‘Well, however that may be,’ Edward says, ‘I shall talk to my sister, and know her mind. And the queen, she will have a view, of course. I don’t know what I shall say to the Earl of Oxford …’
‘I’ll talk to him.’
‘Would you?’ Edward grasps at that. ‘We have come a long way together, my lord,’ he says, embracing him, ‘since we welcomed you to Wolf Hall.’
He goes home and tells Gregory, ‘I have found you a bride.’
‘Very well,’ Gregory says. ‘I shall contain myself in patience till you mention who.’
He hurries on. There are six bishops here to see him, and a delegation from the French embassy. But that night my lord Privy Seal sleeps soundly, under his canopy of violet and silver tissue, beneath a ceiling dusted with gilded stars.
On St George’s Day, at the chapter of the Order of the Garter, the king selects the Earl of Cumberland to fill a vacant stall, in exchange for his offices on the Scots border. It is the first, my lord Privy Seal hopes, in a series of tacit bargains that will free up posts in the north country for keen young men he will choose, whose loyalty is not to great families but only to himself and the king.
Cumberland’s grandfather was known as the Butcher, and the family has not mellowed since. Generations of raw dealing made his tenants smart; no wonder they turned on him, in the late rebellion. But such magnates, even in our day, are best controlled by offering them rewards. And the Garter is Europe’s most ancient order of chivalry, the highest honour the king can bestow.
Mr Wriothesley edges up to him: ‘Shall I tell your lordship what the heralds are saying?’
He waits.
‘They say that the king is disappointed he must give the Garter to Cumberland. He would rather have filled the vacancy with one he holds more dear.’
The dear one should not have long to fret. Harry Percy has requested the loan of his old house in Hackney; he wants it to die in. The doctors say he will not last the summer, and when he goes, that will free a Garter stall. And when Lord Darcy comes to execution, that will make another vacancy. Mr Wriothesley looks coy. ‘Better order your mantles, sir.’
Your mantles of cerulean velvet: sky blue lined with white damask. Hans busies himself at once with new and better designs for Garter insignia: he never lets slip a chance to market his genius. ‘I am not your enemy, you know,’ Hans says to him. ‘Even though I did paint you.’
As Jane lets out her bodices and appears unlaced, she yearns for cherries and peas, but there are none yet. She asks for quails, and the Lisles send them from Calais by the crate. They are fed on the boat and killed at Dover, to keep them as fat as possible, but even so they dwindle on the road, and Jane complains she must have more, and fatter. She eats them rubbed with spices and basted with honey, cracking and sucking the tiny bones. ‘She sets into them as if they had done her an injury,’ Gregory says. ‘Though she looks as if she would only eat curds and whey.’
The king says, ‘I like to see a woman show her appetite. The late Katherine, God rest her, when first we were married –’ he corrects himself, ‘when first we were thought to be married – she would make short work of a duckling. But then later,’ he glances away, ‘she began to undertake special fasts and penances. Always some strict practice, above the misery prescribed. It was her Spanish blood.’
He thinks, she was praying for us. Offering up her hunger pangs for England.
John Husee brings the quails at seven in the morning. Jane sends word from her suite: roast half for dinner, and we’ll have the rest for supper.
He asks Husee, ‘Is there no child yet? The king is keen for the outcome. It will warm his heart if Lisle has a son and heir.’
Husee shakes his head. He looks harassed, but then he always does.
‘Perhaps Honor has mistaken her reckoning,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘What do the doctors advise?’
‘They advise patience.’
Fitzwilliam says, ‘By the time it is born it will know its letters, and be fit to gnaw a marrowbone and wave a wooden sword.’
In return for quails, and cherries when they are ripe, Jane agrees she will give a position in her household to one of Lady Lisle’s daughters. Jane asks them to send two, and whichever she rejects she will place in the train of some other noble lady. She kindly says that the girls may wear out their French apparel, even though English fashion has changed since last year.
But when the girls arrive, Jane looks at them and says, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no. I will have that one, but take her away and bring her back dressed more seemly.’
Anne Bassett must have finer linen, so fine the skin shows through. She needs a gable hood, and a girdle sewn thickly with pearls. When she reappears by the queen’s side, it is with her hair hidden, her skull squeezed, and in a gown belonging to my lady Sussex.
When next he sees John Husee and hails him, Husee shoots off in the other direction.
Whitehalclass="underline" he arrives outside the Lady Mary’s presence chamber, Gregory attending him. Some grand arrival is in the air. Household folk crowd him, chattering: ‘Who is it, Lord Cromwell?’ Mary’s silkwoman has brought a basket. A boy has come to tune her virginals. A little dwarf woman called Jane is waddling around the chamber: ‘Welcome, one and all.’
‘Dodd!’ He greets Mary’s usher. ‘Big fish today.’ He speaks for everyone to hear. ‘A Spanish gentleman has come from the Emperor, to assist Ambassador Chapuys in wooing the Lady Mary.’
One of the queen’s ladies, Mary Mounteagle, has coins in a net purse; the queen lost at cards last night, and now pays her debts. Another lady, Nan Zouche, escorts her, as if she might be robbed. Both of them hang on his elbows: ‘A Spanish gentleman? Is not Dom Luis a Portuguese?’
‘Though it is all the same,’ Nan Zouche says. ‘All the Emperor’s cousins.’
Mounteagle asks, ‘Does Dom Luis speak English? If not, Lord Cromwell will have to kneel at their bedside, interpreting.’
‘I do not speak Portuguese, so they must make shift,’ he says. ‘Does the Lady Mary always collect her winnings?’
‘Always,’ Nan says. ‘And she is such a gambler! One day she bet her breakfast on a game of bowls.’
The little woman says, ‘I hope the ambassador does not bring her comfits. Her teeth are not sound.’ She shows her own. ‘Me, I can crack nuts.’
The great men enter to the sound of giggling. The new envoy, Don Diego de Mendoza, is followed by Chapuys, followed in turn by his Flemish bodyguard. Don Diego is one of those men who requires a big space around himself. Chapuys looks jittery: he backs away to allow the new man to be admired, in his plumes and black velvet. Prominently and reverently, Mendoza carries a black-ribboned letter, sealed with the double-headed eagle. ‘Lord Cremuel,’ he says. ‘I have heard a great deal about you.’
‘And I,’ he says pleasantly, ‘feel I know you already. For you must be related to that Mendoza who was ambassador in the cardinal’s time?’
‘I have that honour.’
‘The cardinal locked him up.’
‘A violation of every agreed principle of diplomacy,’ Mendoza says. The chill in his voice would blight a vineyard. ‘I did not know you were at court then.’
‘No. As I was the cardinal’s man, I have inherited his concerns.’
‘But not his methods,’ Chapuys says quickly.
It is evident that Eustache is keen to make a success of the encounter. ‘You have much in common, gentlemen. Don Diego has been in Italy. At the universities of Padua, and Bologna.’
‘You were there, Cremuel?’ Mendoza asks.
‘Yes, but not at the university.’
‘Don Diego knows Arabic,’ Chapuys offers.
He is alert. ‘Does it take years to learn?’
‘Yes,’ Don Diego says. ‘Years and years.’
He asks, ‘Have you brought Dom Luis’s portrait for my lady?’
‘Just this,’ the ambassador says, showing his letter.
‘I thought perhaps you had it in miniature, and carried it next to your heart.’