1It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king's eyes are open, his body braced for the atteint; he takes the blow perfectly, its force absorbed by a body securely armoured, moving in the right direction, moving at the right speed. His colour does not alter. His voice does not shake.

2‘Healthy? ’ he says. ‘Then I thank God for his favour to us. As I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence.’ He thinks, Henry has been rehearsing. I suppose we all have.

3The king walks away towards his own rooms. Says over his shoulder, ‘Call her Elizabeth. Cancel the jousts.’ A bleat from a Boleyn: ‘The other ceremonies as planned?’ No reply. Cranmer says, all as planned, till we hear different. I am to stand godfather to the … the princess. He falters. He can hardly believe it. For himself, he ordered a daughter, and he got a daughter.

4His eyes follow Henry's retreating back. ‘He did not ask after the queen. He did not ask how she does.’

5‘It hardly matters, does it? ’ Edward Seymour, saying brutally what everyone is thinking.

6Then Henry, on his long solitary walk, stops, turns back. ‘My lord archbishop. Cromwell. But you only.’

7In Henry's closet: ‘Had you imagined this?’ Some would smile. He does not. The king drops into a chair. The urge arises to put a hand on his shoulder, as one does for any inconsolable being. He resists it; simply folds his fingers, protectively, into the fist which holds the king's heart. ‘One day we will make a great marriage for her.’

8‘Poor scrap. Her own mother will wish her away. ’ ‘Your Majesty is young enough,’ Cranmer says. ‘The queen is strong and her family are fertile. You can get another child soon. And perhaps God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess.’ ‘My dear friend, I am sure you are right.’ Henry sounds dubious, but he looks around to take strength from his surroundings, as if God might have left some friendly message written on the wall: though there is only precedent for the hostile kind. He takes a breath and stands up and shakes out his sleeves. He smiles: and one can catch in flight, as if it were a bird with a strong-beating heart, the act of will that transforms a desolate wretch into the beacon of his nation.

9He whispers to Cranmer later, ‘It was like watching Lazarus get up.’ Soon Henry is striding about the palace at Greenwich, putting the celebrations under way. We are young enough, he says, and next time it will be a boy. One day we will make a great marriage for her.

10Believe me, God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess.

11Boleyn faces brighten. It's Sunday, four in the afternoon. He goes and laughs a bit at the clerks who have ‘prince’ written on their proclamations, and who now have to squeeze extra letters in, then he goes back to working out the expenses for the new princess's household. He has advised that Gertrude, Lady Exeter, be among the child's godparents. Why should only the Maid have a vision of her? It will do her good to be seen by the whole court, smiling a forced smile and holding Anne's baby at the font.

12* * *

13The Maid herself, brought to London, is kept in a private house, where the beds are soft and the voices around her, the voices of Cromwell women, hardly disturb her prayers; where the key is turned in the oiled lock with a click as small as the snap of a bird's bone. ‘Does she eat?’ he asks Mercy, and she says, she eats as heartily as you: well, no, Thomas, perhaps not quite so heartily as you.

14‘I wonder what happened to her project of living on the Communion host? ’

15‘They can't see her dining now, can they? Those priests and monks who set her on this course. ’

16Away from their scrutiny, the nun has started to act like an ordinary woman, acknowledging the simple claims of her body, like anyone who wants to live; but it may be too late. He likes it that Mercy doesn't say, ahh, the poor harmless soul. That she is not harmless by nature is clear when they have her over to Lambeth Palace to question her. You would think Lord Chancellor Audley, his chain of office hung about his splendid person, would be enough to subdue any country girl.

17Throw in the Archbishop of Canterbury, and you would imagine a young nun might feel some awe. Not a bit of it. The Maid treats Cranmer with condescension – as if he were a novice in the religious life. When he challenges her on any point and says, ‘How do you know that?’ she smiles pityingly and says, ‘An angel told me.’ Audley brings Richard Riche with him to their second session, to take notes for them, and put any points that occur to him. He is Sir Richard now, knighted and promoted to Solicitor General. In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverence to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty? Riche turns out to have a talent for drafting legislation which is second only to his own. His features, beneath his soft fair hair, are pinched with concentration; the boys call him Sir Purse. You'd never think, to see him precisely laying out his papers, that he was once the great disgrace of the Inner Temple. He says so, in an undertone, teasing him, while they wait for the girl to be brought in.

