Thomas Wyatt brings him baskets of cobnuts and filberts, bushels of Kentish apples, jolting up himself to Austin Friars on the carrier's cart. ‘The venison follows,’ he says, jumping down. ‘I come with the fresh fruit, not the carcases.’ His hair smells of apples, his clothes are dusty from the road. ‘Now you will have words with me,’ he says, ‘for risking a doublet worth –’‘The carrier's yearly earnings.’Wyatt looks chastened. ‘I forget you are my father.’‘I have rebuked you, so now we can fall to idle boyish talk.’ Standing in a wash of chary autumn sun, he holds an apple in his hand. He pares it with a thin blade, and the peel whispers away from the flesh and lies among his papers, like the shadow of an apple, green on white paper and black ink. ‘Did you see Lady Carey when you were in the country?’‘Mary Boleyn in the country. What dew-fresh pleasures spring to mind. I expect she's rutting in some hayloft.’‘Just that I want to keep hold of her, for the next time her sister is hors de combat.’Wyatt sits down amid the files, an apple in his hand. ‘Cromwell, suppose you'd been away from England for seven years? If you'd been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?’This summer, Wyatt vowed, he would stay down in Kent. He would read and write on wet days, hunt when it is fine. But the fall comes, and the nights deepen, and Anne draws him back and back. His heart is true, he believes: and if she is false, it is difficult to pick where the falsehood lies. You cannot joke with Anne these days. You cannot laugh. You must think her perfect, or she will find some way to punish you.‘My old father talks about King Edward's days. He says, you see now why it's not good for the king to marry a subject, an Englishwoman?’The trouble is, though Anne has remade the court, there are still people who knew her before, in the days when she came from France, when she set herself to seduce Harry Percy. They compete to tell stories of how she is not worthy. Or not human. How she is a snake. Or a swan.
Una candida cerva. One single white doe, concealed in leaves of silver-grey; shivering, she hides in the trees, waiting for the lover who will turn her back from animal to goddess. ‘Send me back to Italy,’ Wyatt says. Her dark, her lustrous, her slanting eyes: she haunts me. She comes to me in my solitary bed at night.‘Solitary? I don't think so.’Wyatt laughs. ‘You're right. I take it where I can.’‘You drink too much. Water your wine.’‘It could have been different.’‘Everything could.’‘You never think about the past.’‘I never talk about it.’Wyatt pleads, ‘Send me away somewhere.’‘I will. When the king needs an ambassador.’‘Is it true that the Medici have offered for the Princess Mary's hand?’‘Not Princess Mary, you mean the Lady Mary. I have asked the king to think about it. But they are not grand enough for him. You know, if Gregory showed any interest in banking, I would look for a bride for him in Florence. It would be pleasant to have an Italian girl in the house.’‘Send me back there. Deploy me where I can be useful, to you or the king, as here I am useless and worse than useless to myself, and necessary to no one's pleasure.’He says, ‘Oh, by the bleached bones of Becket. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’Norfolk has his own view of the queen's friends. He rattles a little while he expresses it, his relics clinking, his grey disordered eyebrows working over wide-open eyes. These men, he says, these men who hang around with women! Norris, I thought better of him! And Henry Wyatt's son! Writing verse. Singing. Talk-talk-talking. ‘What's the use of talking to women?’ he asks earnestly. ‘Cromwell, you don't talk to women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic? What would you find to say?’I'll speak to Norfolk, he decides when he comes back from France; ask him to incline Anne to caution. The French are meeting the Pope in Marseilles, and in default of his own attendance Henry must be represented by his most senior peer. Gardiner is already there. For me every day is like a holiday, he says to Tom Wyatt, when those two are away.Wyatt says, ‘I think Henry may have a new interest by then.’In the days following he follows Henry's eyes, as they rest on various ladies of the court. Nothing in them, perhaps, except the speculative interest of any man; it's only Cranmer who thinks that if you look twice at a woman you have to marry her. He watches the king dancing with Lizzie Seymour, his hand lingering on her waist. He sees Anne watching, her expression cold, pinched.Next day, he lends Edward Seymour some money on very favourable terms.