She maintains, as an affectation, a skittish slur in her speech, the odd French intonation, her inability to say his name. There is a stir at the door: the king is coming in. He makes a reverence. Anne does not rise or curtsey; she says without preliminary, ‘I have told him, Henry, to go.’
‘I wish you would, Cromwell. And give us your own report. There is no one like you for seeing into the nature of things. When the Emperor wants a stick to beat me with, he says his aunt is dying, of neglect and cold, and shame. Well, she has servants. She has firewood.’
‘And as for shame,’ Anne says, ‘she should die inside, when she thinks of the lies she has told.’
‘Majesty,’ he says, ‘I shall ride at dawn and tomorrow send Rafe Sadler to you, if you permit, with the day’s agenda.’
The king groans. ‘No escape from your big lists?’
‘No, sir, for if I gave you a respite you would forever have me on the road, on some pretext. Till I return, would you just…sit on the situation?’
Anne shifts in her chair, brother George’s letter under her. ‘I shall do nothing without you,’ Henry says. ‘Take care, the roads are treacherous. I shall be your beadsman. Good night.’
He looks about the outer chamber, but Mark has vanished, and there is only a knot of matrons and maids: Mary Shelton, Jane Seymour and Elizabeth, the Earl of Worcester’s wife. Who’s missing? ‘Where is Lady Rochford?’ he says, smiling. ‘Do I see her shape behind the arras?’ He indicates Anne’s chamber. ‘Going to bed, I think. So you girls get her installed and then you will have the rest of the night for your ill behaviour.’
They giggle. Lady Worcester makes creepy motions with her finger. ‘Nine of the clock, and here comes Harry Norris, bare beneath his shirt. Run, Mary Shelton. Run rather slowly…’
‘Who do you run from, Lady Worcester?’
‘Thomas Cromwell, I could not possibly tell you. A married woman like myself?’ Teasing, smiling, she creeps her fingers along his upper arm. ‘We all know where Harry Norris would like to lie tonight. Shelton is only his bedwarmer for now. He has royal ambitions. He will tell anyone. He is sick with love for the queen.’
‘I shall play cards,’ Jane Seymour says. ‘With myself, so there will be no undue losses. Master, is there any news of the Lady Katherine?’
‘I have nothing to tell you. Sorry.’
Lady Worcester’s glance follows him. She is a fine woman, careless and rather free-spending, no older than the queen. Her husband is away and he feels she too could run rather slowly, if he gave her the nod. But then, a countess. And he a humble master. And sworn to the road before sunrise.
They ride up-country towards Katherine without banner or display, a tight knot of armed men. It is a clear day and bitter cold. The brown tussocky land shows through layers of hard frost, and herons flap from frozen pools. Clouds stack and shift on the horizon, slate-grey and a mild deceptive rose; leading them from early afternoon is a silvered moon as mean as a clipped coin. Christophe rides beside him, growing more voluble and disgusted the further they travel from urban comfort. ‘On dit the king chose a hard country for Katherine. He hopes the mould will get into her bones and she will die.’
‘He has no such thought. Kimbolton is an old house but very sound. She has every comfort. Her household costs the king four thousand pounds a year. It is no mean sum.’
He leaves Christophe to ponder that locution: no mean sum. At last the boy says, ‘Spaniards are merde, anyway.’
‘You watch the track and keep Jenny’s feet out of holes. Any spills and I’ll have you follow me home on a donkey.’
‘Hi-han,’ Christophe bellows, loud enough to make the men at arms turn in their saddles. ‘French donkey,’ he explains.
French fuckwit, one says, amiably enough. Riding beneath dark trees at the close of that first day’s travel, they sing; it lifts the tired heart, and dispels spirits lurking in the verges; never underestimate the superstition of the average Englishman. As this year closes, the favourite will be variations on the song the king wrote himself, ‘Pastime with good company/I love and shall until I die.’ The variations are only mildly obscene, or he would feel obliged to check them.
