she was left, after he had stumbled back to his own apartments, with the bobbing circles of candlelight on the ceiling, the murmurs of her women, the basin of warm water and the cloth: and Lady Rochford’s voice as she scrubs herself, ‘Careful, madam, do not wash away a Prince of Wales.’ Soon she is alone in the dark, with the scent of masculine sweat on the linen, and perhaps one useless maidservant turning and snuffling on a pallet: she is alone with the small sounds of river and palace. And she speaks, and no one answers, except the girl who mutters in her sleep: she prays, and no one answers; and she rolls on to her side, and smooths her hands over her thighs, and touches her own breasts.
So what if, one day, it’s yes, yes, yes, yes, yes? To whoever happens to be standing by when the thread of her virtue snaps? Even if it’s her brother?
He says to Rafe, to Call-Me, ‘I have heard such matter today as I never thought to hear in a Christian country.’
They wait, the young gentlemen: their eyes on his face. Call-Me says, ‘Am I still a lady, or shall I take my seat and pick up my pen?’
He thinks, what we do here in England, we send our children into other households when they are young, and so it is not rare for a brother and sister to meet, when they are grown, as if for the first time. Think how it must be then: this fascinating stranger whom you know, this mirror of you. You fall in love, just a little: for an hour, an afternoon. And then you make a joke of it; the residual drag of tenderness remains. It is a feeling that civilises men, and makes them behave better, to dependent women, than otherwise they might. But to go further, to trespass on forbidden flesh, to leap the great gap from a fleeting thought to action…Priests tell you that temptation slides into sin and you cannot put a hair between. But surely that is not true. You kiss the woman’s cheek, very well; then you bite her neck? You say, ‘Sweet sister,’ and then next minute you flip her back and cant her skirts up? Surely not. There is a room to be crossed and buttons to be undone. You don’t sleepwalk into it. You don’t fornicate inadvertently. You don’t fail to see the other party, who she is. She doesn’t hide her face.
But then, it may be that Jane Rochford is lying. She has cause.
‘I am not often perplexed,’ he says, ‘about how to proceed, but I find I have to deal with a matter I hardly dare speak of. I can only partly describe it, so I do not know how to draw up a charge sheet. I feel like one of those men who shows a freak at a fair.’
At a fair the drunken churls throw down their money, and then they disdain what you offer. ‘Call that a freak? That’s nothing to my wife’s mother!’
And all their fellows slap them on the back and chortle.
But then you say to them, well, neighbours, I showed you that only to test your mettle. Part with a penny more, and I shall show you what I have here in the back of the tent. It is a sight to make hardened men quail. And I guarantee that you have never seen devil’s work like it.
And then they look. And then they throw up on their boots. And then you count the money. And lock it in your strongbox.
Mark at Stepney. ‘He has brought his instrument,’ Richard says. ‘His lute.’
‘Tell him to leave it without.’
If Mark was blithe before, he is suspicious now, tentative. On the threshold, ‘I thought, sir, I was to entertain you?’
‘Make no doubt of it.’
‘I had thought there would be a great company, sir.’
‘You know my nephew, Master Richard Cromwell?’
‘Still, I am happy to play for you. Perhaps you want me to hear your singing children?’
‘Not today. In the circumstances you might be tempted to overpraise them. But will you sit down, and take a cup of wine with us?’
‘It would be a charity if you could put us in the way of a rebec player,’ Richard says. ‘We have but the one, and he is always running off to Farnham to see his family.’
‘Poor boy,’ he says in Flemish, ‘I think he is homesick.’
Mark looks up. ‘I did not know you spoke my language.’
‘I know you did not. Or you would not have used it to be so disrespectful of me.’
‘I am sure, sir, I never meant any harm.’ Mark can’t remember, what he’s said or not said about his host. But his face shows he recalls the general tenor of it.
‘You forecast I should be hanged.’ He spreads his arms. ‘Yet I live and breathe. But I am in a difficulty, and although you do not like me, I have no choice but to come to you. So I ask your charity.’
Mark sits, his lips slightly parted, his back rigid, and one foot pointing to the door, showing he would very much like to be out of it.
‘You see.’ He puts his palms together: as if Mark were a saint on a plinth. ‘My master the king and my mistress the queen are at odds. Everybody knows it. Now, my dearest wish is to reconcile them. For the comfort of the whole realm.’
Give the boy this: he is not without spirit. ‘But, Master Secretary, the word about the court is, you are keeping company with the queen’s enemies.’
‘For the better to find out their practices,’ he says.
‘If I could believe that.’
He sees Richard shift on his stool, impatient.
‘These are bitter days,’ he says. ‘I do not remember such a time of tension and misery, not since the cardinal came down. In truth I do not blame you, Mark, if you find it hard to trust me, there is such ill-feeling at court that no one trusts anyone else. But I come to you because you are close to the queen, and the other gentlemen will not help me. I have the power to reward you, and will make sure you have everything you deserve, if only you can give me some window into the queen’s desires. I need to know why she is so unhappy, and what I can do to remedy it. For it is unlikely she will conceive an heir, while her mind is unquiet. And if she could do that: ah, then all our tears would be dried.’
Mark looks up. ‘Why, it is no wonder she is unhappy,’ he says. ‘She is in love.’
‘With whom?’
‘With me.’
He, Cromwell, leans forward, elbows on the table: then puts a hand up to cover his face.
‘You are amazed,’ Mark suggests.
That is only part of what he feels. I thought, he says to himself, that this would be difficult. But it is like picking flowers. He lowers his hand and beams at the boy. ‘Not so amazed as you might think. For I have watched you, and I have seen her gestures, her eloquent looks, her many indications of favour. And if these are shown in public, then what in private? And of course it is no surprise any woman would be drawn to you. You are a very handsome young man.’
‘Though we thought you were a sodomite,’ Richard says.
‘Not I, sir!’ Mark turns pink. ‘I am as good a man as any of them.’
‘So the queen would give a good account of you?’ he asks, smiling. ‘She has tried you and found you to her liking?’
The boy’s glance slides away, like a piece of silk over glass. ‘I cannot discuss it.’
‘Of course not. But we must draw our own conclusions. She is not an inexperienced woman, I think, she would not be interested in a less than masterly performance.’
‘We poor men,’ Mark says, ‘poor men born, are in no wise inferior in that way.’
‘True,’ he says. ‘Though gentlemen keep that fact from ladies, if they can.’
‘Otherwise,’ Richard says, ‘every duchess would be frolicking in a copse with a woodcutter.’
He cannot help laugh. ‘Only there are so few duchesses and so many woodcutters. There must be competition between them, you would think.’
Mark looks at him as if he is profaning a sacred mystery. ‘If you mean she has other lovers, I have never asked her, I would not ask her, but I know they are jealous of me.’
‘Perhaps she has tried them and found them a disappointment,’ Richard says. ‘And Mark here takes the prize. I congratulate you, Mark.’ With what open Cromwellian simplicity he leans forward and asks, ‘How often?’
