The Duke of Norfolk comes to visit him, clattering up from the yard where his servants hold his plumed horse. ‘Liver, is it? My liver's shot to pieces. And these five years my muscles have been wasting. Look at that!’ He sticks out a claw. ‘I've tried every physician in the realm, but they don't know what ails me. Yet they never fail to send in their accounts.’Norfolk, he knows it for a fact, would never pay anything so mere as a doctor's bill.‘And the colics and the gripes,’ the duke says, ‘they make my mortal life a Purgatory. Sometimes I'm at stool all night.’‘Your Grace should take life more easily,’ Rafe says. Not bolt your food, he means. Not race about in a lather like a post horse.‘I intend to, believe me. My niece makes it clear she wants none of my company and none of my counsel. I'm for my house at Kenninghall, and Henry can find me there if he wants me. God restore you, Master Secretary. St Walter is good, I hear, if a job's getting too much for you. And St Ubald against the headache, he does the trick for me.’ He gropes inside his jacket. ‘Brought you a medal. Pope blessed it. Bishop of Rome, sorry.’ He drops it on the table. ‘Thought you might not have one.’He is out of the door. Rafe picks up the medal. ‘It's probably cursed.’On the stairs they can hear the duke, his voice raised, plaintive: ‘I thought he was nearly dead! They told me he was nearly dead …’He says to Rafe, ‘Seen him off.’Rafe grins. ‘Suffolk too.’Henry has never remitted the fine of thirty thousand pounds he imposed when Suffolk married his sister. From time to time he remembers it, and this is one of those times; Brandon has had to give up his lands in Oxfordshire and Berkshire to pay his debts, and now he keeps small state down in the country.He closes his eyes. It is bliss to think of: two dukes on the run from him.His neighbour Chapuys comes in. ‘I told my master in dispatches that the king has visited you. My master is amazed that the king would go to a private house, to one not even a lord. But I told him, you should see the work he gets out of Cromwell.’‘He should have such a servant,’ he says. ‘But Eustache, you are an old hypocrite, you know. You would dance on my grave.’‘My dear Thomas, you are always the only opponent.’Thomas Avery smuggles in to him Luca Pacioli's book of chess puzzles. He has soon done all the puzzles, and drawn out some of his own on blank pages at the back. His letters are brought and he reviews the latest round of disasters. They say that the tailor at Münster, the King of Jerusalem with sixteen wives, has had a row with one of them and cut her head off in the marketplace.He re-emerges into the world. Knock him down and he will get up. Death has called to inspect him, she has measured him, breathed into his face: walked away again. He is a little leaner, his clothes tell him; for a while he feels light, no longer grounded in the world, each day buoyant with possibilities. The Boleyns congratulate him heartily on his return to health, and so they should, for without him how would they be what they are now? Cranmer, when they meet, keeps leaning forward to pat his shoulder and squeeze his hand.While he has been recovering, the king has cropped his hair. He has done this to disguise his increasing baldness, though it doesn't, not at all. His loyal councillors have done the same, and soon it becomes a mark of fellowship between them. ‘By God, sir,’ Master Wriothesley says, ‘if I wasn't frightened of you before, I would be now.’‘But Call-Me,’ he says, ‘you were frightened of me before.’There is no change in Richard's aspect; committed to the tilting ground, he keeps his hair cropped to fit under a helmet. The shorn Master Wriothesley looks more intelligent, if that were possible, and Rafe more determined and alert. Richard Riche has lost the vestiges of the boy he was. Suffolk's huge face has acquired a strange innocence. Monseigneur looks deceptively ascetic. As for Norfolk, no one notices the change. ‘What sort of hair did he have before?’ Rafe asks. Strips of iron-grey fortify his scalp, as if laid out by a military engineer.The fashion spreads into the country. When Rowland Lee next pitches into the Rolls House, he thinks a cannonball is coming at him. His son's eyes look large and calm, a still golden colour. Your mother would have wept over your baby curls, he says, rubbing his head affectionately. Gregory says, ‘Would she? I hardly remember her.’