When Gregory commands a story he wants the same one over and over, till he can take it away and murmur it, his private possession: the fair knights Gawain and Galahad, or the giants Grip and Wade. But Anne shouts, ‘Oh, we killed that beast yesterday, isn’t there a worser?’ What next, she says, what next? The world is burning under her hand. She lives in intense striving, her earnest little face creased with concentration: the women say, don’t frown like that, Anne, you’ll stay that way and then no one will marry you.
Before Advent he made the peacock wings for Grace, working with a penknife and a fine brush, sticking feather to fabric with bluebell-root glue. ‘Sad work to be doing by candlelight,’ Liz had said. But the days were short and there was no choice if she was to have them for the Christmas play. He prayed he would not be called away before the job was done; he was always out making money for the cardinal. He would have liked Grace to know it was for her that he was so often on the road, to provide for her future: but how would she understand that, when he never comes home, if he comes at all, till the fires are damped and all God’s people sound asleep? Sometimes he would stand by the door of the room where she was bundled into bed with Anne and a young servant, the three entwined like puppies. Once, once only in all the nights, she had raised her head and looked at him from the darkness, her eyes open wide and the flicker of the candlelight inside them; perhaps she thought he was in her dream, as she was in his. She wore no expression, nothing he could later recalclass="underline" he remembered only the shape of the bedcurtain, a curve of shadow; the glow of a white sleeve, a white face, and the flame in her eyes.
Jenneke says, ‘It was a cruel time for you, the children dead so young. I ask myself, why did you not begin another family?’
‘I had Gregory.’
‘But why did you not marry again?’
He doesn’t know why. Perhaps because he didn’t want to have to give an account of himself, to say what he was thinking. It didn’t matter in Lizzie’s day, because he only had the usual thoughts. Some men can make a tidy parcel of their past and hand it over; not he. But when he looks at Jenneke he cannot help but imagine other histories. If he and Anselma had wed, would they have had only one child? Or is he more potent than the banker? In this reconfiguration of circumstance, Gregory would be unborn. His soul would be bobbing around in the somewhere, still waiting for a body. Anne and Grace, likewise, would never have been conceived. And this house would not have been his house. The day not his day, when they told him his wife was dead, and the day not his day, when his daughters were sewn into their shrouds and carried to buriaclass="underline" two lost little girls, weighing nothing, owning nothing, leaving barely a memory behind.
‘So what have you done since?’ his daughter asks. ‘About women?’
‘You are blunt.’
‘An Englishwoman would not ask?’
‘Not out loud. She would wonder. And listen to gossip. And add to it. Invent something.’
‘Better to say the truth. Of course,’ she says, ‘one buys women. No doubt your people arrange it for you. They are in awe of you.’
‘I am in awe of myself,’ he says. ‘I never know what I will do next.’
He goes to court: in his bag are plans for war machines. Better he has the king’s ear in these matters than Norfolk, whose ideas are old-fashioned.
But the gentlemen grooms intercept him: there are six French merchants with the king, with chests full of fabrics and ready-made garments – they have guessed at his measurements. ‘He is trying on all their stock,’ the grooms warn. Their faces say plainly, stop him, Lord Cromwell, before he spends the cost of a castle, or fritters away some cannon.
It is a day of raw cold, a metal light. But great fires are blazing in the king’s chambers, and the scent of pine and amber floats towards him on a warm cloud. ‘Come and get warm, Thomas,’ the king says. ‘Come and look at what these fellows have brought.’ His face is alight with innocent pleasure.
The merchants murmur and make him a bow. They have thrown open the lids of their travelling chests and are spreading out their stock: not only embroidered garments but looking glasses and gemstones. They show the king a standing cup whose lid is topped by a naked boy riding a dolphin. They unfurl a needlework panel four yards long, and line up with it plastered across their persons. The king’s eyes pass left to right over Susanna going to bathe, the Elders spying from the bushes. They offer a child’s cap garnished with gold buttons in the shape of the sun in splendour; the king smiles and perches it on his fingers, saying, ‘If only I had a child to fit it.’
Mr Wriothesley’s eyes signal to his: distract the king, please. ‘Ah, you have dog collars!’ he exclaims: as if dog collars were his only thought.
‘Let us see,’ the king says. ‘Ah, this is pretty, it would look well on little Pumpkin!’ He says to the Frenchmen, almost shyly, it is my wife the queen’s pet, Lord Cromwell got her from Calais.
At once, they write him down for a velvet collar, six shillings, and making further curtseys draw out bags, and disgorge crucifixes and clocks and puppets and masks, topaz rings and tortoiseshell bowls. Kneeling, they offer bracelets enamelled with the signs of the zodiac, and a picture of the Blessed Virgin standing on a carpet of fleur-de-lys, her immortal child in the crook of one arm and a sceptre in the other. They lay out chessmen and cases of knives, and the king’s hand reaches out, as if to set the board or test a blade. From a linen shroud the Frenchmen draw a jeu d’esprit – a pair of sleeves in grass-green, embroidered with deep-red strawberries: to each berry there is a dewdrop, a diamond clear as water.
‘Oh.’ The king glances away, to dilute their sweetness. He is pink with desire. ‘But I am too old for those.’
‘Never!’ The French speak as one man. Call-Me joins the chorus. He keeps quiet. The king is right, the sleeves are meant for a tender youth, like Gregory or the late Fitzroy. But you can see how Henry’s mouth waters.
A hush falls on the Frenchmen. It is the signal, he knows, that they have arrived at their best item. Their captain gestures the youngest of them forward. The Frenchman stoops over a chest; he clicks a key in its lock; he pauses, then draws out and floats into the air something like a swathe of evening sky, or a thousand peacocks, or a vestment for an archangel. Murmuring in delight, they flourish, they spread, they caress the gorgeous vestment: ‘We designed it expressly for you, your Majesty. No other prince in Europe could carry this off.’
The king is entranced. ‘I may as well try it, since you’ve come so far.’ His face is shadowed by a sea-green ripple. ‘We call it pavonazzo,’ the Frenchman says: a turn of the wrist, and the cloth flows in liquid iridescence, turning from sea-green to azure to sapphire. The king shines like Leviathan, upheaved from the ocean bed. He takes a breath at the sight of himself.
They mention a sum. The king laughs, incredulous. But you can see him edging towards the purchase. Mr Wriothesley, brave man, makes an ah-hem. The king acknowledges it with a flicker of his blue eye, then he grimaces, cunning as any old miser: ‘It is a pauper king who stands before you, messieurs. I have spent all my money on the wars.’
‘Really, Majesty?’ The Frenchmen look at each other; you can be certain one or more of them are spies. ‘We thought it was only a spit-spat,’ their captain says, ‘some far-flung agitation of no import, and no more to your puissance than a flea-bite.’