He says to Richard, ‘I have no illusions about the countess. Her sons have been feeding our secrets to the Emperor for years. Young Geoffrey Pole, the brother – he was so often at Chapuys’s house that Eustache had to beg him to stay away.’
The bell at All Hallows gives tongue, then St Mary’s after it. Richard says, ‘But you can see why the king fights to think well of them. It was he who restored their fortunes, and he does not want to take himself for a fool.’
St John Baptist rings out; then Swithun strikes up; further off, the bells at Paul’s. Across the street Richard shouts: ‘Humphrey Monmouth, or do my eyes deceive?’
The merchant, his old friend, halloos in reply. With his companion, he threads between two carts, steps over a stream of horse piss. He, Cromwell, claps their shoulders: ‘Will you come up to Canonbury to hunt?’
‘I will hunt with you,’ Robert Packington says. ‘Old man Monmouth can come and watch.’
Monmouth elbows him. ‘Old man! You’ll not see forty again, sir! I shall ride out with my falcon in your company, Thomas.’
It is a usual conversation. They raise the name of Tyndale, as he knew they would. He says courteously that he has done all he can through official channels, and now awaits the outcome. He turns the subject – the family, are they all well? But Packington turns it back: ‘Any visitors from Antwerp?’
‘The usual,’ Richard says, cautious.
‘No one new?’
He says, ‘No one who can tell us anything we don’t know.’
They part with hearty farewells. The merchants go chattering away. He and Richard walk on, silent. He says to Richard, ‘What?’
‘They sound as if they are planning a surprise. Perhaps it’s a present?’
He doesn’t need to say, I don’t like surprises.
Richard looks at him sideways. ‘So will you? Kill Reynold?’
‘Not in the street,’ he says.
It is a conversation for Austin Friars: for his private rooms. He says, ‘Francis Bryan would do it. He would rise to a challenge. Make a name for himself. He must sometimes wonder, what is the point of my life?’
‘Bryan?’ Richard makes a tippling motion.
‘True.’ He thinks, what other desperate men do I know?
‘I’ll go.’
Fear touches him. ‘No.’
‘I would need a company of rogues, but from what you say I could find them easy, in any Italian town. There are some gentlemen who might try to manage the business from afar. Now, I am not saying I would put the knife in myself. But I am saying I would see it done.’
‘I need you here, Richard,’ he says. God knows how much. ‘Tom Wyatt would do it. The king would forgive him everything. He would make him an earl.’
Richard hesitates. ‘The people about Pole … they might turn him. There are some subtle wits at Rome. I love Tom Wyatt, no man more, but he is not proof against sudden persuasion.’
He says, ‘When we ride to Kent to join with the king’s party, we will visit Allington, you and me, whether the king goes there or no. Sir Henry writes that he is failing. I am his executor, and should consult with him. And Tom Wyatt would be glad to see you.’
Richard slides a paper out of his pocket. ‘This came.’ He has been carrying it near his person. ‘Another verse. Not stolen. Offered freely.’
This time he knows it: Wyatt and none other. It is not strange if, once again, he laments those lost. Call it two and a half months – late May to Lammas-tide. The dead are no longer fresh, but copper-green flesh is still adherent to their bones. The verse is about slippage, fall, reversal of fortune, the casting down of the great by the great: around the throne thunder rolls, circa regna tonat; even as he sits under his canopy of estate, the king hears it, he feels it shudder in the stone flags, he feels its reverberation in the bone. He pictures the bolts, hurled by the gods, falling through the crystal spheres where angels sit and pick the fleas from their wings: hurtling, spinning and plunging till, with a roar of white flame, they crash down on Whitehall and fire the roofs; till they rattle the skeleton teeth of the abbey’s dead, melt the glass in the workshops of Southwark, and fry the fish in the Thames.
The Bell Tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate …
He cannot tell if Wyatt writes lean or learn. From the Bell Tower, no use to lean: you cannot see the scaffold on Tower Hill. But then, what had he to learn? He could not be ignorant of what was to pass. He did not think the men would come back with their heads on their shoulders.
He thinks, I didn’t have to go to the Bell Tower. This sorry procession to extinction – it was always in my sight. Chapuys had said, ‘You went to your house and dreamed it, then it came to pass.’
On the day of Anne’s death, Gregory saw Wyatt standing at a window; Wyatt looked down at him and made no signal. Did he watch the deer on her last run, her heart labouring, her gait failing? One supposed his eyes were inward, his gaze trained on nothing: where nothing soon would be. He has an image in his mind – and either it is a distant memory, or it is inserted there by a verse – of Wyatt’s hands scratched and bleeding, a tangle of roses in his grasp.
But surely, he thinks, it is Wriothesley I remember, at Canonbury: standing at the foot of the tower in the garden, the light fading, a sheaf of peonies in his hands.
They are in Kent, and the king calls him at dawn: he comes in, the locks rattling open, to free his prince from the oppressions of the night. Henry sits in his nightgown on a gilded and fringed stool, while a pale, perfect morning dawns outside the panes, and his features emerge from shadow, as if God were making him for the occasion.
The king begins, as he often does, as if they had just been speaking, and for some slight cause had broken off: a door opening, or a spark flying from the fire. He says, ‘In the days when I wanted her, and could not have her, when we were apart, Anne Boleyn and I, let us say I was at Greenwich, she was here in Kent – in those days I used to see her standing before me, smiling, just as if she were real, as real,’ the king stretches his hand out, ‘as real as you, Cromwell. But now I know she was never truly there. Not in the way I thought she was.’
The room smells sweetly, of lavender and pooled beeswax. Below the window, across the gardens, a boy is singing.
‘The knight knocked at the castle gate
The lady marvelled who was thereat.’
Henry lifts his head, listening. He sings:
‘She asked him what was his name
He said, Desire, your man, madame.’
When he steps forward into the full light, he sees Henry is crying silently, tears running down his cheeks. ‘The archbishop has given me a saying to guide me. It comes from the book of Samuel. “When the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept … But now he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.”’
Some fool comes in with a ewer of hot water. He waves the man back again. ‘A child’s loss is grievous, sir; it is as if we drag their corpses with us, all our days. But it is best to lay down your sorrow in some safe and consecrated place, and then walk on, looking to better times.’
‘I thought I had been punished enough,’ Henry says. ‘But it seems I will never be done being punished.’
‘Sir –’
‘You cannot know. You have only lost daughters, not sons. When my own day comes …’
He waits. He cannot guess how the king will conclude.
‘… you understand my wishes, and should you survive me I charge you to honour them. I wish to be buried in the tomb that the cardinal prepared for himself.’
He inclines his head. There is a sarcophagus of black touchstone, in which the cardinal never lay. All the parts are preserved, laid up in store. They await use, by someone who values himself in the sight of God and man, and wishes his name continued. Wolsey brought the artist over. Benedetto worked on it year after year, but as soon as he put in his account, the cardinal thought of something else. There are twelve bronze saints, and putti bearing shields emblazoned with the Wolsey arms. There are sober angels who bear in their hands pillars and crosses, and dancing angels with curly hair, their garments floating about them as they caper and skip.