‘I’ll make a memorandum,’ Rafe says, and laughs.
A year ago, Rafe could not laugh. Thomas, his first child, had lived only a day or two after he was baptised. Rafe took it like a Christian man, but it sobered him, and he was a sober young man already. Helen had children by her first husband, but had never lost one; she took it badly. Yet this year, after a long and harsh labour that frightened her, she has another son in the cradle, and they have called him Thomas too. May it bring him better fortune than his brother; reluctant as he was to come out and face the world, he seems strong, and Rafe has relaxed into fatherhood.
‘Sir,’ Rafe says. ‘I have been wanting to ask. Is that your new hat?’
‘No,’ he says gravely. ‘It is the hat of the ambassador of Spain and the Empire. Would you like to try it on?’
A commotion at the door. It is Christophe. He cannot enter in the ordinary way; he treats doors as his foe. His face is still black from the bonfire. ‘A woman is here for you, sir. Very urgent. She will not be sent away.’
‘What manner of woman?’
‘Quite old. But not so old you would kick her downstairs. Not on a cold night like this.’
‘Oh, for shame,’ he says. ‘Wash your face, Christophe.’ He turns to Rafe. ‘An unknown woman. Am I inky?’
‘You’ll do.’
In his great hall, waiting for him by the light of sconces, a lady who lifts her veil and speaks to him in Castilian: Maria, Lady Willoughby, once Maria de Salinas. He is aghast: how is this possible, he asks, she has come alone from her house in London, at night, in the snow?
She cuts him short. ‘I come to you in desperation. I cannot get to the king. There is no time to lose. I must have a pass. You must give me a paper. Or when I arrive at Kimbolton they will not let me in.’
But he switches her to English; in any dealings with Katherine’s friends, he wants witnesses. ‘My lady, you cannot travel in this weather.’
‘Here.’ She fumbles for a letter. ‘Read this, it is from the queen’s physician, his own hand. My mistress is in pain and afraid and alone.’
He takes the paper. Some twenty-five years ago, when Katherine’s entourage had first arrived in England, Thomas More had described them as hunchbacked pygmies, refugees from Hell. He cannot comment; he was still out of England himself, and far from the court, but it sounds like one of More’s poetic exaggerations. This lady came a little later; she was Katherine’s favourite; only her marriage to an Englishman had parted them. She was beautiful then, and now, a widow, she is beautiful still; she knows it and will use it, even when she is shrinking with misery and blue with cold. She swirls out of her cloak, and gives it to Rafe Sadler, as if he stood there for that purpose. She crosses the room and takes his hands. ‘Mother of God, Thomas Cromwell, let me go. You will not refuse me this.’
He glances at Rafe. The boy is as immune to Spanish passion as he might be to a wet dog buffeting the door. ‘You must understand, Lady Willoughby,’ Rafe says coolly, ‘that this is a family matter, not even a council matter. You may beseech Master Secretary all you like, but it is for the king to say who visits the dowager.’
‘Look, my lady,’ he says. ‘The weather is filthy. Even if it thaws tonight, it will be worse up-country. I cannot guarantee your safety, even if I give you an escort. You might fall from your horse.’
‘I will walk there!’ she says. ‘How will you stop me, Master Secretary? Keep me in chains? Will you have your black-faced peasant tie me up and lock me in a closet till the queen is dead?’
‘You are ridiculous, madam,’ Rafe says. He seems to feel some need to step in and protect him, Cromwell, from women’s wiles. ‘It is as Master Secretary says. You cannot ride in this weather. You are no longer young.’
Under her breath she utters a prayer, or curse. ‘Thank you for your gallant reminder, Master Sadler, without your advice I might have thought myself sixteen. Ah, do you see, I am an Englishwoman now! I know how to say the opposite of what I mean.’ A shadow of calculation crosses her face. ‘The cardinal would have let me go.’
‘Then what a pity he is not here to tell us about it.’ But he takes the cloak from Rafe, places it around her shoulders. ‘Go, then. I see you are determined. Chapuys is riding up there with a pass, so perhaps…’
‘I am sworn to be on the road at dawn. God turn his back on me, if I am not. I shall outpace Chapuys, he is not impelled as I am.’
‘Even if you get there…it is a harsh country and the roads barely worth the name. You might reach the castle itself and have a fall. Even under the walls.’
‘What?’ she says. ‘Oh, I see.’
‘Bedingfield has his orders. But he could not leave a lady in a snowdrift.’
She kisses him. ‘Thomas Cromwell. God and the Emperor will requite you.’
He nods. ‘I trust in God.’
She sweeps out. They can hear her voice raised in enquiry: ‘What are these strange mounds of snow?’
‘I hope they do not tell her,’ he says to Rafe. ‘She is a papist.’
‘One never kisses me like that,’ Christophe complains.
‘Perhaps if you washed your face,’ he says. He looks keenly at Rafe. ‘You would not have let her go.’
‘I would not,’ Rafe says stiffly. ‘The ruse would not have occurred to me. And even if it had…no, I would not, I would have been afraid to cross the king.’
‘That’s why you will thrive and live to be old.’ He shrugs. ‘She will ride. Chapuys will ride. And Stephen Vaughan will watch them both. Are you coming tomorrow morning? Bring Helen and her daughters. Not the baby, it’s too cold. We are going to have a fanfare, Gregory says, and then trample the papal court into the ground.’
‘She loved the wings,’ Rafe says. ‘Our little girl. She wants to know if she can wear them every year.’
‘I don’t see why not. Till Gregory has a daughter big enough.’
They embrace. ‘Try to sleep, sir.’
He knows Brandon’s words will go round in his head when that head touches the pillow. ‘When it comes to the affairs of nations you cannot deal, you are not fit to talk to princes.’ Useless to swear vengeance on Duke Dripping Pan. He will undo himself, and perhaps for good this time, shouting around Greenwich that Henry is a cuckold. Surely even an old favourite cannot get away with that?
Besides, Brandon’s right. A duke can represent his master at the court of a foreign king. Or a cardinal; even if he is low-born like Wolsey, his office in the church dignifies him. A bishop like Gardiner; he may be of dubious provenance, but by his office he is Stephen Winchester, incumbent of England’s richest see. But Cremuel remains a nobody. The king gives him titles that no one abroad understands, and jobs that no one at home can do. He multiplies offices, duties pile on him: plain Master Cromwell goes out at morning, plain Master Cromwell comes in at night. Henry had offered him the Lord Chancellor’s post; no, don’t disturb Lord Audley, he had said. Audley does a good job; Audley, in fact, does as he’s told. Perhaps, though, he should have agreed? He sighs, at the thought of wearing the chain. You cannot, surely, be both Lord Chancellor and Master Secretary? And he will not give up that post. It doesn’t matter if it gives him a lesser status. It doesn’t matter if the French don’t comprehend. Let them judge by results. Brandon can make a racket, unreproved, near the royal person; he can slap the king on the back and call him Harry; he can chuckle with him over ancient jests and tilt-yard escapades. But chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.