18Well, Master Cromwell! Riche says; what about you and that abbess in Halifax?

19He knows better than to deny it: or any of those stories the cardinal told about him. ‘Oh, that,’ he says. ‘It was nothing – they expect it in Yorkshire.’

20He is afraid the girl may have caught the tail end of the exchange, because today, as she takes the chair they have placed for her, she gives him a particularly hard stare. She arranges her skirts, folds her arms and waits for them to entertain her. His niece Alice Wellyfed sits on a stool by the door: just there in case of fainting, or other upset.

21Though a glance at the Maid tells you she is no more likely to faint than Audley is.

22‘Shall I? ’ Riche says. ‘Start?’

23‘Oh, why not? ’ Audley says. ‘You are young and hearty.’ ‘These prophecies of yours – you are always changing the timing of the disaster you foresee, but I understood you said that the king would not reign one month after he married Lady Anne. Well, the months have passed, Lady Anne is crowned queen, and has given the king a fine daughter. So what do you say now?’

24‘I say in the eyes of the world he seems to be king. But in the eyes of God,’ she shrugs, ‘not any more. He is no more the real king than he,’ she nods towards Cranmer, ‘is really archbishop.’ Riche is not to be sidetracked. ‘So it would be justified to raise rebellion against him? To depose him? To assassinate him? To put another in his place?’

25‘Well, what do you think? ’

26‘And among the claimants your choice has fallen on the Courtenay family, not the Poles. Henry, Marquis of Exeter. Not Henry, Lord Montague. ’

27‘Or,’ he says sympathetically, ‘do you get them mixed up?’ ‘Of course not.’ She flushes. ‘I have met both those gentlemen.’ Riche makes a note.

28Audley says, ‘Now Courtenay, that is Lord Exeter, descends from a daughter of King Edward. Lord Montague descends from King Edward's brother, the Duke of Clarence. How do you weigh their claims? Because if we are talking of true kings and false kings, some say Edward was a bastard his mother got by an archer. I wonder if you can cast any light?’

29‘Why would she? ’ Riche says.

30Audley rolls his eyes. ‘Because she talks to the saints on high.

31They'd know. ’

32He looks at Riche and it is as if he can read his thoughts: Niccolò's book says, the wise prince exterminates the envious, and if I, Riche, were king, those claimants and their families would be dead. The girl is braced for the next question: how is it she has seen two queens in her vision? ‘I suppose it will sort itself out,’ he says, ‘in the fighting?

33It's good to have a few kings and queens in reserve, if you're going to start a war in a country. ’

34‘It is not necessary to have a war,’ the nun says. Oh? Sir Purse sits up: this is new. ‘God is sending a plague on England instead. Henry will be dead in six months. So will she, Thomas Boleyn's daughter.’ ‘And me?’

35‘You too. ’

36‘And all in this room? Except you, of course? All including Alice Wellyfed, who never did you harm? ’

37‘All the women of your house are heretics, and the plague will rot them body and soul. ’

38‘And what about the princess Elizabeth? ’ She turns in her seat, to aim her words at Cranmer. ‘They say when you christened her you warmed the water to spare her a shock. You should have poured it boiling.’

39Oh, Christ in Heaven, Riche says. He throws his pen down. He is a tender young father, with a daughter in the cradle.

40He drops a consoling hand on his, the Solicitor General's. You would think Alice would need consoling; but when the Maid condemned her to death, he had looked down the room at his niece to note that her face was the perfect picture of derision. He says to Riche, ‘She didn't think it up herself, the boiling water. It is a thing they are saying on the streets.’

