He was not sure if he had spoken aloud. George did not seem to think so. He had put a question, and was waiting for an answer, leaning forward, hands joined on the table. ‘Did Tom Wyatt claim he had tupped my sister?’
‘His evidence was private. It was not given in court.’
‘But it reached the king. I don’t know how Wyatt can make such claims, and live. Why Henry does not strike him dead on the spot.’
‘After a certain point, the king was not concerned with her chastity.’
‘You mean, what’s one man more?’ George flushed. ‘Master Secretary, I do not know what you call this, but you cannot call it justice.’
‘I don’t call it anything, George. Or if I must, I call it necessità.’
He was aware of George’s pisspot in the corner. As if noting his delicate attention to it – as if his nostrils had twitched – George said, ‘I would empty it myself, but they will not let me out.’ He opened his hands. ‘Master Secretary, I will not dispute with you. Neither verdict nor sentence. I know why we are dying. I am not the fool you have always thought me.’
To that, he had said nothing. But George pushed back his chair and followed him to the door: ‘Master, pray to God to strengthen me on the scaffold. I must give an example if, as I think, we observe order of rank –’
‘Yes, my lord, you will be first.’
Viscount Rochford. Then the gentlemen. Then the lute player. ‘It would have been better to send Mark before us,’ George said. ‘Being a common man, he is the most likely to give way. But I suppose the king would not have the order broken.’
And at this, he burst into tears. He threw out his arms, a swordsman’s arms, young, strong, springing with life, and locked them around Thomas Cromwell as if grappling with Death. His body trembled, his lower limbs shook, he sagged and staggered as he rehearsed what he would never let the world see, his fear, his incredulity, his hope that this was a dream from which he might wake: his eyes slitted by tears, his teeth chattering, his hands blindly grasping, his head seeking a shoulder where it might rest.
‘God bless you,’ he had said. And he had kissed Lord Rochford, as one gentleman might, leaving another. ‘You will soon be past your pain.’ Going out, he had said to the guards, ‘Empty his pisspot, for God’s sake.’
And now he is awake, in his own house. George recedes, and the taste of his tears. There are footsteps in the room. He pulls aside the bedcurtains: heavy brocade, embroidered with acanthus leaves. It is half-light. I have hardly slept, he thinks. Sometimes, if you think of money as it flows in, flows out, you can drowse; the river brings it, you comb it from the shore. But then persons step into his dream: Sir, if you require clerks for the king’s new enterprise, my nephew is exact with numbers … It is no easy matter, to break up the monasteries. It is only the small houses, and even so. Some of them have land in ten counties. Real property and movables add themselves, assets for the king’s treasury … but then out of those sums subtract the monks’ debts and liabilities, the pensions, settlements, annuities. He has had to start up a new department to handle the work of survey and audit, collection and disbursement. Sir, my son is learning Hebrew and seeks a post where he can also employ his Greek … He has thirty-four boxes stuffed with papers, left over from when he did such work for Wolsey. He must arrange their carriage. Can your son shift heavy weights? Perhaps Richard Riche should keep the boxes at his house. Freshly appointed, he is Chancellor of Augmentations, and there are no premises yet for the new court, just some space in the Palace of Westminster he must contest with mice. It won’t do, he thinks. I shall build us a house.
On the sword of the Calais headsman, a prayer was written. ‘Show me,’ he said. He remembered the incised words, their feel under his fingers. Anne’s lovers died by the axe, and when they were dead they were stripped. Five linen shrouds. Five bodies in them. Five severed heads. On the day the dead rise, they hope to recognise themselves. What kind of blasphemy would it be, to mismatch heads and bodies? The sheer ineptitude of these people at the Tower, you would not believe it. When the sodden load was tumbled from a cart, bare of any badge of rank, they found they had no note of who was who. He was not there – he was at Lambeth, with the archbishop – so they turned to his nephew Richard: ‘What do we do now, sir?’
He thinks, I would have opened the shrouds and looked at their hands. Norris had a scar in his palm. Mark’s fingers were calloused from the lute-strings. Weston had torn nails, like the child he was. George Rochford … George still wore his wedding ring. And the one remaining, that must be Brereton – unless, in error, they had severed the head of some passer-by?
