dishonestly?’ the archbishop asks.
‘I feel sure I was not in my clear mind then. Not as I am now.’
‘But sir,’ Cranmer says. ‘Majesty. Saving Your Grace, your mind cannot be clear. You have suffered a great loss.’
Two, in fact, he thinks: today your son was born dead, and your first wife buried. No wonder you tremble.
‘It seems to me I was seduced,’ Henry says, ‘that is to say, I was practised upon, perhaps by charms, perhaps by spells. Women do use such things. And if that were so, then the marriage would be null, would it not?’
Cranmer holds out his hands, like a man trying to send back the tide. He sees his queen vanishing into thin air: his queen who has done so much for true religion. ‘Sir, sir…Majesty…’
‘Oh, peace!’ Henry says: as if it were Cranmer who had started it. ‘Cromwell, when you were soldiering, did you ever hear of anything that would heal a leg like mine? I have knocked it again now and the surgeons say the foul humours must come out. They fear that the rot has got as far as the bone. But do not tell anybody. I would not like word to spread abroad. Will you send a page to find Thomas Vicary? I think he must bleed me. I need some relief. Give you good night.’ He adds, almost under his breath, ‘For I suppose even this day must end.’
Dr Chramuel goes out. In an antechamber, one of him turns to the other. ‘He will be different tomorrow,’ the archbishop says.
‘Yes. A man in pain will say anything.’
‘We should not heed it.’
‘No.’
They are like two men crossing thin ice; leaning into each other, taking tiny, timid steps. As if that will do you any good, when it begins to crack on every side.
Cranmer says uncertainly, ‘Grief for the child sways him. Would he wait so long for Anne, to throw her over so quickly? They will soon be perfect friends.’
‘Besides,’ he says. ‘He is not a man to admit he was wrong. He may have his doubts about his marriage. But God help anyone else who raises them.’
‘We must calm these doubts,’ Cranmer says. ‘Between us we must do it.’
‘He would like to be the Emperor’s friend. Now that Katherine is not there to cause ill-feeling between them. And so we must face the fact that the present queen is…’ He hesitates to say, superfluous; he hesitates to say, an obstacle to peace.
‘She is in his way,’ Cranmer says bluntly. ‘But he will not sacrifice her? Surely he will not. Not to please Emperor Charles or any man. They need not think it. Rome need not think it. He will never revert.’
‘No. Have some faith in our good master to maintain the church.’
Cranmer hears the words he has left unspoken: the king does not need Anne, to help him do that.
Although, he says to Cranmer. It is hard to remember the king, before Anne; hard to imagine him without her. She hovers around him. She reads over his shoulder. She gets into his dreams. Even when she’s lying next to him it’s not close enough for her. ‘I tell you what we’ll do,’ he says. He squeezes Cranmer’s arm. ‘Let’s give a dinner, shall we, and invite the Duke of Norfolk?’
Cranmer shrinks. ‘Norfolk? Why would we?’
‘For reconciliation,’ he says breezily. ‘I fear that on the day of the king’s accident, I may have, um, slighted his pretensions. In a tent. When he raced in. Well-founded pretensions,’ he adds reverently. ‘For is he not our senior peer? No, I pity the duke from the bottom of my heart.’
‘What did you do, Cromwell?’ The archbishop is pale. ‘What did you do in that tent? Did you lay violent hands upon him, as I hear you did recently with the Duke of Suffolk?’
‘What, Brandon? I was only moving him.’
‘When he was not of a mind to be moved.’
‘It was for his own good. If I had left him there in the king’s presence, Charles would have talked himself into the Tower. He was slandering the queen, you see.’ And any slander, any doubt, he thinks, must come from Henry, out of his own mouth, and not from mine, or any other man’s. ‘Please, please,’ he says, ‘let us have a dinner. You must give it at Lambeth, Norfolk will not come to me, he will think I plan to put a sleeping draught in the claret and convey him on board ship to be sold into slavery. He will like to come to you. I will supply the venison. We will have jellies in the shape of the duke’s major castles. It will be no cost to you. And no trouble to your cooks.’
Cranmer laughs. At last, he laughs. It has been a hard-fought campaign, to get him even to smile. ‘As you wish, Thomas. We shall have a dinner.’
The archbishop sets his hands on his upper arms, kisses him right and left. The kiss of peace. He does not feel soothed, or assuaged, as he returns to his own rooms through the palace unnaturally quiet: no music from distant rooms, perhaps the murmur of prayer. He tries to imagine the lost child, the manikin, its limbs budding, its face old and wise.
Few men have seen such a thing. Certainly he has not. In Italy, once, he stood holding up a light for a surgeon, while in a sealed room draped in shadows he sliced a dead man apart to see what made him work. It was a fearful night, the stench of bowel and blood clogging the throat, and the artists who had jostled and bribed for a place tried to elbow him away: but he stood firm, for he had guaranteed to do so, he had said he would hold the light. And so he was among the elect of that company, the luminaries, who saw muscle stripped from bone. But he has never seen inside a woman, still less a gravid corpse; no surgeon, even for money, would perform that work for an audience.
He thinks of Katherine, embalmed and entombed. Her spirit cut free, and gone to seek out her first husband: wandering now, calling his name. Will Arthur be shocked to see her, she such a stout old woman, and he still a skinny child?
King Arthur of blessed memory could not have a son. And what happened after Arthur? We don’t know. But we know his glory vanished from the world.
He thinks of Anne’s chosen motto, painted up with her coat of arms: ‘The Most Happy’.
He had said to Jane Rochford, ‘How is my lady the queen?’
Rochford had said, ‘Sitting up, lamenting.’
He had meant, has she lost much blood?
Katherine was not without sin, but now her sins are taken off her. They are all heaped upon Anne: the shadow who flits after her, the woman draped in night. The old queen dwells in the radiance of God’s presence, her dead infants swaddled at her feet, but Anne dwells in this sinful world below, stewed in her childbed sweat, in her soiled sheet. But her hands and feet are cold and her heart is like a stone.
So here’s the Duke of Norfolk, expecting to be fed. Dressed in his best, or at least what’s good enough for Lambeth Palace, he looks like a piece of rope chewed by a dog, or a piece of gristle left on the side of a trencher. Bright fierce eyes under unruly brows. Hair an iron stubble. His person is meagre, sinewy, and he smells of horses and leather and the armourer’s shop, and mysteriously of furnaces or perhaps of cooling ash: dust-dry, pungent. He fears no one alive except Henry Tudor, who could at a whim take his dukedom away, but he fears the dead. They say that at any of his houses at close of day you can hear him slamming the shutters and shooting the bolts, in case the late Cardinal Wolsey is blowing through a window or slithering up a stair. If Wolsey wanted Norfolk he would lie quiet inside a table top, breathing along the grain of the wood; he would ooze through a keyhole, or flop down a chimney with a soft flurry like a soot-stained dove.
When Anne Boleyn came up in the world, and she a niece of his illustrious family, the duke thought his troubles were over. Because he has troubles; the greatest nobleman has his rivals, his ill-wishers, his defamers. But he believed that, with Anne crowned in due time, he would be always at the king’s right hand. It hasn’t worked out like that, and the duke has become disaffected. The match hasn’t brought the Howards the riches and honours he expected. Anne has taken the rewards for herself, and Thomas Cromwell has taken them. The duke thinks Anne should be guided by her male kin, but she won’t be guided; in fact she has made it plain that she sees herself, and not the duke, as the head of the family now. Which is unnatural, in the duke’s view: a woman cannot be head of anything, subordination and submission is her role. Let her be a queen and a rich woman, still she