The landlord of their inn is a harassed wisp of a man, who does his futile best to find out whom he is entertaining. His wife is a strong, discontented young woman, with angry blue eyes and a loud voice. He has brought his own travelling cook. ‘What, my lord?’ she says. ‘You think we’d poison you?’ He can hear her banging around in the kitchen, laying down what shall and shan’t be done with her skillets.
She comes to his chamber late and asks, do you want anything? He says no, but she comes back: what, really, nothing? You might lower your voice, he says. This far from London, the king’s deputy in church affairs can perhaps relax his caution? ‘Stay, then,’ he tells her. Noisy she may be, but safer than Lady Worcester.
He wakes before dawn, so suddenly that he doesn’t know where he is. He can hear a woman’s voice from below, and for a moment he thinks he is back at the sign of the Pegasus, with his sister Kat crashing about, and that it is the morning of his flight from his father: that all his life is before him. But cautiously, in the dark chamber without a candle, he moves each limb: no bruises; he is not cut; he remembers where he is and what he is, and moves into the warmth the woman’s body has left, and dozes, an arm thrown across the bolster.
Soon he hears his landlady singing on the stairs. Twelve virgins went out on a May morning, it seems. And none of them came back. She has scooped up the money he left her. On her face, as she greets him, no sign of the night’s transaction; but she comes out and speaks to him, her voice low, as they prepare to ride. Christophe, with a lordly air, pays the reckoning to their host. The day is milder and their progress swift and without event. Certain images will be all that remain from his ride into middle England. The holly berries burning in their bushes. The startled flight of a woodcock, flushed from almost beneath their hooves. The feeling of venturing into a watery place, where soil and marsh are the same colour and nothing is solid under your feet.
Kimbolton is a busy market town, but at twilight the streets are empty. They have made no great speed, but it is futile to wear out horses on a task that is important, but not urgent; Katherine will live or die at her own pace. Besides, it is good for him to get out to the country. Squeezed in London’s alleys, edging horse or mule under her jetties and gables, the mean canvas of her sky pierced by broken roofs, one forgets what England is: how broad the fields, how wide the sky, how squalid and ignorant the populace. They pass a wayside cross that shows recent signs of excavation at its base. One of the men at arms says, ‘They think the monks are burying their treasure. Hiding it from our master here.’
‘So they are,’ he says. ‘But not under crosses. They’re not that foolish.’
In the main street they draw rein at the church. ‘What for?’ says Christophe.
‘I need a blessing,’ he says.
‘You need to make your confession, sir,’ one of the men says.
Smiles are exchanged. It is harmless, no one thinks the worse of him: only that their own beds were cold. He has noticed this: that men who have not met him dislike him, but when they have met him, only some of them do. We could have put up at a monastery, one of his guard had complained; but no girls in a monastery, I suppose. He had turned in the saddle: ‘You really think that?’ Knowing laughter from the men.
In the church’s frigid interior, his escort flap their arms across their bodies; they stamp their feet and cry ‘Brr,’ like bad actors. ‘I’ll whistle for a priest,’ Christophe says.
‘You will do no such thing.’ But he grins; can imagine his young self saying it, and doing it too.
But there is no need to whistle. Some suspicious janitor is edging in with a light. No doubt a messenger is stumbling towards the great house with news: watch out, make ready, lords are here. It is decorous for Katherine to have some warning, he feels, but not too much. ‘Imagine it,’ Ch
ristophe says, ‘we might burst in on her when she is plucking her whiskers. Which women of that age do.’
To Christophe, the former queen is a broken jade, a crone. He thinks, Katherine would be my age, or thereabouts. But life is harsher to women, particularly women who, like Katherine, have been blessed with many children and seen them die.
Silently the priest arrives at his elbow, a timid fellow who wants to show the church’s treasures. ‘Now you must be…’ He runs through a list in his head. ‘William Lord?’
