is glad, though he doesn’t know why. It is unreasonable of him to think other women shouldn’t have his wife’s name. Bess is no great beauty, and darker than her sister, but she has a confident vivacity that compels the eye. ‘Be kind to Jane, Master Secretary,’ Bess says. ‘She is not proud, as some people think. They wonder why she doesn’t speak to them, but it’s only because she can’t think what to say.’
‘But she will speak to me.’
‘She will listen.’
‘An attractive quality in women.’
‘An attractive quality in anyone. Wouldn’t you say? Though Jane above all women looks to men to tell her what she should do.’
‘Then does she do it?’
‘Not necessarily.’ She laughs. Her fingertips brush the back of his hand. ‘Come. She is ready for you.’
Warmed by the sun of the King of England’s desire, which maiden would not glow? Not Jane. She is in deeper black, it seems, than the rest of her family, and she volunteers that she has been praying for the soul of the late Katherine: not that she needs it, for surely, if any woman has gone straight to Heaven…
‘Jane,’ Edward Seymour says, ‘I am warning you now and I want you to listen carefully and heed what I say. When you come into the king’s presence, it must be as if no such woman as the late Katherine ever existed. If he hears her name in your mouth, he will cease his favour, upon the instant.’
‘Look,’ Tom Seymour says. ‘Cromwell here wants to know, are you truly and entirely a virgin?’
He could blush for her. ‘If you aren’t, Mistress Jane,’ he says, ‘it can be managed. But you must tell us now.’
Her pale, oblivious regard: ‘What?’
Tom Seymour: ‘Jane, even you must understand the question.’
‘Is it correct that no one has ever asked for you in marriage? No contract or understanding?’ He feels desperate. ‘Did you never like anybody, Jane?’
‘I liked William Dormer. But he married Mary Sidney.’ She looks up: one flash of those ice-blue eyes. ‘I hear they’re very miserable.’
‘The Dormers didn’t think we were good enough,’ Tom says. ‘But now look.’
He says, ‘It is to your credit, Mistress Jane, that you have formed no attachments till your family were ready to marry you. For young women often do, and then it ends badly.’ He feels that he should clarify the point. ‘Men will tell you that they are so in love with you that it is making them ill. They will say they have stopped eating and sleeping. They say that they fear unless they can have you they will die. Then, the moment you give in, they get up and walk away and lose all interest. The next week they will pass you by as if they don’t know you.’
‘Did you do this, Master Secretary?’ Jane asks.
He hesitates.
‘Well?’ Tom Seymour says. ‘We would like to know.’
‘I probably did. When I was young. I am telling you in case your brothers cannot bring themselves to tell you. It is not a pretty thing for a man to have to admit to his sister.’
‘So you see,’ Edward urges. ‘You must not give in to the king.’
Jane says, ‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘His honeyed words –’ Edward begins.
‘His what?’
The Emperor’s ambassador has been skulking indoors, and won’t come out to meet Thomas Cromwell. He would not go up to Peterborough for Katherine’s funeral because she was not being buried as a queen, and now he says he has to observe his mourning period. Finally, a meeting is arranged: the ambassador will happen to be coming back from Mass at the church of Austin Friars, while Thomas Cromwell, now in residence at the Rolls House at Chancery Lane, has called by to inspect his building work, extensions to his principal house nearby. ‘Ambassador!’ he cries: as if he were wildly surprised.
The bricks ready for use today were fired last summer, when the king was still on his progress through the western counties; the clay for them was dug the winter before, and the frost was breaking down the clumps while he, Cromwell, was trying to break down Thomas More. Waiting for Chapuys to appear, he has been haranguing the bricklayers’ gaffer about water penetration, which he definitely does not want. Now he takes hold of Chapuys and steers him away from the noise and dust of the sawpit. Eustache is seething with questions; you can feel them, jumping and agitating in the muscles of his arm, buzzing in the weave of his garments. ‘This Semer girl…’
It is a lightless day, still, the air frigid. ‘Today would be a good day to fish for pike,’ he says.
The ambassador struggles to master his dismay. ‘Surely your servants…if you must have this fish…’
‘Ah, Eustache, I see you do not understand the sport. Have no fear, I will teach you. What could be better for the health than to be out from dawn to dusk, hours and hours on a muddy bank, with the trees dripping above, watching your own breath on the air, alone or with one good companion?’
Various ideas are fighting inside the ambassador’s head. On the one hand, hours and hours with Cromwell: during which he might drop his guard, say anything. On the other hand, what good am I to my Imperial master if my knees seize up entirely, and I have to be carried to court in a litter? ‘Could we not fish for it in the summer?’ he asks, without much hope.
‘I could not risk your person. A summer pike would pull you in.’ He relents. ‘The lady you mean is called Seymour. As in, “Ambassador, I would like to see more of you.” Though some old folk pronounce it Semer.’
‘I make no progress in this tongue,’ the ambassador complains. ‘Anyone may say his name any way he likes, different on different days. What I hear is, the family is ancient, and the woman herself not so young.’
‘She served the dowager princess, you know. She was fond of Katherine. She lamented, in fact, what had befallen her. She is troubled about the Lady Mary, and they say she has sent her messages to be of good cheer. If the king continues his favour to her, she may be able to do Mary some good.’
‘Mm.’ The ambassador looks sceptical. ‘I have heard this, and also that she is of a very meek and pious character. But I fear there may be a scorpion lurking under the honey. I would like to see Mistress Semer, can you arrange that? Not to meet her. To glimpse her.’
‘I am surprised that you take so much interest. I should have thought you would be more interested in which French princess Henry will marry, should he dissolve his present arrangements.’
Now the ambassador is stretched tight on the ladder of terror. Better the devil you know? Better Anne Boleyn, than a new threat, a new treaty, a new alliance between France and England?
‘But surely not!’ he explodes. ‘Cremuel, you told me that this was a fairy tale! You have expressed yourself a friend of my master, you will not countenance a French match?’
‘Calmly, ambassador, calmly. I do not claim I can govern Henry. And after all, he may decide to continue with his present marriage, or if not, to live chaste.’
‘You are laughing!’ the ambassador accuses. ‘Cremuel! You are laughing behind your hand.’
And so he is. The builders skirt around them, giving them space, rough London craftsmen with tools stuck in their belts. Penitent, he says, ‘Do not get your hopes up. When the king and his woman have one of their reconciliations, it goes hard with anyone who has spoken out against her in the interim.’
‘You would maintain her? You would support her?’ The ambassador’s whole body has stiffened, as if he had really been on that riverbank all day. ‘She may be your co-religionist –’
‘What?’ He opens his eyes wide. ‘My co-religionist? Like my master the king, I am a faithful son of the holy Catholic church. Only just now we are not in communion with the Pope.’
‘Let me put it another way,’ Chapuys says. He squints up at the grey London sky, as if seeking help from above. ‘Let us say your ties to her are material, not spiritual. I understand that you have had preferment from her. I am aware of that.’
‘Do not mistake me. I owe Anne nothing. I have preferment from the king, from no one else.’
‘You have sometimes called her your dear friend. I remember occasions.’
‘I have sometimes called you my dear friend. But you’re not, are you?’
Chapuys digests the point. ‘There is nothing I wish to see more,’ he says, ‘than peace between our nations. What could better mark an ambassador’s success in his post, than a rapprochement after years of trouble? And now we have the opportunity.’
