‘You’ll have to talk to him,’ Edward says. ‘Cromwell, you’ll have to recall to him how a Christian man behaves.’
He takes Jane’s hands between his. It is a bold move but he can see no alternative. ‘Your Grace, put aside modesty, and tell me what it is the king requires of you.’
Jane slides her hands away. She slides her pale little person away, and nudges aside her brothers: she falters in the direction of her king, her court, her future. She whispers as she goes, ‘He wants me to ride down to Dover with him, and see the fortifications.’
Unsmiling, Jane walks the length of the great chamber. Every eye is on her; she looks proud, someone whispers. And if you knew nothing of her, you might think that. Henry stretches out his arms, as one does for a child learning to walk, and when he has her, he kisses her, full on the mouth. His lips form a question; she whispers an answer; he bends his head to catch it, his face full of solicitude and pride. Chapuys is in a huddle with the old dames and their menfolk. As if he were their envoy – as if he were their envoy to Cromwell – the ambassador peels himself away and says, ‘She appears to be wearing all her jewels at once, like a Florentine bride. Still, she looks well enough, for a woman who is so plain. Whereas the other one, the more she dressed up, the worse she looked.’
‘Latterly. Perhaps.’
He remembers the days, when the cardinal was still alive, when Anne needed no ornament but her eyes. She had dwindled away in those last months, her face pinched. When she landed at the Tower, and slipped from his grasp and fell at his feet on the cobbles, he had lifted her and she weighed nothing; it was like holding air.
‘So,’ Chapuys says. ‘While your king is in this merry mood, press him to name the Princess Mary as his heir.’
‘Pending, of course, his son by his new wife.’
Chapuys bows.
‘Press your master to speak to the Pope,’ he tells the ambassador. ‘There is a bull of excommunication hovering over my master. No king can live like that, threatened in his own realm.’
‘All Europe is keen to heal the breach. Let the king approach Rome in a spirit of penitence, and undo the legislation that has separated your country from the universal church. As soon as that is done, His Holiness will be pleased to welcome his lost sheep, and accept the restitution of his revenues from England.’
‘With interest paid, I suppose, on the missing years?’
‘I imagine the normal banking rules will apply. And also –’
‘There is more?’
‘King Henry should withdraw his delegates to the Lutheran princes. We know you are holding talks. We want you to break them off.’
He nods. In sum, Chapuys is asking him to destroy the work of four years. To take England back to Rome. To recognise Henry’s first marriage as valid, and the daughter of that marriage as his heir. To break off diplomacy with the German states. To forswear the gospel, embrace the Pope, and bow the knee to idols.
‘So what shall I do,’ he asks, ‘in these brave new days? I mean, me personally? Thomas Cromwell?’
‘Back to the smithy?’
‘I think I’ve lost the blacksmith’s art. I’ll have to take to the road as I did as a boy. Cross the sea and offer myself as a footsoldier to the King of France. Do you think he’d be pleased to see me?’
‘That is one course,’ Chapuys says. ‘On the other hand, you could stay in post, and accept a generous retainer from the Emperor. He understands the labour involved in returning your country to the status quo ante.’ The ambassador smiles at him; then swivels on his heel, his arms held out in greeting. ‘Cara-vey!’
That plush frontage, that deep chest emblazoned with gold: who can it be, but Sir Nicholas Carew? The grandee, in a lilting tone, corrects the ambassador’s pronunciation: ‘Car-ew.’ He waits for it to be repeated.
Chapuys signals regret. ‘It is beyond me, sir.’
Carew will let it pass. He fixes his attention on Master Secretary. ‘We should meet.’
‘That would honour me, Sir Nicholas.’
‘We must arrange an escort to bring the Princess Mary back to court. Come out to my house at Beddington.’
‘Come to me. I’m busy.’
Sir Nicholas is annoyed. ‘My friends expect –’
‘You can bring your friends.’
Now Sir Nicholas heaves closer. ‘We made a bargain with you, Cromwell. We expect it to be honoured.’
He doesn’t answer Carew, merely adjusts him so that his path is clear. Passing him, he touches his hand to his heart. It looks like the gesture of a man suddenly anxious. But that’s not what it is, and that’s not what he’s doing.
At once his boys are beside him.
Richard asks, ‘What did Carew want?’
‘His bargain honoured.’
It is true what Wriothesley says: there was a bargain. In Carew’s version: we, friends of the Princess Mary, will help you remove Anne Boleyn, and afterwards, if you grovel to us and serve us, we will refrain from ruining you. Master Secretary’s version is different. You help me remove Anne, and … and nothing.
Richard says, ‘Do you know that the king had Carew’s wife in his bed? Before Carew married her, and after?’
‘No!’ Gregory says. ‘Am I old enough to know? Does everybody know? Does Carew know they know?’
Richard grins. ‘He knows we know.’
It’s better than gossip. It’s power: it’s news from the court’s inner economy, from the counting house where the units of obligation are fixed and the coins of shame are weighed. Richard says, ‘I could like her myself, Eliza Carew. If a man were not a married man …’
‘Out of our sphere,’ he says.
‘When has that stopped you? It’s only a fortnight since you and the Earl of Worcester’s wife were shut in a room together.’
Getting evidence.
‘And she came out smiling,’ Richard says.
Because I paid her debts.
Gregory says, ‘And she’s big with child. Which people do talk about.’
‘Let’s go,’ Richard says, ‘before Carve-Away comes back. We might laugh at him.’
But their names are called: Rafe, whisking around a corner. He has come from the king, and his expression – if you could parse it – is a compound of reverence, wariness and incredulity. ‘He wants you, sir.’
He nods. ‘You boys go home.’ Then a thought strikes him. ‘But Richard –’
His nephew turns. He whispers. ‘Do you attend Sir William Fitzwilliam. See if he will stand my ally in the king’s council. He knows Henry’s mind. He knows him as well as any man.’
It was Fitzwilliam who came to him, last March, to spell out to him how the Boleyns were detested, and how this detestation might unite natural foes, give them a common interest. It was Fitzwilliam who hinted at the king’s own need for a change: who did it with the calm authority of a man who had known Henry since his youth.
Richard says, ‘I think he will follow your star, sir.’
‘Find out his hopes,’ he says. ‘And raise them.’
‘Sir –’ Rafe prompts.
He takes Rafe’s arm. A knot of gentlemen turn their faces, and watch them pass. Rafe looks over his shoulder as the gentlemen fall behind, arranged as if waiting for Hans to paint them: silken hose, silken beards, their daggers in scabbards of black velvet, crimson velvet books in their hands. They are all Howards, or Howard kin, and one is the Duke of Norfolk’s young half-brother, who shares his name: Thomas Howard the Lesser. No danger of confusing the two. The Lesser is the worst poet at court. The Greater never rhymed in his life.
Rafe says, ‘The king is not as sanguine as he appears. He is not sure now of what he believed yesterday. He says, is justice served? He does not doubt Anne’s guilt, but he says, what about the gentlemen? You remember, sir, what ado we had to get him to sign the warrants? How we stood over him? Now he has fallen into doubts again. “Harry Norris was my old friend,” he says. “How is it possible he betrayed me with my wife? And Mark – a lute player, a boy like that – is it likely she would sin with him?”’