He watches as Richard draws the papers together. Pray for the souls of those be dead and gone. ‘I’m going to Mortlake,’ he says. ‘To my new house.’
On his first night he cannot sleep. He walks in the garden till dusk, deciding what needs to be done first: some old rotten stumps to haul out, and fresh planting. He walks the rooms of the house, replanning them, extending them: hall, great chamber and gallery, chapel and library, and the kitchens, sculleries, pantries; the wood store and coal store, wet larder, dry larder, bakehouse. This chamber could be for Call-Me, he thinks, when he stays, and Richard could have this corner room next door – new windows, perhaps? There is still material left over from the king’s rebuilding of Hampton Court, he can order it sent by barge. The principal chambers are served by a privy stair; he will need to set a guard there.
He knew this place in the time of his sister Kat and her husband Morgan Williams. The Williams family had a house on the river, almost under the manor’s wall. They were substantial people, good at laying plans: Thomas, they would say, you’ve not a bad head on your shoulders and if you got away from Walter you could make something of yourself. They imagined he might go as clerk to some cronies of theirs, or be kitchen steward for some dotard, work his way up to book-keeper for a great man. He pictured himself going to Morgan Williams’s tailor and getting a good town coat like his: wearing that coat when, at thirty or thirty-five, he dipped his children in old Bouchier’s font in the parish church. The manor house had always belonged to the archbishops. His uncle had worked in the kitchen one time, and half the lads he knew had picked up pennies for carting wood, for unloading at the wharf, cleaning the fishponds. It did not seem possible he would enter those gates as anything other than a labourer: that he would walk in one day with building plans in his hands, with a new owner’s appraising eye. After all, he never aimed to be an archbishop.
If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you. When you are Lord Privy Seal you must walk abroad with solemn countenance, looking chosen by Jesus, like More did when he was chancellor. Once he had shrugged off his early life – the Williamses and their plans, as well as Walter, his slaps and kicks – he did not think he would ever come back to those streets. But we yearn for our origins; we yearn for an innocent terrain. Ship Lane has always been there, running downhill to the wharves. The town he knew had been a territory of back alleys and rat-runs, robbers’ dens with broken doors, keel-up boats rotting, frayed rope dissolved into vegetable matter, riverine mud and riverine gravel. His birthplace squatted there, around the bend in the river.
On his journey today from London, he felt he brought guests: Norris and George Boleyn, young Weston, Mark, and William Brereton. As he stepped out of his barge they stepped out too; they stood on the banks of the Styx, waiting to cross. They died within minutes of each other, but that does not mean they are together now. The dead wander the lanes of the next life like strangers lost in Venice. Even if they met, what would they have to talk about? When they stood before their judges they edged away from each other, as if fearing contamination. Each man had made a case against the other, hoping he might save his own life.
Get out, he tells them. Don’t think you can move in here. Pay the ferryman, and away you go. His spaniel turns in his arms as they walk in the twilight, her muzzle raised, her tasselled ears pricked; though she is small of her kind, her nose is as sharp as a hunter’s. There is always a current of disturbance, till a house settles about you: till your dog finds its way to the hearth and the sheets to the beds, the beef to the table. There is a scent in the air that reminds him of something from the past – it is yeast, perhaps, hops – though when he was a boy, they had no hops but what came in on the boat; the hometown brewers still used burdock root or marigold. Hops poison dogs, they said, when foreigners boasted about why their ale kept better.
He remembers standing behind the king, at his shoulder, as he signed the death warrants in May: Rafe Sadler, silent, at the king’s other hand: the windows open to admit soft air, and the king an unwilling scholar, truculent as some infant set down for the first time with a slate. It is hard labour for Henry, it is irksome toil, signing lives away. And the king’s hand rests, it seems, for long moments together, to allow him to view the half-made strokes – as if they might form by themselves and relieve him of the task.
Henry Norris, yes. He wills the royal arm to move. William Brereton, yes: he can feel, as if he himself were the king, the concentrated power of Rafe Sadler’s gaze on the nape of his neck. The lutenist Smeaton, yes, that is easily done, ink slips like oil onto the paper, into the vital space: resolving easily, a day or so from now, into the boy’s liquid death. As a man of no birth or breeding, Smeaton should have been strangled in a noose and, before he died, his guts pulled out before the crowd. But he had said to Henry, ‘Be merciful because …’
The king had said, ‘Why would I? Why would I show mercy, to a man who has debauched a queen of England?’
‘Mark is very young and fearful. No creature in terror can make a good death. And he must be sensible of his sins at the last, and able to frame a prayer.’
‘Do you think that a man meeting the headsman is composed?’
‘I have seen examples.’
Henry had closed his eyes. ‘Very well.’
And there Henry had paused. One saw again a child, bowed under the heavy grief of infancy: the schoolmaster’s mauvais sujet twisting in his seat, kicking his stool, watching out of the window as a blithe day draws to its close. I could be out there, the child thinks, in the last of the sun. Wherefore must I engrave these letters, does my tutor hate me that he keeps me to this task? And from the table before him, with a sigh, the king had picked up his little knife (smooth ivory handle) to mend his pen. ‘Weston,’ he said. ‘You know … he’s very young.’
Over the king’s head, his eyes had met Rafe’s. It must be all of them: no doubts, no exceptions. All are guilty.
Rafe reaches out, takes the knife and the quill, sharpens it for the king. Henry receives it with a murmur of thanks: always gracious. He takes a breath and, neck bent, patient as an ox yoked to his future, he reapplies himself to his task: Francis Weston, yes. He, Cromwell, thinks, I have done this before, surely? Some other time, some similar form of coercion?
Henry’s arm, his jewelled and heavy sleeve, trails across the table; an ink blot forms by Weston’s name, and blooms there; it unfolds, a solitary black flower, and forty years glide into ink-dark. His face does not change, he can trust it for that, but he is a child now, and standing, arms folded, feet planted apart in the posture of a man. He stands in a diffuse glow; it is afternoon sun, and it kindles in a curve of burnished copper. He sees the low rippling gleam of pewter plates, the sharp mirror flash from the blades of kitchen tools, from paring knife, boning blade, cleaver. It is Lambeth Palace, the cook’s domain: the echo of raised voices, among them his Uncle John’s.
What has occurred here? Someone is to be whipped. The kitchen steward’s hand slaps the table. The misdeed stated: who and what and why. (Well, not why, no one is interested in why.) The theft, the infraction, the breach – of manners or protocol, piecrust or bowclass="underline" the kitchen sin, the pantry crime: whatever it is, Uncle John’s senior means to skin somebody for it, he is bellowing his intentions so loud that his voice bounces around the cold vaulting above and reverberates in the chambers of the skull. And it is the eel boy who sits weeping, neck bent, knuckles pressed into his eyes, while the kitchen steward pummels him for information: the red-headed eel boy who he, Thomas Cromwell, had half-drowned in a water butt only yesterday. ‘It was me!’ The eel boy is streaked with angry tears, nose bubbling with snot, eyes screwed tight. ‘Leave me. Get off me. Enough. It was me.’