They’re inside the doorway of the brewhouse. The smell blankets him. He comes up to John’s elbow. His father is moving in the dimness, heaving some chests around; he wonders what’s in them. ‘Oh, just stand there, brother!’ Walter says. ‘Just stand there and watch a man break his back!’
John says, ‘Do me courtesy of listening when I speak to you.’
Walter dumps the box he is hauling. ‘What?’
‘Let me take Tom to Lambeth. The kitchen steward’s a good friend to me.’
‘You want to make him into a cook? No lad of mine will be known as Platterface.’
‘He won’t be bound,’ John says. ‘What harm?’
‘I suppose he can make me a posset in my old age. Stew a fowl. All right.’ Walter laughs. He thinks he’ll never be old. He thinks he’ll always have teeth. ‘Mind, Tom, obey your uncle, or you’ll be baked in a pie.’
‘You’ll be minced.’ John slaps him around the head to seal the agreement. Already there’s something solid about him, that inclines people to cuff and slap him, perhaps because it makes a satisfying noise. But as they walk away, John says, ‘You need a skill, Tom. You don’t want to be like your dad, good at nothing but trouble.’
He says, ‘There’s a box under his bed with three padlocks.’
‘Gold, I don’t doubt,’ John says. ‘Where from I don’t like to think. But take him out of his parish, and how would he thrive? They all know him in Putney and none dares cross him. But let him walk abroad without his bully boys, then it’s a different tale.’
Think of that. For the first time, he imagines Walter through the eyes of an indifferent stranger: sees a squat bruiser, unshaven, his belt holding him together. A scoffing, jeering ruffian, looking for a fight; and being Walter, he never looks far. Everybody’s agin him and hoping to do him down, filch what’s his. Filch them first, is Walter’s maxim, and that’s how he thrives. He clip-clops through life to the sound of other people grieving: sniffing out weakness, anybody sad or lost, so he can inflict them.
He says to John, ‘Everybody in Mortlake knows my dad. Everybody in Wimbledon. I’ll get the smithy when he’s dead.’
‘What’s going to kill Walter,’ his uncle asks, ‘unless the hangman? You’ll be a labourer till you’re thirty if you wait on him. I can’t teach you his business, but I can teach you mine. You need a trade you can carry with you. Even in a foreign country folk always want cooks.’
‘I wouldn’t know their dishes,’ he says.
‘A light hand with a sauce, and you’re welcome anywhere.’ John sniffs. ‘I’d like to see Walter make a cream sauce. The bugger would curdle as soon as he looked at it.’
He thinks, my uncle is jealous. My father is a famous fighter, and he’s only good at flouring things.
But he says, my good uncle, I would like to learn your trade, where do we begin?
Mid-month: Lord Clifford is besieged at Carlisle. The Duke of Norfolk is at Ampthill with the king’s forces, and with him Henry Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter: with the marquis, though the marquis does not know it, are men watching him, on Lord Cromwell’s behalf. Norfolk has got what he wants – a troop of men at his back, the king’s commission in his saddlebag – yet still he grouches in every letter he sends. Mr Wriothesley opens them, and interprets the content to the king.
The rebels are aiming for York and the mayor believes the city is too divided to resist. The rumour is that its archbishop has already fled. Robert Aske has called down the rebels from north Yorkshire to join his host. They say they will restore houses of religion in the territory they capture. Mr Wriothesley says, I told you so. I told you, when the monks go, we should knock the buildings down after them.
He, Thomas Cromwell, goes from Windsor to London, road or river, to and from at the king’s behest – he might as well be with the armies, so uneasy his bed, so spare his diet. Even when he is on the road he feels he is still within the castle, trapped in the royal hour, the royal day. The king is querulous when he is not in his presence – he is still Master Secretary, after all, and everything works through and by him. But the king’s first need is coin. His dishes and chalices must be sacrificed, weighty gold chains signed out of the Jewel House never to return. He has never believed metal should be left to lose its lustre, or weigh down the persons of great men – it should circulate as money and multiply. But, he says to Call-Me, I would like to meet a competent alchemist this fall, or a princess who could spin gold out of straw.
In Windsor the town hugs the castle walls, and what were market stalls in King Edward’s day are dwellings now, dirty infills like dens for dwarves, clustering up to the castle ditch. The streets are packed with tradespeople come to try their luck, see what they can sell to the court, for within the castle’s tight precincts they grow nothing, can’t even stock a carp pond. All day wagons rumble uphill, across the cobbles and through the great gate, so noble folk must edge aside to give carters a path. He hears that sermons have been preached in the town in favour of the Pilgrims. He slips money to a few boys of his choosing so they can stand in line at stalls and get the gossip, and later filter into the Windsor taverns, jostling with the customers of Thameside harlots. Afterwards they seek out a priest, see what kind of confessions he likes to hear, then put it to him bald: are these rebels holy, Father? Should we take their part?
So much travelling in the cold and wet, and he wakes up aching. His dreams are oppressive: he finds himself at a landing stage, the opposite bank out of view. The river widening, nothing but the grey still water stretching away, polished pewter reflecting a silver sky: no bank in view because there is no bank, because the water has become eternity, because his flesh is dissolved in it; because his stories merge, all memories flatten to one.
His uncle John says, mind, young Thomas: if you are going to learn, you can’t go running up and down the riverbank, you have to be where we can find you. Because when Archbishop Morton – Cardinal Morton, he is now – has visitors from Rome, they’re not replete with a dish of split peas, they expect to eat songbirds basted in honey. We can’t say to them, well, Monsignors, unfortunately the boy who catches larks has gone home to Putney, because his father’s entered in a shin-kicking contest, and Tom is holding his coat and taking the bets.
It was not easy to leave Putney. There were matters that called him back; he was a boy, you whistled for him and he came. Men planned a robbery and besought him to go through a window for them, and open up the house.
‘No,’ he said.
‘No?’ said the brigands. ‘Why not?’
‘Because I fear God’s punishment.’
The chief robber said, ‘You should more fear my fist.’ And showed it to him.
Besides, they said, why would God notice a boy like you? Why would He care if you go through Mildred Dyer’s window, she being a widow with a store of money, and none but a lapdog to defend her, a cur we can kick away, or easy break its neck?
He thought, God regards every sparrow that falls. From listening at a sermon, he had this text by heart. God regards Mildred Dyer. God regards her dog Pippin. He said, ‘I disdain you. You are the sort who need strong drink before you dare jump a puddle, and on the day you are hanged my friends will laugh at you while you kick.’
The chief robber deployed his fist then, pinning him against the wall and pounding his head till the others cried, ‘Edwin, he’s not worth it.’
He did not remember the pain, perhaps did not feel it. But he remembered the taint of the man’s breath.
‘Who did that?’ Walter said, when he took his injuries home. ‘All angels help me,’ he said, when he heard the story. ‘Next time someone invites you to a robbery, say no in a civil fashion. Tell them you’ve a job on somewhere else – it’s only common courtesy.’
As he grew up, he grew into caution: to a degree. He sinned, he sinned greatly, but usually he picked his time. He saw a woman forced, and he said and did nothing. He saw a man’s eyes put out of their sockets, because he had witnessed what he should not: Jesu, he’d said, would it not have made more sense to slit his tongue? One day when he was brought up against the frontier of Walter’s schemes – some frontier he was unwilling to cross – he had said, ‘Father, do you not know right from wrong?’