No one saw a strange man in the street. No one saw fire in the murk – as it might be, the match-flare for an arquebus. No one was seen carrying a parcel or wrapping, that could have disguised an arquebus. It seems possible a pistol was employed, that a man could carry in his coat and fire with one hand; moreover, a wheel-lock device, which needs no flare. There are few such weapons in London. Some countries have banned them, but that does not weigh with felons. If the pistol is still with its owner, it convicts him. If it was hidden, it will soon be found. Unless, of course, it’s at the bottom of the river: in which case he is not just a whoreson, but a whoreson with a rich paymaster, to toss such a weapon away.
Packington was a gospeller, he was a Bible man, these many years he has travelled between here and Flanders, not only on cloth business but on the business of scripture; he carried Testaments home, when it was death to do it. ‘He saw Tyndale just before –’ a mercer tells him, and he holds up a palm: ‘I cannot hear what you are telling me. If you met Tyndale yourself I must not know.’ I am your brother in Christ, he thinks, but I am also the king’s servant.
By noon he, the Lord Privy Seal, has visited Packington’s widow, a daughter of the Skinners’ Company. Rob had two stepchildren with her, and five of his own from his first marriage; the city wants to know who will make decisions for them. Chief Justice Baldwin, father of Robert’s first wife, steps forward as their guardian. ‘Guard yourself, Cromwell,’ the judge tells him. ‘I doubt not this killer has stalked you and you have never seen him.’
‘What remedy?’ he says.
‘Body armour?’ Baldwin says.
He has worn it before, in times of civic excitement, under his court robes. It is hot and as the day wears on it becomes a hoop around the ribs and a band tightening the heart. It is the same feeling you get when you are standing before the king, agenda in your hand, twenty items on it and every one crucial – and the king decides to talk about the medicinal properties of lilies. You think you might choke; you feel the ache of being bound to your desk while your nephew rides east, while Wyatt rides north, while Norfolk in some distant tent makes the fate of the commonwealth. And now he is told he is not safe in his own streets – not in his own house, not in his own bed, where Walter stands at the bedpost, sneering at him and fingering the king’s purple and silver curtains.
It is no distance from Austin Friars to where Packington fell. He sits down in the parlour of the woman who cried ‘Murder!’ He listens to her recitation of her morning, from first opening an eye to the moment she ran into the street. But it is clear she saw nothing: except in a dream, she says, two or three nights back, where she saw the city on fire. Outside a restless crowd mutters and gossips on the spot: as if the gunman might come back and do it again, so they can witness. The labourers from Soper’s Lane have changed their story. They now remember a tall man wrapped in a cloak, clutching something under it, and incanting to himself as he crossed the road.
Judge Baldwin is unstrung by the morning’s events. ‘Tall man in a cloak? How does that aid us? We did not think it was a naked dwarf did the deed.’
‘But Lord Cromwell,’ the men plead, ‘he looked Italian.’
‘How does an Italian look, in a thick fog?’
They shuffle their feet. He gives them some coins anyway, for showing willing. ‘You’re too soft,’ Baldwin says, but he says, have mercy, Baldwin, they are only boys, and they carried the corpse – in acting as good citizens, they lost their earnings for the day.
‘Listen, Cromwell. You don’t get a good name among the lowly by sharing their concerns and handing out coin. You get their respect by overlooking them, as if you did not understand their sort, and your own belly had never been empty.’
‘I could not so belie myself.’
‘I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you how it is.’
Vaughan says, ‘Do not advise my lord how to be lordly. A great man is open-handed.’
The labourers follow them, encouraged to more suggestions: perhaps the miscreant was a Yorkshireman? ‘We would walk in the procession for the obsequy, sirs, if we got black gowns and fourpence. Pity he was felled on his way into church, and not his way out, for he might have flown straight to paradise and be looking down on us now.’
There is no Purgatory for Packington. He will rest quiet till, at the end of time, he takes a final boat to meet his God. A pity to have survived so many sea crossings, and Thomas More’s persecutions, and the simmering fury of the London clergy, only to come to grief outside your own front door. There is no time to mourn, though the dead man has been his friend these many years. By ten o’clock the mist has dispersed, a pale sun shining from a clear sky. By the Angelus bell it is grey again, but for an hour the air is sprinkled with flakes of gold, as if Heaven has thrown some lustre on dead Packington. Funeral in two days, the family are told, three at most. Father Robert Barnes to preach. It’s what the dead man would have wanted.
It’s a miscalculation. Barnes’s sermon is so inflammatory that he has no choice but to take him into custody. Better in my hands, he says, than in the Bishop of London’s prison. The city has not forgot the case of Richard Hunne. It may be twenty-five years, or nearly that, but the shame is still fresh. This godly merchant, shut up in the Lollards’ Tower, was found hanged: never was there such a hanging, with blood on the flags and blood on the walls. The authorities claimed Hunne had killed himself, in despair at his own heresies. The stool on which he was supposed to have balanced was well beyond reach of his feet.
At Windsor he stands at a casement with Henry, watching the rain. The wind moans in the chimney. The room seems drained of light, as if each window were a device for sucking it out and dribbling it feebly into the day outside.
The king says, ‘Brighter? In the west? Do you think?’
‘Not really.’
Henry sighs. ‘The eye of faith, it must be.’
It occurs to him that he has answered absently, as if to a child or a member of his own household. Henry is fretful, his mind hopping here and there, and when he is in this humour it is best to keep your head low, like a birdcatcher. ‘Do you know what I liked best this summer?’ the king says. He corrects himself: ‘I mean the summer before? I liked Wolf Hall. Once in a while every prince wishes he could lay aside his duties, and live for a year as a private gentleman. Because a gentleman bides content; he dances in the great barn decked with garlands, he sees the harvest home and knows every harvester by name.’
He says nothing. He has the boy Rob in his service, down in Wiltshire reporting on who comes and goes. Not that he suspects the Seymours, but it is no harm to have a source. The king says, ‘I was innocent in those days. I did not understand the Boleyns and their treason. But once I did understand it, and cleared them out of the court, I thought everything would be better. Yet here I am, one summer passed and one winter passing, my son Fitzroy is dead, I have bastardised both my daughters, I have no heir and, as far as I understand, no hope of one. My subjects are in rebellion, my coffers are empty, and my cradle empty too. So tell me, Thomas, how is this better? How am I better off than this time last year? Last year, my subjects were not shot down in the street.’
Still he says nothing. We must trust the gale of self-pity will blow itself out, and presently it does. Henry straightens up. ‘There are thirty thousand loyal men advancing on the town.’ Pontefract, he means. ‘Fear not, my lord. It will soon be back in our hands.’