41Cranmer huddles into himself; the Maid has bruised him, she has scored a point. He, Cromwell, says, ‘I saw the princess yesterday. She is thriving, in spite of her ill-wishers.’ His voice suggests calm: we must get the archbishop back in the saddle. He turns to the Maid: ‘Tell me: did you locate the cardinal?’

42‘What? ’ Audley says.

43‘Dame Elizabeth said she would look out for my old master, on one of her excursions to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and I offered to pay her travelling expenses on the occasion. I gave her people a down- payment – I hope we see some progress? ’

44‘Wolsey would have had another fifteen years of life,’ the girl says.

45He nods: he has said the same himself. ‘But then God cut him off, as an example. I have seen devils disputing for his soul.’ ‘You know the result?’ he asks.

46‘There is no result. I searched for him all over. I thought God had extinguished him. Then one night I saw him. ’ A long, tactical hesitation. ‘I saw his soul seated among the unborn.’ There is a silence. Cranmer shrinks in his seat. Riche gently nibbles the end of his pen. Audley twists a button on his sleeve, round and round till the thread tightens.

47‘If you like I can pray for him,’ the Maid says. ‘God usually answers my requests.’

48‘Formerly, when you had your advisers about you, Father Bocking and Father Gold and Father Risby and the rest, you would start bargaining at this point. I would propose a further sum for your goodwill, and your spiritual directors would drive it up. ’ ‘Wait.’ Cranmer lays a hand over his ribcage. ‘Can we go back?

49Lord Chancellor? ’

50‘We can go in any direction you choose, my lord archbishop. Three times round the mulberry bush …’

51‘You see devils? ’

52She nods.

53‘They appear how? ’

54‘Birds. ’

55‘A relief,’ Audley says drily.

56‘No, sir. Lucifer stinks. His claws are deformed. He comes as a cockerel smeared in blood and shit. ’

57He looks up at Alice. He is ready to send her out. He thinks, what has been done to this woman?

58Cranmer says, ‘That must be disagreeable for you. But it is a characteristic of devils, I understand, to show themselves in more than one way.’

59‘Yes. They do it to deceive you. He comes as a young man. ’ ‘Indeed?’

60‘Once he brought a woman. To my cell at night. ’ She pauses.

61‘Pawing her. ’

62Riche: ‘He is known to have no shame.’

63‘No more than you. ’

64‘And what then, Dame Elizabeth? After the pawing? ’ ‘Pulled up her skirts.’

65‘And she didn't resist? ’ Riche says. ‘You surprise me.’ Audley says, ‘Prince Lucifer, I don't doubt he has a way with him.’ ‘Before my eyes, he had to do with her, on my bed.’ Riche makes a note. ‘This woman, did you know her?’ No answer.

66‘And the devil did not try the same with you? You can speak freely. It will not be held against you. ’

67‘He came to sweet-talk me. Swaggering in his blue silk coat, it's the best he has. And new hose with diamonds down his legs. ’ ‘Diamonds down his legs,’ he says. ‘Now that must have been a temptation?’

68She shakes her head.

69‘But you are a fine young woman – good enough for any man, I'd say. ’

70She looks up; a flicker of a smile. ‘I am not for Master Lucifer.’ ‘What did he say when you refused him?’

71‘He asked me to marry him. ’ Audley puts his head in his hands. ‘I said I was vowed to chastity.’

72‘Was he not angry when you would not consent? ’ ‘Oh yes. He spat in my face.’

73‘I would expect no better of him,’ Riche says.

74‘I wiped his spit off with a napkin. It's black. It has the stench of Hell. ’

75‘What is that like? ’

76‘Like something rotting. ’

77‘Where is it now, the napkin? I suppose you didn't send it to the laundry? ’

78‘Dom Edward has it. ’

79‘Does he show it to people? For money? ’

80‘For offerings. ’

81‘For money. ’

82Cranmer takes his face from his hands. ‘Shall we pause?’ ‘A quarter hour?’ Riche says.

