Mary says, ‘Fitzroy doesn’t need me. He doesn’t even like me. He doesn’t count me as his wife. My brother Surrey takes him whoring.’
Blunt as her father. ‘My lady,’ he says, ‘you bear much blame for this intrigue. As we have not yet defined the scope of the new law, we do not know what penalties you might face. But I doubt the king will pursue you, if you are watching at his son’s sickbed. Do not fret over Lady Margaret, she will be well-attended at the Tower. But unless you want to go with her, I advise you to get to St James’s and stay there.’
Meg is on her feet, bursting into tears again; she clings to the back of her chair. Mr Wriothesley rises and takes charge. He is firm and cool. ‘Lady Margaret, you will not be put in a dungeon. No doubt Lord Cromwell will arrange for you to have the late queen’s apartments.’
He gathers his papers. ‘Come, my lady,’ Mary Fitzroy pleads, ‘do this as befits your royal dignity. Do not make these men have to carry you. And thank Lord Cromwell – my trust is in him, he will divert the king’s anger if any man can.’
He thinks, it will be diverted to Tom Truth: Henry will hate his proceedings. He stands by the wall till the women are gone, sweeping by him without a word. But the Princess of Scotland is still protesting: ‘What harm can I take by telling the truth?’
Her voice rings in the stairwell, then she is gone. Call-Me says, ‘I thought she would never grasp your saving hand.’
‘She’s not by nature stupid. She’s in love.’
‘It’s lucky it doesn’t make men stupid. I mean, look at Sadler.’
Yes, look at Sadler. Besotted with his wife, and no blunting of his wits at all.
Mr Wriothesley’s mood has softened. With Meg in the Tower, he knows he will have another chance to bring her down. ‘Were you ever in love, sir?’
‘It’s eluded me.’ He remembers asking Rafe, what is it like? Although Wyatt has alerted him to the signs. The burning sighs, the frozen heart. Or is it the other way around?
He thinks, I must make shift to help Bess Darrell. I am caught up in this fresh Howard knavery, while Wyatt’s child is growing inside her. ‘I want Francis Bryan. Is he at home or abroad?’
‘Favours to call in?’ But Call-Me is restless, excited; he does not pursue it. ‘Who’s going to break it to the king that Meg is married?’
He sighs. ‘I am.’
‘I would not like to be in Norfolk’s shoes. His niece disgraces him in spring, and his half-brother in summer. You can easy pull him down now.’ Call-Me flits a glance at him. ‘If you want to.’
He thinks, I don’t know that I do. Whether the duke planned this misalliance, or just concealed it, it is a grave matter. But no graver than crimes in the past, for which I appear to have forgiven him. ‘Suppose the Scots come over the border? If not Norfolk, who would go up against them?’
‘Suffolk,’ Wriothesley says.
‘And if the French come in by the other door?’
‘You were a soldier, sir.’
‘A long time ago.’ I carried a pike. Or I was the boy to the man who did; one fights as a unit. I was a child. Now I am fifty. I could perhaps win a brawl in the street, though I would rather stop one. ‘I have aged into accommodation, Call-Me. As you have noticed, this hour past. It would be a meagre triumph to have saved the king’s daughter, if he now turns and executes his niece.’
‘But why,’ Call-Me says, ‘would they let a year pass – in love, as she says – and only then take a vow? I think he was not so passionate, till the date Eliza was declared a bastard, and Meg stepped nearer the throne.’
‘Unless he was weary of making rhymes without result. Surely they took the vow so he could bed her?’
‘Surely. And what if inconvenience should ensue?’
He shrugs. Meg must trust to luck. And sometimes a woman gets a child, but loses it before anyone knows it but herself. It’s only afterwards they tell you about such things: twenty years on, sometimes. Call-Me says, ‘The king will want her pressed on the date and the witnesses.’
‘Then we’ll press Tom Truth. He already thinks I know more than I do.’
‘Most people think that,’ Mr Wriothesley says.
‘He fears everybody knows where his cock has been just by reading his rhymes. But Norfolk’s daughter has a stout heart. She should be on the king’s council. You recall how she tried to bar the door to me, on the day Anne was crowned?’
Wriothesley doesn’t know, why would he? What Call-Me witnessed was the public show, the seething crowds, trumpet blasts, banners, snorting horses, trampling hooves. Anne, fragile, heavy with child in the humid heat, must sustain three days of ceremony under the hostile eyes of the people. The flower of England’s nobility, under protest, carried her train. At the altar, the weight of the crown bent her neck. If her face shone, that was not sweat – it was a sense of destiny. Her hand, itching for so long, took a sure grip on the sceptre. Archbishop Cranmer smudged her forehead with holy oil.
Then after the ceremony she withdrew, away from the gaze of the city and its gods, to a chamber where she could lay aside her robes. He followed. He had seen the look of glazed fatigue on her face. But now he must get her up and out, to the feast in Westminster Hall; if he could not, short of carrying her, then he must speak urgently to the king, because rumour spreads like a blaze in thatch; if Anne was too exhausted to be propped up in public view, they would say she was taken ill, they would say she was losing the child.
At the chamber door he met Norfolk’s daughter, an obdurate fourteen-year-old shocked to her marrow: ‘The queen is undressed!’ Anne’s voice, fractious, called out to him, and setting the little girl aside, he stepped in. On a high bed the queen lay on her back like a corpse, her thin shift draping the mound of her belly. Her narrow hand rested on her person, as if she were calming the prince within; her hair was loose and fell around her like black feathers. He had looked at her in pity and in wonder and a kind of appetite, imagining that he himself had a woman heavy with child. She turned her head. A ripple of hair slid away, spilled over the side of the bed. In an impulse of – what, of tidiness? – he had lifted the strand, held it for a moment between finger and thumb, then smoothed it with the rest.
Mary Norfolk had yelped, ‘No! Don’t touch the queen.’
The dead woman spoke: ‘Let him. He has earned it.’
Her eyes snapped open. They moved over him. She gave him her strange, slow smile. I knew then (he would say later) that Anne would not stop at the king, but consume many men, young or old, rich or poor, noble or common. But at the last, she did not consume me.
He remembers her swollen feet, blue-veined, bare. How helpless they seemed, as if on that hot June day they might be cold.
At the king’s command, a lodging is prepared for Tom Truth. Constable Kingston comes in person, and suggests the upper floor of the Bell Tower, which has a good fireplace. Let’s put a hopeful face on it, Kingston says, and assume the king will show mercy, and the young man will still be alive this winter.
He says to Kingston, ‘You know the turnkey Martin?’
‘I know him. One of your gospellers.’
‘Martin ought to attend Lord Thomas,’ he says. ‘He respects those who write verse.’
Kingston stares at him as if he were ignorant. ‘They all did it. All those late gentlemen.’
‘George Boleyn, certainly,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘And Mark, I concede. But can you see Will Brereton juggling with terza rima? As for Norris, he was more interested in listing his emoluments and tabulating his assets.’
Kingston says, ‘They tried their hand. I am no judge. But the queen said there was only Wyatt who could do it.’
‘Sir William,’ he says, ‘ask your wife to sit with Lady Margaret, as she sat with the late queen. Let me know what she says.’ He adds, ‘I do not say it will end the same way. Let Lady Kingston encourage her to think she can live and thrive, if she sees her duty.’