He hides his smile: a bad week for the eel boy.
It is only as the boy is hauled away to his punishment, and the knot of gawping menials disperses, that his uncle says to him, his voice low: ‘You demon, it was you, wasn’t it?’
‘What, me? I was nowhere near. You heard him. He confessed.’
‘Yes, but he had no choice. God alone knows.’ John turns away. ‘Could you not rub along with the little wretch, he being a townsman of yours?’
‘People from Putney don’t like each other. You know it.’
‘You’re as twisty as a skewer, Thomas. Where will you end up?’
Whitehall, it seems. The king lays down his quill. He rubs together the tips of his fingers; right, done, deo gratias. Rafe whisks the paperwork away. Each stroke of the pen will translate into a stroke of the axe. Like the eel boy, they will understand that if Thomas Cromwell says, ‘You did it,’ you did it. No use arguing. It only prolongs the pain.
Outside the room he says to Rafe, ‘Get those warrants to the Tower before he changes his mind.’
‘Sir …?’ Rafe’s glance, puzzled, travels to his master’s hand. He is holding – how did it get there? – the king’s penknife, ‘HR’ picked out in letters of jet. Ah, he says, I had better … Rafe says, I will, I’ll take it back to him, and he says, no, you see those papers into Kingston’s hands, then you can get home to Helen before it’s dark.
Rafe goes; one parting glance over his shoulder, flash of pallor above a swirl of black. He, Cromwell, moves back towards his master, the knife in his grip. He stands in the doorway, words on his lips: Majesty, I find I have this knife in my hand, though it belongs to you.
But Henry is at prayer. Beside the table, he is kneeling, uncushioned, on the stone floor: his eyes closed. Lips move: salve, regina. The mild evening is draped around him, the rosy light.
He drops the king’s penknife on the table and walks away. Not backing, as one does, from the presence of the monarch, but assured as a man in his own house, turning from someone in mid-conversation, quitting the room and leaving the door open.
Last night young Dick Purser had said to him, ‘Master, is the queen really guilty? Did she really go to it with all those brave fellows?’
No use to say, she is not on trial for that, but for treason. A month from now, it is only the bawdry and lechery that folk will remember. ‘You want my opinion?’ He had passed his hand over his face. ‘You see, Dick, it is why we have courts of law, and judges, and juries … to protect us from the tyranny of one man’s opinion.’
Outside the king’s chamber, gentlemen servants had tried to converge on him, but he distanced them with an outstretched palm. ‘Go in to the king, he is praying but I dare say he will soon want his supper.’ He was irritated; if Henry has a mind to fall to his knees and beseech the Blessed Virgin, someone should have foreseen it and provided a hassock. ‘Light a fire, the dew is falling. Later he may ask for music …’
Clément Janequin, his psalms. The duets of Francesco Spinacino, the saltarellos of Dalza the Milanese: the pavane alla venetiana, pavane alla ferrarese: a new toccata from Capirola, quickly rehearsed from a manuscript decorated at its edges with the images of apes and leaping hares. The galliard, the basse-dance, Chansons nouvelles en musique à quatre parties: four parties now dead, or dead in effect, and five if you count George Boleyn. On other light evenings, the musicians will ease themselves to the royal threshold: the jellies go out, and the fruits roasted in honey, and as the waiters depart, the consort arrives, one with lute in hand: a single note, shivering, is drawn from a string tightened to a seraph key. With Norris, Brereton, and Weston gone, other gentlemen, chosen by Thomas Cromwell, will take their places in the privy chamber, close to the person of the king. But old servants are the best, the ones who know when you need to sing and when you need to pray. Will death stop them jotting their names on the roster, pricking their names on the list: six weeks off and six weeks on? By the third week in May, their heads are in the street. Autumn will come, the days shortening, and the shade of Harry Norris will slide back to his tasks, bobbing in a corner like a spider on his silk. There is a place, a sequestered place in the imagination, where the eel boy is always waiting to be whipped, where George Boleyn is always in his prison room, always rising in welcome: Master Cromwell, I knew you would come. As George had stood, his hands held out, an image had stirred inside him, and he was elsewhere: in some other enclosed space, the light failing, as if a shutter had half-closed. Above him a shadow, like the outstretched wing of an angel; blood in his mouth, and the curve not of feathers but of stone: and a chill, a deep chill in the marrow. A stone arch, a cellar, a crypt, where someone is waiting in the dark: someone who has apprehended pain for so long that he walks towards it, arms open, relieved that it is here at last.
He remembers himself at eighteen years of age, a shattered creature crawling from the battlefield, creeping through Italy till he came to rest – or a halt, anyway – at the gate of the Frescobaldi banking house. He did not know then whose house it was, only that he needed shelter. He had seen the city’s saint drawn on walls – the city’s patron, one should say: Hercules as an infant, crushing a snake in his fist; Hercules as a hero cleaning out the Augean stables with his bucket and his rake. So when the gate opened to his knock he crawled inside. ‘My name?’ he told the steward. ‘My name is Ercole, I can labour.’
Now when he recalls himself, helpless on the cobbles, he sees himself blackened as he crawls, as if escaping from a burning building. He walks the rooms of the manor at Mortlake, Lord Cromwell on home ground, the wash of the river familiar as the waters of his mother’s womb. He douses his light at last, and sleeps, and dreams he stands, wrapped in his cloak of night, on a wharf where the burning boats have fired the quays.
Towards morning, banging at the gate wakes the household. He rises, prays briefly, and goes down to see what the noise is about. It is Richmond’s people, come from St James’s to say the young duke is dead.
He says, ‘Is someone on the road to tell the king?’ (For once, this is not his role: Mortlake to the Dover road, one has not wings.) ‘Alert my lord archbishop. He should be ready to go to the king’s side.’
He thinks, Henry will say this is God’s punishment on him, for allowing the bishops to make new articles of faith. For stripping the number of the sacraments away.
‘Ensure word goes up-country to my lady Clinton. Remember the feelings of a mother, tell her gently – not banging on the gate and shouting it to the skies.’
Seventeen years back, when the king’s son was born, he himself had not been at court or anywhere near it, and so he had to rely on others to tell him about those days. Francis Bryan saw Bessie Blount when she first came into the queen’s household, fair as a goddess and not yet fourteen. The king would not touch her at that age; the most lenient confessor would have shaken his jowls at it. Henry danced with her, and waited a year or two, always mindful of Charles Brandon bustling behind him, ready to snap her up. Then Queen Katherine had to watch her as her little maid of honour filled out, plump and smiling and sick every morning. Katherine said nothing, only praising her glowing skin. Why, she had said, I think our little Bessie is in love.
Bessie was whisked away before her belly showed. Her family were sensible of the honour and hopeful of a son for the king. It was the cardinal who arranged everything. The king never saw her afterwards – perhaps once, after the child was born. He received the compliments, insincere, of the ambassadors: this shows your Highness well capable of siring a boy, and surely God will not long deny your Highness the consolation of one born in wedlock? But everybody knew Katherine’s courses had stopped, and she would not bear another child.