‘Ah. No.’ This is some other William. A long explanation ensues. He cuts it short. ‘As long as your bishop knows who you are.’ Behind him is an image of St Edmund, the man with five hundred fingers; the saint’s feet are pointed daintily, as if he is dancing. ‘Hold up the lights,’ he says. ‘Is that a mermaid?’
‘Yes, my lord.’ A shadow of anxiety crosses the priest’s face. ‘Must she come down? Is she forbidden?’
He smiles. ‘I just thought she’s a long way from the sea.’
‘She’s stinking fish.’ Christophe yells with laughter.
‘Forgive the boy. He’s no poet.’
A feeble smile from the priest. On an oak screen St Anne holds a book for the instruction of her little daughter, the Virgin Mary; St Michael the Archangel hacks away with a scimitar at a devil entwining his feet. ‘Are you here to see the queen, sir? I mean,’ the priest corrects himself, ‘the Lady Katherine?’
This priest doesn’t know me from Adam, he thinks. I could be any emissary. I could be Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. I could be Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. They have both tried on Katherine their scant persuasive powers and their best bully-boy tricks.
He doesn’t give his name, but he leaves an offering. The priest’s hand enfolds the coins as if to warm them. ‘You will forgive my slip, my lord? Over the lady’s title? I swear I meant no harm by it. For an old countryman such as I am, it is hard to keep up with the changes. By the time we have understood one report from London, it is contradicted by the next.’
‘It’s hard for us all,’ he says, shrugging. ‘You pray for Queen Anne every Sunday?’
‘Of course, my lord.’
‘And what do your parishioners say to that?’
The priest looks embarrassed. ‘Well, sir, they are simple people. I would not pay heed to what they say. Though they are all very loyal,’ he adds hastily. ‘Very loyal.’
‘No doubt. Will you please me now, and this Sunday in your prayers remember Tom Wolsey?’
The late cardinal? He sees the old fellow revising his ideas. This can’t be Thomas Howard or Charles Brandon: for if you speak the name of Wolsey, they can hardly restrain themselves from spitting at your feet.
When they leave the church, the last light is vanishing into the sky, and a stray snowflake drifts along towards the south. They remount; it has been a long day; his clothes feel heavy on his back. He doesn’t believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there’s no harm in hedging your bets. When the woodcock flew up in its flash of reddish brown, his heart had knocked hard. As they rode he was aware of it, each beat a heavy wing-beat; as the bird found the concealment of trees, its tracing of feathers inked out to black.
They arrive in the half-dark: a hallooing from the walls, and an answering shout from Christophe: ‘Thomas Cremuel, Secretary to the king and Master of the Rolls.’
‘How do we know you?’ a sentry bellows. ‘Show your colours.’
‘Tell him show a light and let me in,’ he says, ‘or I’ll show his backside my boot.’
He has to say these things, when he’s up-country; it’s expected of him, the king’s common adviser.
The drawbridge must come down for them: an antique scrape, a creak and rattling of bolts and chains. At Kimbolton they lock in early: good. ‘Remember,’ he says to his party, ‘do not make the priest’s mistake. When you talk to her household she is the Dowager Princess of Wales.’
‘What?’ Christophe says.
‘She is not the king’s wife. She never was the king’s wife. She is the wife of the king’s deceased brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales.’
‘Deceased means dead,’ Christophe says. ‘I know it.’
‘She is not a queen, or former queen, as her second so-called marriage was not licit.’
‘That is, not permissible,’ Christophe says. ‘She make the mistake of conjugation with both brothers, Arthur first then Henry.’
‘And what are we to think of such a woman?’ he says, smiling.
Flare of torches and, taking form out of dimness, Sir Edmund Bedingfield: Katherine’s keeper. ‘I think you might have warned us, Cromwell!’