83Audley: ‘I told you he was young and hearty.’ ‘Perhaps we will meet tomorrow,’ Cranmer says. ‘I need to pray.

84And a quarter of an hour will not do it. ’ ‘But tomorrow is Sunday,’ the nun says. ‘There was a man who went out hunting on a Sunday and he fell down a bottomless pit into Hell. Imagine that.’

85‘How was it bottomless,’ Riche asks, ‘if Hell was there to receive him?’

86‘I wish I were going hunting,’ Audley says. ‘Christ knows, I'd take a chance on it.’

87Alice rises from her stool and signals for her escort. The Maid gets to her feet. She is smiling broadly. She has made the archbishop flinch, and himself grow cold, and the Solicitor General all but weep with her talk of scalded babies. She thinks she is winning; but she is losing, losing, losing all the time. Alice puts a gentle hand on her arm, but the Maid shakes it off.

88Outside, Richard Riche says, ‘We should burn her.’ Cranmer says, ‘Much as we may mislike her talk of the late cardinal appearing to her, and devils in her bedchamber, she speaks in this way because she has been taught to ape the claims of certain nuns who have gone before her, nuns whom Rome is pleased to recognise as saints. I cannot convict them of heresy, retrospectively. Nor have I evidence to try her for heresy.’

89‘Burned for treason, I meant. ’

90It is the woman's penalty; where a man is half-hanged and castrated, then slowly gutted by the executioner.

91He says, ‘There is no overt action. She has only expressed an intent.’

92‘Intent to raise rebellion, to depose the king, should that not be treason? Words have been construed as treasons, there are precedents, you know them. ’

93‘I should be astonished,’ Audley says, ‘if they have escaped Cromwell's attention.’

94It is as if they can smell the devil's spit; they are almost jostling each other to get into the air, which is mild, damp: a faint scent of leaves, a green-gold, rustling light. He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

95‘I think new laws are needed,’ Riche says.

96‘I have it in hand. ’

97‘And I think this woman is too leniently kept. We are too soft. We are just playing with her. ’

98Cranmer walks away, shoulders stooped, his trailing habit brushing up the leaves. Audley turns to him, bright and resolute, a man keen to change the subject. ‘So, the princess, you say she was well?’ The princess, unswaddled, had been placed on cushions at Anne's feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature. It seems stories have been put about that Anne's child was born with teeth, has six fingers on each hand, and is furred all over like a monkey, so her father has shown her off naked to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display in the hope of countering the rumours. The king has chosen Hatfield for her seat, and Anne says, ‘It seems to me waste might be saved, and the proper order of things asserted, if Spanish Mary's household were broken up and she were to become a member of the household of the princess Elizabeth my daughter.’

99‘In the capacity of …? ’ The child is quiet; only, he notes, because she has crammed a fist into her maw, and is cannibalising herself.

100‘In the capacity of my daughter's servant. What else should she be?

101There can be no pretence at equality. Mary is a bastard. ’ The brief respite is over; the princess sets up a screech that would bring out the dead. Anne's glance slides away sideways, and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, and she leans down towards her daughter, but at once women swoop, flapping and bustling; the screaming creature is plucked up, wrapped up, swept away, and the queen's eyes follow pitifully as the fruit of her womb exits, in procession. He says gently, ‘I think she was hungry.’ * * *

102Saturday evening: supper at Austin Friars for Stephen Vaughan, so often in transit: William Butts, Hans, Kratzer, Call-Me Risley.

103Conversation is in various tongues and Rafe Sadler translates adroitly, smoothly, his head turning from side to side: high topics and low, statecraft and gossip, Zwingli's theology, Cranmer's wife. About the latter, it has not been possible to suppress the talk at the Steelyard and in the city; Vaughan says, ‘Can Henry know and not know?’ ‘That is perfectly possible. He is a prince of very large capacities.’ Larger by the day, Wriothesley says, laughing; Dr Butts says, he is one of those men who must be active, and recently his leg is troubling him, that old injury; but think, is it likely that a man who has not spared himself on the hunting field and in the tilt yard should not get some injury by the time he is the king's age? He is forty-three this year, you know, and I should be glad, Kratzer, to have your view on what the planets suggest, for the later years of a man whose chart is so dominated by air and fire; by the by, did I not always warn of his moon in Aries (rash and hasty planet) in the house of marriage?

