house. If she has misconducted herself, it must not bear on the Howards, only the Boleyns. And I don’t need Wiltshire finished off. I just want his foolish title taken off him.
‘My lord,’ he says, ‘do you have the warrant?’
Norfolk flourishes a parchment. When they enter Anne’s rooms, her gentlemen servants are just rolling away the great tablecloth, and she is still seated under her canopy of estate. She is wearing crimson velvet and she turns – the bag of bones – the perfect ivory oval of her face. Hard to think she has eaten anything; there is a fretful silence in the room, strain visible on every face. They must wait, the councillors, until the rolling is performed, till the folding of the napery is accomplished, and the correct reverences made.
‘So you are here, uncle,’ she says. Her voice is small. One by one she acknowledges them. ‘Lord Chancellor. Master Treasurer.’ Other councillors are pushing in behind them. Many people, it seems, have dreamed of this moment; they have dreamed that Anne would plead with them on her knees. ‘My lord Oxford,’ she says. ‘And William Sandys. How are you, Sir William?’ It is as if she finds it soothing, to name them all. ‘And you, Cremuel.’ She leans forward. ‘You know, I created you.’
‘And he created you, madam,’ Norfolk snaps. ‘And be sure he repents him of it.’
‘But I was sorry first,’ Anne says. She laughs. ‘And I am sorry more.’
‘Ready to go?’ Norfolk says.
‘I do not know how to be ready,’ she says simply.
‘Just come with us,’ he says: he, Cromwell. He holds out a hand.
‘I would rather not go to the Tower.’ The same small voice, empty of everything except politeness. ‘I would rather go to see the king. Can I not be taken up to Whitehall?’
She knows the answer. Henry never says goodbye. Once, on a summer’s day of still heat, he rode away from Windsor and left Katherine behind; he never saw her again.
She says, ‘Surely, masters, you will not take me like this, as I stand? I have no necessities, not a change of shift, and I should have my women with me.’
‘Your clothes will be brought to you,’ he says. ‘And women to serve you.’
‘I had rather have my own ladies of my privy chamber.’
Glances are exchanged. She seems not to know it is these women who have given evidence against her, these women who crowd around Master Secretary everywhere he moves, keen to tell him anything he wants, desperate to protect themselves. ‘Well, if I cannot have my choice…some persons at least from my household. So I can keep my proper state.’
Fitz clears his throat. ‘Madam, your household is to be dissolved.’
She flinches. ‘Cremuel will find them places,’ she says lightly. ‘He is good about servants.’
Norfolk nudges the Lord Chancellor. ‘Because he grew up with them, eh?’ Audley turns his face away: he is always Cromwell’s man.
‘I do not think I shall come with any of you,’ she says. ‘I will go with William Paulet, if he is pleased to escort me, because in the council this morning you all abused me, but Paulet was a very gentleman.’
‘By God,’ Norfolk chuckles. ‘Go with Paulet, is it? I’ll lock you under my arm and drag you to the boat with your arse in the air. Is that what you want?’
With one accord, the councillors turn on him, and glare. ‘Madam,’ Audley says, ‘be assured, you will be handled as befits your status.’
She stands. Gathers her crimson skirts, raising them, fastidious, as if she will not now touch the common ground. ‘Where is my lord brother?’
Last seen at Whitehall, she is told: which is true, though by now the guards may have come for him. ‘And my father Monseigneur? This is what I do not understand,’ she says. ‘Why is Monseigneur not here with me? Why does he not sit down with you gentlemen and resolve this?’
‘No doubt there will be resolution hereafter.’ The Lord Chancellor is almost purring. ‘Everything will be provided to keep you in comfort. It is arranged.’
‘But arranged for how long?’
No one answers her. Outside the chamber, William Kingston waits for her, the Constable of the Tower. Kingston is a huge man, the king’s own build; he conducts himself nobly, but his office, and his appearance, have struck terror into the hearts of the strongest men. He remembers Wolsey, when Kingston went up-country to arrest him: the cardinal’s legs went from under him, and he had to sit down on a chest to recover. We should have left Kingston at home, he whispers to Audley, and taken her ourselves. Audley murmurs, ‘We could have, certainly; but don’t you think, Master Secretary, that you’re frightening enough on your own account?’
It amazes him, the Lord Chancellor’s levity, as they pass into the open air. At the king’s landing stage, the heads of stone beasts swim in the water, and so do their own shapes, the shapes of gentlemen, their forms broken by ripples, and the everted queen, flickering like a flame in a glass: around them, the dance of mild afternoon sunshine, and a flood of birdsong. He hands Anne into the barge, as Audley seems reluctant to touch her, and she shies away from Norfolk; and as if fishing his thoughts out of his mind, she whispers, ‘Cremuel, you have never forgiven me for Wolsey.’ Fitzwilliam gives him a glance, murmurs something he does not catch. Fitz was a favourite of the cardinal’s in his day, and perhaps they are sharing a thought: now Anne Boleyn knows what it is like to be turned out of your house and put upon the river, your whole life receding with every stroke of the oars.
Norfolk takes a place opposite his niece, twitching and tutting. ‘You see? You see now, madam! You see what happens, when you spurn your own family?’
‘I do not think “spurn” is the word,’ Audley says. ‘She hardly did that.’
He gives Audley a black look. He has asked for discretion on the charges against brother George. He does not want Anne to start flailing about and knock someone out of the boat. He withdraws into himself. Watches the water. A company of halberdiers are their escort, and he admires each fine axe edge, the sharp gleam on their blades. From an armoury’s point of view, they are surprisingly cheap to produce, halberds. But probably, as a weapon of war, they’ve had their day. He thinks of Italy, the battlefield, the forward push of pike. There is a powder house at the Tower and he likes to go in and talk to the firemasters. But perhaps that is a task for another day.
Anne says, ‘Where is Charles Brandon? I am sure he is sorry not to have seen this.’
‘He is with the king, I suppose,’ Audley says. He turns to him and whispers, ‘Poisoning his mind against your friend Wyatt. You have your work cut out there, Master Secretary.’
His eyes are on the far bank. ‘Wyatt is too good a man to lose.’
The Lord Chancellor sniffs. ‘Verses will not save him. Damn him, rather. We know he writes in riddles. But I think perhaps the king will feel they have been solved.’
He thinks not. There are codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line, or in a syllable, or in a pause, a caesura. He has prided himself, will pride himself, on asking Wyatt no questions that will force him to lie, though he may dissimulate. Anne should have dissimulated, Lady Rochford has explained to him: on her first night with the king she should have acted the virgin’s part, lain rigid and weeping. ‘But, Lady Rochford,’ he had objected, ‘faced with such fear, any man might falter. The king is not a rapist.’
Oh, well then, Lady Rochford had said. She should at least have flattered him. She should have acted like a woman who was getting a happy surprise.
He did not relish the topic; he sensed in Jane Rochford’s tone the peculiar cruelty of women. They fight with the poor weapons God has bestowed – spite, guile, skill in deceit – and it is likely that in conversations between themselves they trespass in places where a man would never trust his footing. The king’s body is borderless, fluent, like his realm: it is an island building itself or eroding itself, its substance washed out into the waters salt and fresh; it has its shores of polder, its marshy tracts, its reclaimed margins; it has tidal waters, emissions and effusions, quags that slough in and out of the conversation of Englishwomen, and dark mires where only priests should wade, rush lights in their hands.
On the river the breeze is cold; summer still weeks away. Anne is watching the water. She looks up and says, ‘Where is the archbishop? Cranmer will defend me and so will all my bishops, they owe their promotion to
