He had told the household officers, block out the draughts, build up her fires, send in extra fueclass="underline" bread, wine and boiled meats to go to her chamber each day at dawn.
She says, ‘The great breakfast is needless now. If you remember, it was so that I did not have to dine in the hall in company, and sit lower than little Eliza. In those days when my title was degraded, and Eliza was styled princess.’
She does not ask him to sit. He would not, anyway. He says, ‘We have worked so much between us that I forget some of our ploys. I must ask you, my lady – you have not been approached?’
‘The rebels may use my name, but they have no permission from me.’
Which is to say, yes, I have been approached. And as he moves towards her – he, Lord Cromwell – she does not move, except that with a little hitch she draws her nightgown together, hiding the white of her linen; and at once lets it go, as if she knew the gesture to be ridiculous. He is close enough to touch the cloth of her gown, but of course he does not. ‘You favour that crimson, I perceive, you and the queen both – may I ask, is it from Genoa?’
‘I believe so. The queen sent her brother Edward to Hunsdon, to see what apparel I needed. I said, my father’s favour is clothing enough, but he begged me to ask for whatever I wished. Edward Seymour is a fine gentleman. It is a pity he is a heretic.’
‘Edward is guided by the king, as are we all.’
God forgive me, he thinks, but she is exhausting. And starved of touch, her rank forbids it.
She says, ‘I hear the council is discussing a marriage for me. With the young Duke of Orléans.’
‘The French are discussing it. I’m not sure we are.’
The French will not take her unless Henry makes her his heir. This, of course, he will not do; but could some compromise be reached, a French marriage would detach her once and for all from the Emperor and the Spanish. Therefore, we are talking.
He says, ‘You see yourself with a Spanish husband, very likely.’
She hesitates. ‘The king is such a good father that he would not marry me against my own wishes.’
Answer the question, he thinks. She turns her back on him, as if incidentally. ‘And your own care of me has been so tender that it is like that of a father.’
He can see her face in a glass, only she does not know that. Someone has made her aware that we are linked, if only by rumour. She is warning me off. Well, he thinks, I am warning her. ‘Would you not like to marry an Englishman?’
‘Who?’ The question jumps out at him.
She stares at him through the mirror. Her heart is in her mouth. Let’s leave it there.
A restless supper: a worse grace. He can hear the rain on the leads, its trickle and swirl. Well were they wet that barehead stood … His meal lies heavy, and as he goes to his desk – the last messages have come in from Yorkshire – he finds himself thinking of his spectacular bed: the king has given him a set of covers and bed hangings, purple woven with silver tissue, emblazoned with the royal arms. You are mine asleep or awake, Henry is saying: like a lover. You could keep a troop of horse in the field on what the gift has cost him, but Henry must feel he is worth the expense. He lights another candle, and calls in Christophe to build up the fire. He has used up his court allocation of coals and wood but he says, hang the expense, say it’s for me, and if anybody queries it, just knock them down, will you?
Christophe grins. I fetch Rafe to talk to you? Or someone to sing? But he says, no, no, I must get to this, it won’t wait; but then he rests his head on his hand and perhaps dozes, and he is now here, now there: now lit by the tentative flicker from the hearth, now by the sunlight on the water of the Thames at Lambeth, forty-odd years back: but what is forty years, in the life of a river?
I kept this back for you, Uncle John says. Got to eat it when it’s just warm. Too hot or too cold and you don’t get the beauty of it. A cook has to learn. It can’t always be leftovers.
It is an aromatic custard in a white dish. He saw the gooseberries earlier, tiny bubbles of green glass, sour as a friar on a fast day. For this dish you need fresh hens’ eggs and a pitcher of cream; you need to be a prince of the church to afford the sugar.
His uncle stands over him. The custard quakes in waves of sweetness and spice.
‘Nutmeg,’ he says. ‘Mace. Cumin.’
‘Now taste it.’
‘And rosewater.’
John’s smile is a benediction. ‘Nothing is so green as a summer in England, Thomas. Those who have voyaged yearn for it. They dream of a bowl such as this.’
On the silk road; in the heat of the plains where neither rill nor brook trickles in three days’ march; in the fortified towns of barbarians, where you can cook an egg by cracking it on the stones; in the places at the edge of the map, where the lines blur and the paper frays: by Mother Mary, says the traveller, by the maidenhead of St Agatha, I wish I were in Lambeth and had a dish of gooseberries and a spoon.
He shakes his head. This dish lacks some final flourish … He pictures himself, forty years on, standing where John stands now. He is the master-cook, he wears velvet: he never goes near a flour bag, nor flying hot oiclass="underline" papers in hand, he issues his orders, and at his behest a boy who looks very like himself tosses slivers of almonds in a latten pan; then he spoons them into the cream, freckling it.
And then he might, if he had made an elderflower cordial, venture to add a drop or two.
The boy he can see has his own curly head, his skinned knuckles, his feet cold on the stone-flagged floor. He wears a patched jerkin of sad colour. Beneath his clothes are the prints of his father’s fingers: bruises reversing nature, turning from the autumn black-purple of the elderberry to the pale yellow-white of the flowers.
All his flesh is dappled with these shadows. Walter can’t help it, John says, he lashes out. Our own father may God acquit him was the same.
If you go out on a morning in late June, after the dew has burned off, you can pick the finest elderberries from the top of the bushes, employing a hooked stick or giant to help you. When you have carried them home, you spill them by handfuls onto a scrubbed tabletop. Breathing in their honeyed scent, you sift them for the best-formed blossoms, your fingertips gentle; then you paint each petal with white of egg. If you dip them in sugar, which as the servant of a rich man you can afford to do, you can keep them a year. On a cheerless November day, when the idea of summer has dropped out of the world, you can lay the crystallised petals on the surface of a cake, each one a five-pointed star: to enchant the eye of a lady, or to tempt the jaded palate of a king.
19 October, the city of Hull capitulates to the rebels. In Doncaster, mayor and chief citizens are compelled to take the Pilgrim oath. In the chapel at Windsor, the dead knights in their Garter stalls bow over their shame in an agony of colic that no oil of almonds will ease: inside their helms they moan, earls of Lancaster and earls of March, Bohuns and Beauchamps, Mowbrays and Veres, Nevilles and Percys, Cliffords and Talbots and Fitzalans and Howards, and that great servant of the state, Reginald Bray himself. There are more dead than living; why can they not fight?
When evening comes a blue light fades in the north windows, and the river is sucked into the darkness, as if into a universal sea. The south windows are shuttered, the courts below fall quiet, and the watch is changed at the foot of the king’s privy stair. The tapers are brought in, and mirrored sconces redirect a shivering light; the king’s private rooms, painted and gilded, shine like a jewel box.
The king says, ‘I remember my father’s passing … Bishop Fox came to me at Evensong: “The king your father is dead: God save your Majesty.” I said, at what hour did his soul depart? And Fox never answered. I guessed by that my father had lain untended, cooling in his death sweat, while his councillors plotted at their leisure. For two whole days after that, his ministers pretended he was still alive.’