What I need, he thinks, are men who can count. Keep track of five heads and five bodies, thirty-four boxes of papers. Can your son count? Does he mind being out in all weathers? Will he ride the winter roads? Officers have been appointed for Augmentations, honest and able men: Danaster and Freeman, Jobson and Gifford, Richard Paulet, Scudamore, Arundell, Green. Did he appoint Waters, so he could introduce him to Spillman? Then his friend Robert Southwell, and Bolles and Morice and – who? Who’s missing?
When Anne was cut in two pieces the man from Calais showed him the sword and he passed his fingers over the prayer. The steel is cold and his fingers numb; when I am cold, I shall slide off this wedding ring. He walks towards, always towards the king, his naked hands held out, no weapon. Three silken gentlemen, in his dream, turn to watch him pass, Howard faces stamped with Howard sneers. Thomas Howard the Greater, Thomas Howard the Lesser. Half-waking he asks himself, what is the Lesser for? What does he do with his time? It is he who is the bad poet. His lines go thump and flop. Me/see. Too/do. Thing/bring. Flip-flap, they go, pit-pat.
Don’t count Howards, he thinks. Count clerks. Beckwith, I did forget Beckwith. Southwell and Green. Gifford and Freeman, Jobson and Stump – William Stump. Who could forget Stump?
Me. Evidently.
You need to write everything down, he tells his people. Distrust yourself. Human memory is fallible. You are Augmentations men. Twenty pounds per annum plus generous expenses. You will never be at home, always quartering the kingdom, slicing it; you will kill horses under you, when the business of revenue is urgent. Each house of monks has different obligations, and different customs, personnel. Certain abbots say ‘Spare us’; he says, perhaps. Pay in two years’ income to the Treasury and we may give you a stay. He must steady the pace of closures, because the monks – those who wish – must be found places in larger houses. Auditors must be appointed. Several are in place already, and three are called William. And there is Mildmay and Wiseman, Rokeby and Burgoyne. But not Stump. Get out of my dream, Stump. In Christ’s time there were no monks, no Stump either. The court must have messengers, it must have an usher; there must be someone to keep back the tide of petitioners, yet open the door. Put the usher on a per diem, he will make enough from gratuities; wouldn’t you want the door opened to you, if you stood to make your way in the world? Fortune, your gate is unlatched: Thomas Lord Cromwell, stroll through.
Now Austin Friars begins to shape like the house of a great man, its front lit by oriel windows, its small town garden expanding into orchards. He has bought up the parcels of land that adjoin it, some from the friars, and some from the Italian merchants who are his friends and live in this quarter. He owns the neighbourhood, and in his chests – in a walnut chest carved with laurel wreaths, in an armoire that’s higher than Charles Brandon – he keeps the deeds that have divided, valued and named it. Here are his freedoms and titles, the ancient seals and signatures of the dead, witnessed by city wardens and sergeants, by aldermen and sheriffs whose chains of office are melted for coin, whose corpses rest under stone. Citizen tailors, citizen skinners have plied their trades here, Broad Street and Swan Alley and London Wall. Two sisters have inherited a garden; before their husbands sell it to the friars, they stroll under the fruit trees together, skins fresh in the apple-scented evening, fingers of Isabella resting on Margaret’s arm: through the braided pattern of branches they look into the sky, and their feet in pattens leave bruises on the grass. A vintner sells a warehouse, a chandler conveys a shop: the warehouse and the shop come to the prior, a century rolls by and then – his finger tracks them – they come to me. Careful, do not smudge them, their names are not yet dry, Salomon le Cotiller and Fulke St Edmund. Here are their seals, showing rabbits, lions, flowers and saints, a bird with fledglings in her nest; the city’s arms, a horseshoe, a porcupine and the Sacred Heart. History inks the skin: it writes on the hide of sheep long slaughtered, or calves who never breathed; the dead cut away the ground beneath us, so that when he descends a stair at Austin Friars, the tread falls away under his foot, and below him there is another stair, no longer visible except in the mind’s eye; and down it goes, to the city where the legions of Rome left their ashes beneath the earth, their glass in the soil, their bones in the river. And down it plunges and down, into the subsoil of himself, through France and Italy and the pays bas, through the lowlands and the quicksands, by the marshes and meadows estuarine, through the floodplains of his dreams to where he wakes, shocked into a new day: the clang of the anvil from the smithy shakes the sunlight in a room where, a helpless child, he lies swaddled, startled from sleep, feeling as if for the first time the beat of his own heart.