Mr Secretary. She had carried it under four months, as we judge.’
Early October, then. We were still on progress. ‘You will have a note of the itinerary,’ Lady Rochford murmurs. ‘Where was she then?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I should think you would like to know. Oh, I know that plans were changed, sometimes on the instant. That sometimes she was with the king, sometimes not, that sometimes Norris was with her, and sometimes others of the gentlemen. But you are right, Master Secretary. It is of no moment. The doctors can be sure of very little. We cannot say when it was conceived. Who was here and who was there.’
‘Perhaps we should leave it like that,’ he says.
‘So. Now that she has lost another chance, poor lady…what world will be?’
The dwarf scrambles to her feet. Watching him, holding his gaze, she pulls her skirts up. He is not quick enough to look away. She has shaved herself or someone has shaved her, and her parts are bald, like the parts of an old woman or a little child.
Later, before the king, holding Mary Shelton’s hand, Jane Rochford is unsure of everything. ‘The child had the appearance of a male,’ she says, ‘and of about fifteen weeks’ gestation.’
‘What do you mean, the appearance of?’ the king demands. ‘Could you not tell? Oh, get away, woman, you have never given birth, what do you know? It should have been matrons at her bedside, what did you want there? Could not you Boleyns give way to someone more useful, must you be there in a crowd whenever disaster strikes?’
Lady Rochford’s voice shakes, but she sticks to her point. ‘Your Majesty may interview the doctors.’
‘I have.’
‘I only repeat their words.’
Mary Shelton bursts into tears. Henry looks at her and says humbly, ‘Mistress Shelton, forgive me. Sweetheart, I did not mean to make you cry.’
Henry is in pain. His leg has been bound up by the surgeons, the leg he injured in the joust over ten years ago; it is prone to ulcerate, and it seems that the recent fall has opened a channel into his flesh. All his bravado has melted away; it is like the days when he dreamed of his brother Arthur, the days he was run ragged by the dead. It is the second child she has lost, he says that night, in private: though who knows, there could have been others, the women keep these things to themselves till their bellies show, we do not know how many of my heirs have bled away. What does God want of me now? What must I do to please him? I see he will not give me male children.
He, Cromwell, stands back while Thomas Cranmer, pale and smooth, takes charge of the king’s bereavement. We much misconstrue our creator, the archbishop says, if we blame him for every accident of fallen nature.
I thought he regarded every sparrow that falls, the king says, truculent as a child. Then why does he not regard England?
Cranmer will have some reason. He hardly listens. He thinks of the women about Anne: wise as serpents, mild as doves. Already a certain line is being spun, about the day’s events; it is spun in the queen’s chamber. Anne Boleyn is not to blame for this misfortune. It is her uncle Thomas Howard, the Duke of Norfolk, who is at fault. When the king took his tumble, it was Norfolk who burst in on the queen, shouting that Henry was dead, and giving her such a shock that the unborn heart stopped.
And further: it is Henry’s fault. It is because of the way he has been behaving, mooning over old Seymour’s daughter, dropping letters in her place in chapel and sending her sweetmeats from his table. When the queen saw he loved another, she was struck to the quick. The sorrow she has taken has made her viscera revolt and reject the tender child.
Just be clear, Henry says coldly, when he stands at the foot of the lady’s bed and hears this reading of events. Just be clear on this, madam. If any woman is to blame, it is the one I am looking at. I will speak to you when you are better. And now fare you well, because I am going to Whitehall to prepare for the Parliament, and you had better stay in bed till you are restored. Which I myself, I doubt I will ever be.
Then Anne shouts after him – or so Lady Rochford says – ‘Stay, stay my lord, I will soon give you another child, and all the quicker now Katherine is dead…’
‘I do not see how that will speed the business.’ Henry limps away. Then in his own rooms the privy chamber gentlemen move carefully about him, as if he were made of glass, making their preparations for departure. Henry is repenting now of his hasty pronouncement, because if the queen stays behind all the women must stay behind, and he will not be able to feast his eyes on his little bun-face, Jane. Further reasoning follows him, conveyed by Anne in a note perhaps: this lost foetus, conceived when Katherine was alive, is inferior to the conception that will follow, at some unknown date, but soon. For even if the child had lived and grown up, there would have been some who still doubted his claim; whereas now Henry is a widower, no one in Christendom can dispute that his marriage to Anne is licit, and any son they beget is heir to England.
‘Well, what do you make of that chain of reasoning?’ Henry demands. Leg stout with bandages, he heaves himself into a chair in his private rooms. ‘No, do not confer, I want an answer from each of you, each Thomas alone.’ He grimaces, though he means to smile. ‘Do you know the confusion you cause among the French? They have made of you one composite counsellor, and in dispatches they call you Dr Chramuel.’
They exchange glances, he and Cranmer: the pork butcher and the angel. But the king does not wait for their advice, joint or several; he talks on, like a man sticking a dagger into himself to prove how much it hurts. ‘If a king cannot have a son, if he cannot do that, it matters not what else he can do. The victories, the spoils of victory, the just laws he makes, the famous courts he holds, these are as nothing.’
It is true. To maintain the stability of the realm: this is the compact a king makes with his people. If he cannot have a son of his own, he must find an heir, name him before his country falls into doubt and confusion, faction and conspiracy. And who can Henry name, that will not be laughed at? The king says, ‘When I remember what I did for the present queen, how I raised her from a gentleman’s daughter…I cannot think now why I did it.’ He looks at them as if to say, do you know, Dr Chramuel? ‘It seems to me,’ he is groping, perplexed, for the right phrases, ‘it seems to me I was somehow dishonestly led into this marriage.’
He, Cromwell, eyes the other half of himself, as if through a mirror: Cranmer looks thrown. ‘How,
