‘I myself have no such intention. I make you no guarantee, his Majesty’s will being supreme, but you are better to trust to my efforts than to scrambling down a rope ladder in the dark, and setting to sea in a sieve.’
She turns her face away.
‘Give me the letter,’ he says. ‘The ambassador’s letter.’
She takes from the table the fat ribboned packet, the seal broken, and offers it to him. ‘Perhaps you would like to read it and then take it to the king?’
‘The other letter,’ he says.
She hesitates, but only for a moment. Without a word, without glancing at his face, she slides it from her book and gives it him. It lacks a seal. But she has not had time to read it.
‘What is your book?’ He turns it up to see. It is a Herbal, with a device of a wild man and a wild woman, hairy creatures holding a shield with the printer’s initials. ‘I have one of these,’ he says. ‘It is ten years old, it could stand some correction.’ He turns the leaves, looking at the woodcuts. ‘But there will be other matter for us soon. Archbishop Cranmer is sending me a new translation of the scriptures.’
‘Another?’ she says wanly. ‘It must be the third this year.’
‘Cranmer says it is the soundest yet. He is confident your lord father will license it and set it forth.’
‘I am not against the scriptures. Do not think so.’
‘I will make sure you receive an early copy. You will do well to study the Commandments. Honour thy father. Since thy mother is departed.’
Katherine, God pardon her. Katherine, whom God assoil. Katherine, whose children would not stay within her womb: who is responsible nevertheless for the sorry object before him, her eyes dull, her face swollen with toothache.
He thinks of her Spanish grandmother in shining breastplate, mirror of fate to the infidel. Isabella took the field: Andalusia trembled.
On Whitsun eve, after a voyage so long postponed, the King of Scots makes landfall on his own shore. The French bride looks as if she has heaved up her soul on the deep. She falls to the ground, observers report, scoops up two handfuls of the port of Leith and kisses the soil.
A man called William Dalyvell, a follower of Merlin and King James, is put into the Tower. He has been spreading a prophecy that the King of Scots will swoop down from the north, expel the Tudors and rule two kingdoms. He also says he has seen an angel.
In former ages this would have been a cause for congratulation, but times being what they are, Dalyvell is put on the rack.
The Cornish people petition to have their saints back – those downgraded in recent rulings. Without their regular feasts, the faithful are unstrung from the calendar, awash in a sea of days that are all the same. He thinks it might be permitted; they are ancient saints of small worship. They are scraps of paint-flaked wood, or stumps of weathered stone, who say and do nothing against the king. They are not like your Beckets, whose shrines are swollen with rubies, garnets and carbuncles, as if their blood were bubbling up through the ground.
June, second drawing: ‘The king is to stand on this carpet,’ Hans decrees. Boys spread it at their feet: his own feet of Spanish leather, the neat red boots of Mr Wriothesley, the distinguished padded toes of Lord Audley and Sir William Fitzwilliam. It is one of the cardinal’s carpets; he stoops to uncurl an edge.
‘All of them?’ the Lord Chancellor asks. ‘Together on this carpet? The king, the queen, and his royal parents too?’
Hans gives him a withering look. ‘His father I will place behind him. His royal mother, behind the queen that is now.’
He asks, ‘How will you show the old king and queen? At what age?’
‘In eternity they have no age.’
‘There are other pictures to guide you, I suppose.’
‘Did we not make you a gallery?’ Hans says. ‘A whole room of the lost.’
Yes, but that was more like a game, he thinks, a game of kings, their faces like clues in a riddle. No one could point to them as a true or false likeness. They were all so old and they had been gone so long.
Hans begins to pace out the scene. The father here, towards the centre, but Henry in the foreground. Between the two parents I shall place a column, he says, or a piece of marble –
‘A sort of altar?’ Lord Audley offers.
‘He will want verses on it, Hans. Extolling him.’
‘Words are for Lord Cromwell to supply.’
‘Mr Wriothesley,’ he says, ‘will you make a note?’ But Call-Me is already sketching out suggestions.
They look up as the king comes in. He has to walk the length of the gallery. He seems unbalanced, as if the floor were soft. Fitz whispers something: ‘Hush,’ he says.
‘Ah, Cromwell,’ Henry says. ‘Lord Chancellor. I hear a rumour that François is dead.’
‘I fear untrue,’ he says.
The king’s face is pale and puffy. He dare not ask if he is in pain. Henry would not want an underling like Hans to hear the question, let alone the answer.
‘Better light today,’ the king says. ‘Norfolk writes to me that in Yorkshire there is a hard frost every morning. When here, the roses are out!’
Call-Me says, ‘There is always a hard frost in the region of Norfolk.’
Henry smiles. ‘The zephyrs do not play about his person. And young Surrey, he writes, is suffering from a depression of his spirits. Myself I always thought action dispelled melancholy, and I should have thought the Howards would find plenty to do …’
‘The duke should stay up in Yorkshire,’ Fitzwilliam says. ‘He is as well-accepted among the northern sort as any lord can be.’
Thomas Howard says another winter will kill him. But he can take his chances till September. He would not want to be in London, surely, with the plague’s incursions? A hundred and twelve buried last week.
‘And what do we hear of Harry Percy?’ The king rubs his nose, reflective. He is looking forward to the reversion of the Percy earldom to the crown. ‘Send young Sadler, will you, to see how the dying goes?’
From Wriothesley, a stir of mute discontent: not him, Majesty, send me!
‘Unless you care to go yourself, my lord Privy Seal? But I think the earl fears you of old, and I do not want to be accused of frightening him to death.’
‘I never hurt the earl,’ he says. A picture rises to his mind of Call-Me at the deathbed, taking off his coat and turning back his sleeves, picking up a pillow …
The king calls, ‘Hans, where are you? We are ready. Today you must finish with the drawing, or you will have to chase me. I shall not linger at Whitehall when I could be hunting.’
The king’s tone is hearty; as if he is trying to encourage himself as well as the painter. Hans whistles through his teeth and flaps over his sheets. When stitched together they will cover the wall. The councillors fall back, making space. Fitz murmurs, ‘What’s the matter with him today? Something’s the matter.’
He thinks, the damage has been done since last October. It is cumulative, but we are only noticing now. The rebels have knocked him out of true. He will not be the same again. The king stands alone on the turkey carpet, feet planted on the cobalt stars. His voice reaches out, as if to loop them into his plans: Hampton Court to Woking, to Guildford, to Easthampstead. ‘You will hunt with me this summer, my lord Cromwell.’
He moves so fast that he is able to grip the king by his upper arms and steadies him as he sways. Fitz is behind him. ‘A seat for the king!’ Audley bawls. Cries of distant alarm – how news flies! – then pounding of feet, and servants and courtiers pour in. ‘Keep away!’ Fitz windmills his arms, bellows as if he were on the battlefield. Wriothesley has a stool, gliding it smoothly under his monarch’s haunches. Gingerly, they lower the afflicted man, so he sits gaping, his face working as if he might cry. He and Audley lean in, propping him up. There is a sheen of sweat on Henry’s face. He takes out a handkerchief. They huddle to shield him from the ring of faces. ‘Have you a pain, sir?’ Audley asks. ‘Where is your pain?’