‘At least,’ one adds, ‘that is what Monseigneur Cremuel is telling the world.’
Even while the false Frenchman is saying it, he is sliding other wares from a leather bag soft as a virgin’s sigh. It crosses his mind that in Harry Norris’s day, they would not have got access: unless of course Norris was taking a percentage.
The sun has come out, a white haze infiltrating the forenoon. It emboldens the merchants, who hold up their mirrors, and walk around the room with them: as they angle them, they catch little off-cuts of the king’s person, and with each caprice of the light, he dazzles himself.
Yet still Henry hesitates. ‘Come, Majesty,’ they say. ‘We are giving you first refusal. Think how you will feel if one of your courtiers were to buy it – it would be a humiliation for any prince.’
An inspiration seizes the king: ‘You know my vessel the Mary Rose is enlarged? I mean to make her carry more ordnance, and to build some new warships – two or three. I believe those are the drawings, that the Lord Privy Seal has in his bag.’
Mr Wriothesley grins. Warships: the message cannot fail to be carried home to France. ‘So you see I may not commit great sums for my adornment,’ the king says. ‘It would wrong the commonweal.’
The dealers begin to gibber. Sweat starts out of their brows. He realises that even their captain must answer to a master, and he dare not take these wares back unsold. If the King of England will not buy, where next: the Emperor, the Sultan? Add in the expense of the voyage; factor in that the goods may look fingered.
What he really has in his bag, besides the war machines, is an excitable proclamation from the north, urging a new Pilgrim effort. ‘Wherefore now is the time to arise, or else never, and go proceed with our pilgrimage for grace …’
He steps forward. ‘My lord Cromwell?’ the king says.
He whispers in Henry’s ear: caveat emptor, sir, and by the way – let me at these pedlars.
‘I know,’ Henry says aloud. ‘I will.’
But Thomas, he whispers: I want it all. I want Susanna and the Elders, and the chessmen, and the puppets, and the strawberry sleeves. And in that pavonazzo, I like myself much better than I did.
‘Watch this,’ he whispers to Call-Me. He follows the Frenchmen out. Safely beyond the closed door, he throws an idiomatic fit: what do they take him for? What fraud is this they are trying to perpetrate, on one of Christendom’s great potentates? Do they not fear for their souls, passing off such trash? Our Lord Jesus Christ, if he saw them, would personally hurl them out of the Temple and break their teeth: and as it seems Jesus is not here, he will gladly do it himself.
‘But Milord Cremuel,’ the Frenchmen moan. One begs, ‘Magnificence, lend your king the money.’
They reduce their demands, drooping with anxiety and fatigue.
‘I’ll have your total in writing,’ he says. ‘Five copies, please.’
They blanch. They are afraid he means to pay them with a warrant, which they must then present, and sue for payment, and wait till quarter-day. ‘We dare not go back without money in hand,’ they say. ‘We will be skinned alive.’
‘Cash, then,’ he says, indifferent. ‘But a third off the price.’
They brighten. The compliments begin. ‘We will make you a present, of course, my lord – this mulberry satin would do much to enliven your complexion?’
He considers it. It’s something, not to be purple-faced like old Darcy. Not to be drawn and jaundiced, like Francis Bryan. Yes, he agrees, that hue has a certain appeal.
Call-Me says, ‘Be careful, sir.’ With the colour, he thinks he means. He wants to unroll the bolt, see it in the piece, how it changes with the light, but this is not the place. ‘You can come to my house,’ he says. ‘And those vanities you did not show the king you can show to me.’ He turns away. ‘Mr Wriothesley, do you have my list, my remembrances there? We should get back to our meeting, we have a dozen items to work through before we can let his Majesty have his morning back. And we must talk about the new warships of course.’
When after Vespers he goes back to the king with papers to sign, he tells him how much money he has saved him. ‘Did you?’ Henry says. ‘I thought I had driven a bargain, but there you are.’ The king’s brow has cleared. He looks five years younger than before the Frenchmen came; it’s almost worth the expense. ‘I want some new clothes,’ he says, ‘because I think of being painted. Speak to Master Hans for me.’
‘Gladly,’ he says. He goes out smiling: good news for once.
Before he left court after the Christmas season, the king gave the rebel Aske a coat of crimson, which ill became him, especially when he blushed red with pride. Departing homewards, Aske left it at an inn, the Cardinal’s Hat, with other stuff too heavy to port to Yorkshire. Perhaps he did not want his gruff compeers in the fells to see him tricked out like a dancing monkey. The outer man, Henry knows, shows the inner man to the world; and if he knows it, how much more does Master Hans. He paints your shell and he does not put his sticky fingers on your soul; when he draws you in preparation, he makes a note of the colours you wear, in a tiny hand that looks like stitching along a seam. Hans has waited for a big commission, and here it is: as the Boleyns used to say, le temps viendra.
The rebels say, Wherefore now is the time to rise, or else we shall all be undone: Wherefore forward! forward! forward! Now forward on pain of death, forward now or else never.
His daughter says, ‘I want to tell you about Tyndale, how he died.’
It is twilight; they sit together in an alcove. ‘You saw it with your own eyes?’
‘Tyndale wanted witnesses. People who would not look away. Have you ever seen a man burned?’
He says, ‘In the king’s service, yes, I regret.’ Henry controls what you look at; you cannot direct the angle of your gaze. ‘I have seen a woman burned.’ He feels a tightness in his chest. ‘But that was a long time ago. She died for Wyclif’s book. It was an old Bible. She was what they call a Lollard, and many such folk were poor and could not read, and so they learned the scriptures by heart. But she whose death I witnessed – this heretic, as they termed her – she was not poor, and not unfriended. It was only that, I being a child, and seeing her bareheaded and in a smock, and seeing their base usage of her, I took her for a beggar.’
She interrupts him. ‘You were a child? Who took you to see such a sight?’
‘I brought myself. Wandering through the city, to Smithfield. It is open ground, where folk suffer even to this day. My family did not know or care where I was. My mother was dead.’
In deference to her English, which is good but not perfect, he is speaking simply; a lesson for me, he thinks, a lesson for us all, to converse with Jenneke. Never have events seemed so plain: no nuance, but a clear noonday light. She says, ‘Stephen Vaughan has told me of how he first met Master Tyndale. He says it was at your instruction.’
‘I hoped at that time Tyndale would come back to England. Be reconciled with the king.’
‘They did not stay within doors,’ she says, ‘because walls have eyes and ears. They went out to the fields – not the schuttershoven where they practise with their arrows, I mean the … the raamhoven – the bleach fields?’
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘not bleach fields, you mean the tenter-grounds. Where they pin out the cloth to dry.’
But she has put in his mind an image of Tyndale strolling in the open air, the ground dissolving into a pale radiance, the city walls whispering into vapour: his shabby cross-grained countryman transfigured, and Meester Vaughan beside him, hood pulled up, his secret instructions hugged to his heart.