104He says, impatient, we heard very little about the Aries moon when he was settled with Katherine for twenty years. It is not the stars that make us, Dr Butts, it is circumstance and necessità, the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't you agree?

105He beckons to Christophe to fill their glasses. They talk about the Mint, where Vaughan is to have a position; about Calais, where Honor Lisle seems more busy in affairs than her husband the Governor. He thinks about Guido Camillo in Paris, pacing and fretting between the wooden walls of his memory machine, while knowledge grows unseen and of itself in its cavities and concealed inner spaces. He thinks of the Holy Maid – by now established as not holy, and not a maid – no doubt at this moment sitting down to supper with his nieces. He thinks of his fellow interrogators: Cranmer on his knees in prayer, Sir Purse frowning over the day's transcripts, Audley – what will the Lord Chancellor be doing? Polishing his chain of office, he decides. He thinks of saying to Vaughan, below the conversation, was there not a girl in your house called Jenneke? What happened to her? But Wriothesley breaks in on his train of thought. ‘When shall we see my master's portrait? You have been at work on it a while, Hans, it is time it came home. We are keen to see what you have made of him.’ ‘He is still busy with the French envoys,’ Kratzer says. ‘De Dinteville wants to take his picture home with him when he gets his recall …’

106There is some laughter at the expense of the French ambassador, always doing his packing and having to undo it again, as his master commands him to stay where he is. ‘Anyway, I hope he does not take it too quick,’ Hans says, ‘because I mean to show it and get commissions off it. I want the king to see it, indeed I want to paint the king, do you think I can?’

107‘I will ask him,’ he says easily. ‘Let me choose the time.’ He looks down the table to see Vaughan glow with pride, like Jupiter on a painted ceiling.

108After they get up from the table his guests eat ginger comfits and candied fruits, and Kratzer makes some drawings. He draws the sun and the planets moving in their orbits according to the plan he has heard of from Father Copernicus. He shows how the world is turning on its axis, and nobody in the room denies it. Under your feet you can feel the tug and heft of it, the rocks groaning to tear away from their beds, the oceans tilting and slapping at their shores, the giddy lurch of Alpine passes, the forests of Germany ripping at their roots to be free.

109The world is not what it was when he and Vaughan were young, it is not what it was even in the cardinal's day.

110The company has left when his niece Alice comes in, past his watchmen, wrapped up in a cloak; she is escorted by Thomas Rotherham, one of his wards who lives in the house. ‘Never fear, sir,’ she says, ‘Jo is sitting up with Dame Elizabeth, and nothing gets by Jo.’

111Does it not? That child perpetually in tears over her spoiled sewing?

112That grubby little girl sometimes found rolling under a table with a wet dog, or chasing a peddler down the street? ‘I would like to talk to you,’ Alice says, ‘if you have time for me?’ Of course, he says, taking her arm, folding her hand in his; Thomas Rotherham turns pale – which puzzles him – and slides away.

113Alice sits down in his office. She yawns. ‘Excuse me – but she is hard work and the hours are long.’ She tucks a strand of hair into her hood. ‘She is ready to break,’ she says. ‘She is brave to your faces, but she cries at night, because she knows she is a fraud. And even while she is crying, she peeps under her eyelids to see what effect she is making.’

114‘I want it over with now,’ he says. ‘For all the trouble she has caused, we do not find ourselves an edifying spectacle, three or four of us learned in the law and the scriptures, convening day after day to try to trip one chit of a girl.’

115‘Why did you not bring her in before? ’

116‘I didn't want her to shut the prophecy shop. I wanted to see who would come to her whistle. And Lady Exeter has, and Bishop Fisher.

