‘Then your Grace is restored to your rights,’ he says gravely.
The duke eyes him. ‘Have I you to thank?’
He waves it away. ‘Chapuys well understands your great lineage and your long experience. He knows what you are and will always be, to both the king and the commonwealth.’
‘That may be,’ the duke says. ‘But he doesn’t regard them as much as the dinners you give him. He speaks about you as if you have all to rule. Cremuel this, Cremuel that. Still. You have done me service. I acknowledge it.’ The duke stumps away on his little legs.
In answer to his summons, Master Holbein comes. He trails with him traces of his occupation, the scents of linseed and lavender oil, pine-resin and rabbit-skin glue. ‘Now you are a milord, shall I paint you again?’
‘I am content with what you did before.’ If a portrait may serve as an act of concealment, then he has effected one, he and Hans between them. He says, ‘I thought I might have a whole wall of portraits. The past kings of England.’
Hans sucks his lip. ‘How far you wish to go back?’
‘Back before King Harry who conquered France. Before his father Bolingbroke.’
‘You wish to include those murdered?’
‘If it does not take up too much space.’
Hans crucifies himself against the wall, then spins about and about, using his wing span to measure it. ‘You can build a new room if need be.’ Below the window, the tramp of bricklayers: scaffolding is lashed together, dust rises into the air. ‘Write them down, their names. You want a picture of Henry? You standing beside him, whispering sums of money?’
He knows what Hans is hinting at. If Henry is to be painted this year, he wants the commission. Hans says, ‘He can no longer ride hard, nor play at tennis. So look now.’ He pats his belly.
‘True. The king is augmented.’
Hans strides along the gallery, squaring off with his hands the notional space for each king. ‘When you come home from the court you will come in and greet them. They will say, “God bless you, Thomas,” as if they were your uncles. You do this because you have no people of your own.’
True again. ‘I wish you had painted my wife.’
‘Why? She was pretty?’
‘No.’
If he had been able to afford Hans when his wife and daughters were alive he could have painted them as he had Thomas More’s family, along with their house spaniels and any other little pets they had then: he with his book in hand, and Gregory playing with a child-sized sword, and his daughters with their coral beads. He can almost see the picture; his eyes move around it, to where Richard Cromwell leans on the back of his chair, and Rafe Sadler sits to the right of the frame with abacus and quill, and a door is open for Call-Me to come in when he pleases. When he tries to bring the faces of his girls to mind, he cannot do it. He knows memory tricks but they don’t help with this. Children change so fast. Grace changed every day. Even Liz’s face is a blurred oval beneath her cap. He imagines telling her, ‘A German is coming to draw us, and we shall be doubled, as if we carried a mirror.’ When you went to Chelsea you made your bow to the Lord Chancellor – the one seated on the wall, wearing the grave expression of the councillor. Then the real one would sidle up, with his blue chin and his frayed wool gown, rubbing his cold hands and letting you know you were interrupting him. Thomas More looking at you twice: a dirty look both times.
He says, ‘Hans, I am not expecting you to paint these kings yourself. Send a boy. It doesn’t matter what the faces look like, because nobody knows.’
They shake hands on it. There is nothing against the recreation of the dead, as long as they are plausible. He, Lord Cromwell, will provide bed and board for two apprentices, who will stay till the kings are dried and hung, and Hans will charge for materials, and a nominal sum for labour, ‘but rich man’s rates’, Hans says. He digs a finger into his patron’s plush person, and goes out, whistling.
His jester Anthony comes to him: ‘Sir, when was it heard of, that a man was fool to the Lord Privy Seal, and was not hung with silver bells?’
‘Good idea,’ Richard Cromwell says. ‘You can ring them to let us know when you make a joke.’
‘I may be the saddest jester born,’ Anthony says, ‘but I don’t go parading around the taverns and giving your secrets away, and I am cheaper than Will Somer, that is the king’s fool now, for he has a man to attend on him, and I need no keeper. Except in the spring when I am melancholy, and need someone to keep me away from sharp knives, and streams and ponds where I might drown myself.’
Will Somer is a hunchback who falls asleep while he is talking. He sits at table and slam goes his head, right down into his platter. He is not safe in the street; if he did not have a servant to check him he might fall under the wheels of a cart. He might slump to the ground while he is mounting a stile, his feet entangled, his hair trailing in mud. Every moment of his day is interpenetrated with night, and when he sinks to the ground in the precincts of the court, spaniels run up and peer at him, and wave their tails as they lick his ears. Somer is harmless, an innocent. But the man Sexton, or Patch, remains in Nicholas Carew’s house, where they say he tells stories about the queen that was, calling her a harlot, and for each slander Carew augments his living; and the ingrate talks about the cardinal too, his former master, and defames him every waking hour.
He says to Anthony, ‘Tell Thomas Avery to give you a budget. Then you can buy your own bells.’
Three great ships, it is reported, have docked in the river port of Seville, and are unloading treasure from Peru to swell the coffers of the Emperor: whose forces now advance into Picardy, into the territory of the King of France. King Henry offers his services as mediator, and declares he will remain neutral. ‘By which he means,’ Chapuys says, ‘he will go to the side that promises him most and costs him least. That is what he means by neutrality.’
He says, ‘What prince would do anything else? He must seize his advantage.’
‘But then,’ Chapuys says, ‘Henry talks so much of his honour.’
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘they all do.’
The Venetian ambassador, Signor Zuccato, calls on him beaming with pleasure, to explain the Senate has voted him fifty ducats for the purchase of horses – a perquisite all former ambassadors have enjoyed, but which in his case had unaccountably been forgotten. So the Venetian can hunt if he likes, cantering after the king and Madamma Jane into the dappled misty mornings. There have been years of hunting par force: while gentlemen lie abed the questers are at work to find a runnable stag, who stirs in the glade and wakes and sniffs the air of a new day. When the beast is chosen the hounds are relayed on the line of his run, grey and lemon and tawny and white; and when the hart is unharboured, the huntsman feels the grass where he lay – if it is cold, if it is warm. At sun-up the chase begins. Hart may ruse and he may flee, he may plunge into the chilly stream, but the hounds run on and never change, till he is brought to bay, and as they run they revile him, baying their taunts in a language he can understand, calling him a varlet and a knave: and the hunters cry ho moy, cy va, ho sto, mon amy: sa cy avaunt, so ho. And when the sword strikes him, through the shoulder into the heart, then hart is turned on his back, his antlers in the earth; and the horn, which has blown mote and recheat and prise, now blows mort. When he is unmade, disassembled, then the hounds are thrown bread soaked in his blood, and certain bones, cast aside for crows, are called the raven’s fee; and the head is set on a spear and carried home, foremost, as it was in life.