But there is no need for these lessons. All his life Rafe has been training for this. A scrap of a boy, he is no athlete, he could never exercise himself in tilt or tournament, a stray breeze would whisk him out of the saddle. But he has the heft for this. He knows how to watch. He knows how to listen. He knows how to send a message encrypted, or a message so secret that no message appears to be there; a piece of information so solid that its meaning seems to be stamped out in the earth, yet its form so fragile that it seems to be conveyed by angels. Rafe knows his master; Henry is his master. But Cromwell is his father and his friend.
You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
In Henry’s new church, Lent is as raw and cold as ever it was under the Pope. Miserable, meatless days fray a man’s temper. When Henry talks about Jane, he blinks, tears spring to his eyes. ‘Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child’s. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I have to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her…and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace…she has nothing…she expects nothing…’ A tear at last sneaks from Henry’s eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard.
Notice how he speaks of Jane: so humble, so shy. Even Archbishop Cranmer must recognise the portrait, the black reverse portrait of the present queen. All the riches of the New World would not sate her; while Jane is grateful for a smile.
I am going to write Jane a letter, Henry says. I am going to send her a purse, for she will need money for herself now she is removed from the queen’s chamber.
Paper and quills are brought to his hand. He sits down and sighs and sets about it. The king’s handwriting is square, the hand he learned as a child from his mother. He has never picked up speed; the more effort he puts into it, the more the letters seem to turn back on themselves. He takes pity on him: ‘Sir, would you like to dictate it, and I will write for you?’
It would not be the first time he has written a love letter for Henry. Over their sovereign’s bent head, Cranmer looks up and meets his eyes: full of accusation.
‘Have a look,’ Henry says. He doesn’t offer it to Cranmer. ‘She’ll understand, yes, that I want her?’
He reads, trying to put himself in the place of a maiden lady. He looks up. ‘It is very delicately expressed, sir. And she is very innocent.’
Henry takes the letter back and writes in a few reinforcing phrases.
It is the end of March. Mistress Seymour, stricken with panic, seeks an interview with Mr Secretary; it is set up by Sir Nicholas Carew, though Sir Nicholas himself is absent, not yet ready to commit himself to talks. Her widowed sister is with her. Bess gives him a searching glance; then drops her bright eyes.
‘Here is my difficulty,’ Jane says. She looks at him wildly; he thinks, maybe that’s all she means to say: here is my difficulty.
She says, ‘You can’t…His Grace, His Majesty, you can’t for one moment forget who he is, even though he demands you do. The more he says, “Jane I am your humble suitor,” the less humble you know he is. And every moment you are thinking, what if he stops talking and I have to say something? I feel as if I’m standing on a pincushion, with the pins pointing up. I keep thinking, I’ll get used to it, next time I’ll be better, but when he comes in, “Jane, Jane…” I’m like a scalded cat. Though, have you ever seen a scalded cat, Master Secretary? I have not. But I think, if after this short time I’m so frightened of him –’
‘He wants people to be frightened.’ With the words arrives the truth of them. But Jane is too intent on her own struggles to hear what he has said.
‘– if I’m frightened of him now, what will it be like to see him every day?’ She breaks off. ‘Oh. I suppose you know. You do see him, Master Secretary, most days. Still. Not the same, I suppose.’
‘No, not the same,’ he says.
He sees Bess, in sympathy, raise her eyes to her sister. ‘But Master Cromwell,’ Bess says, ‘it cannot always be acts of Parliament and dispatches to ambassadors and revenue and Wales and monks and pirates and traitorous devices and Bibles and oaths and trusts and wards and leases and the price of wool and whether we should pray for the dead. There must sometimes be other topics.’
He is struck by her overview of his situation. It is as if she has understood his life. He is taken by an impulse to clasp her hand and ask her to marry him; even if they did not get on in bed, she seems to have a gift for précis that eludes most of his clerks.
‘Well?’ Jane says. ‘Are there? Other topics?’
He can’t think. He squashes his soft hat between his hands. ‘Horses,’ he says. ‘Henry likes to know about trades and crafts, simple things. In my youth I learned to shoe a horse, he likes to know about that, the right shoe for the job, so he can confound his own smiths with secret knowledge. The archbishop, too, he is a man who will ride any horse that comes to his hand, he is a timid man but horses like him, he learned to manage them when he was young. When he is tired of God and men we speak of these matters with the king.’
‘And?’ Bess says. ‘You are together many hours.’
‘Dogs, sometimes. Hunting dogs, their breeding and virtues. Fortresses. Building them. Artillery. The range of it. Cannon foundries. Dear God.’ He runs his hand through his hair. ‘We sometimes say, we will have a day out together, ride down to Kent, to the weald, to see the ironmasters there, study their operations, and propose them new ways of casting cannon. But we never do it. Something is always in our way.’
He feels irredeemably sad. As if he has been plunged into mourning. And at the same time he feels, if someone tossed a feather bed into the room (which is unlikely) he would throw Bess on to it, and have to do with her.