‘Grace, you didn’t want warning of me, did you?’ He kisses Lady Bedingfield. ‘I didn’t bring my supper. But there’s a mule cart behind me, it will be here tomorrow. I have venison for your own table, and some almonds for the queen, and a sweet wine that Chapuys says she favours.’
‘I am glad of anything that will tempt her appetite.’ Grace Bedingfield leads the way into the great hall. In the firelight she stops and turns to him: ‘Her doctor suspects she has a growth in her belly. But it may take a long course. When you would think she has suffered enough, poor lady.’
He hands his gloves, his riding coat, to Christophe. ‘Will you wait upon her straight away?’ Bedingfield asks. ‘Though we were not expecting you, she may be. It is hard for us, because the townspeople favour her and word slips in with servants, you cannot prevent it, I believe they stand and signal from beyond the moat. I think she knows most of what goes on, who passes on the road.’
Two ladies, Spanish by their dress and well-advanced in age, press themselves against a plaster wall and look at him with resentment. He bows to them, and one remarks in her own tongue that this is the man who has sold the King of England’s soul. The wall behind them is painted, he sees, with the fading figures of a scene from paradise: Adam and Eve, hand in hand, stroll among beasts so new to creation they have not yet learned their names. A small elephant with a rolling eye peeps shyly through the foliage. He has never seen an elephant, but understood them to be higher by far than a warhorse; perhaps it’s not had time to grow yet. Branches bowed with fruit hang above its head.
‘Well, you know the form,’ Bedingfield says. ‘She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps.’
Katherine is sitting by the fire shrunk into a cape of very good ermines. The king will want that back, he thinks, if she dies. She glances up, and puts out a hand for him to kiss: unwilling, but more because of the chill, he thinks, than because she is reluctant to acknowledge him. She is jaundiced, and there is an invalid fug in the room – the faint animal scent of the furs, a vegetal stench of undrained cooking water, and the sour reek from a bowl with which a girl hurries away: containing, he suspects, the evacuated contents of the dowager’s stomach. If she is ill in the night, perhaps she dreams of the gardens of the Alhambra, where she grew up: the marble pavements, the bubbling of crystal water into basins, the drag of a white peacock’s tail and the scent of lemons. I could have brought her a lemon in my saddlebag, he thinks.
As if reading his thoughts, she speaks to him in Castilian. ‘Master Cromwell, let us abandon this weary pretence that you do not speak my language.’
He nods. ‘It has been hard in times past, standing by while your maids talked about me. “Jesu, isn’t he ugly, do you think he has a hairy body like Satan?”’
‘My maids said that?’ Katherine seems amused. She withdraws her hand, out of his sight. ‘They are long gone, those lively girls. Only old women remain, and a handful of licensed traitors.’
‘Madam, those about you love you.’
‘They report on me.
All my words. They even listen in to my prayers. Well, master.’ She raises her face to the light. ‘How do you think I look? What will you say of me when the king asks you? I have not seen myself in a mirror these many months.’ She pats her fur cap, pulls its lappets over her ears; laughs. ‘The king used to call me an angel. He used to call me a flower. When my first son was born, it was the depths of winter. All England lay under snow. There were no flowers to be had, I thought. But Henry gave me six dozen roses made of the purest white silk. “White as your hand, my love,” he said, and kissed my fingertips.’ A twitch beneath the ermine tells him where a bunched fist lies now. ‘I keep them in a chest, the roses. They at least do not fade. Over the years I have given them to those who have done me some service.’ She pauses; her lips move, a silent invocation: prayers for departed souls. ‘Tell me, how is Boleyn’s daughter? They say she prays a good deal, to her reformed God.’
‘She has indeed a reputation for piety. As she has the approbation of the scholars and bishops.’
‘They are using her. As she is using them. If they were true churchmen they would shrink from her in horror, as they would shrink from an infidel. But I expect she is praying for a son. She lost the last child, I am told. Ah well, I know how that is. I pity her from the bottom of my heart.’