117And a score of monks and foolish priests whose names I know, and a hundred perhaps whose names I don't know yet. ’ ‘And will the king kill them all?’

118‘Very few, I hope. ’

119‘You incline him to mercy? ’

120‘I incline him to patience. ’

121‘What will happen to her? Dame Eliza? ’

122‘We will frame charges. ’

123‘She will not go in a dungeon? ’

124‘No, I shall move the king to treat her with consideration, he is always – he is usually – respectful of any person in the religious life.

125But Alice,’ he sees that she is dissolving into tears, ‘I think this has all been too much for you.’

126‘No, not at all. We are soldiers in your army. ’ ‘She has not been frightening you, talking about the devil's wicked offers?’

127‘No, it's Thomas Rotherham's offers … he wants to marry me. ’ ‘So that's what's wrong with him!’ He is amused. ‘Could he not ask himself?’

128‘He thought you would look at him in that way you have … as if you were weighing him. ’

129Like a clipped coin? ‘Alice, he owns a fat slice of Bedfordshire, and his manors prosper very nicely since I have been looking after them.

130And if you like each other, how could I object? You are a clever girl, Alice. Your mother,’ he says softly, ‘and your father, they would be very pleased with you, if they were able to see.’ This is why Alice is crying. She must ask her uncle's permission because this last year has left her orphaned. The day his sister Bet died, he was up-country with the king. Henry was receiving no messengers from London for fear of contagion, so she was dead and buried before he knew she was ill. When the news crept through at last, the king spoke to him with tenderness, a hand on his arm; he spoke of his own sister, the silver-haired lady like a princess in a book, removed from this life to gardens of Paradise, he had claimed, reserved for royal dead; for it is impossible, he had said, to think of that lady in any low place, any place of darkness, the barred charnel house of Purgatory with its flying cinders and sulphur reek, its boiling tar and roiling clouds of sleet.

131‘Alice,’ he says, ‘dry your tears, find Thomas Rotherham, and end his pain. You need not come to Lambeth tomorrow. Jo can come, if she is as formidable as you say.’

132Alice turns in the doorway. ‘I will see her again, though? Eliza Barton? I should like to see her before …’ Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just as well.

133Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.

134He hears Alice running upstairs. He hears her calling, Thomas, Thomas … It is a name that will bring half the house out, tumbling from their bedside prayers, from their very beds: yes, are you looking for me? He pulls his furred gown around him and goes outside to look at the stars. The precincts of his house are kept well lit; the gardens by torchlight are the site of excavations, trenches dug out for foundations, earth banked up into barrows and mounds. The vast timber frame of a new wing juts against the sky; in the middle distance, his new planting, a city orchard where Gregory, one day, will pick the fruit, and Alice, and Alice's sons. He has fruit trees already, but he wants cherries and plums like the ones he has eaten abroad, and late pears to use in the Tuscan fashion, to match their crisp metallic flesh with winter's salt cod. Then next year he means to make another garden at the hunting lodge he has at Canonbury, make it a retreat from the city, a summer house in the fields. He has work in hand at Stepney too, expansion; John Williamson is looking after the builders for him. Strange, but like a miracle the family's prosperity seems to have cured him of his killing cough. I like John Williamson, he thinks, why ever did I, with his wife … Beyond the gate, cries and shouts, London never still or quiet; so many in the graveyards, but the living parading in the streets, drunken fighters pitching from London Bridge, sanctuary men stealing out to thieve, Southwark whores bawling out their prices like butchers selling dead flesh.

135He goes inside. His desk draws him back. In a small chest he keeps his wife's book, her book of hours. Inside it are prayers on loose papers which she has inserted. Say the name of Christ a thousand times and it keeps fever away. But it doesn't, does it? The fever comes anyway and kills you. Beside the name of her first husband, Thomas Williams, she has written his own name, but she never, he notices, crossed Tom Williams out. She has recorded the births of her children, and he has written in beside them the dates of his daughters' deaths. He finds a space where he will note the marriages of his sisters' children: Richard to Frances Murfyn, Alice to his ward.

136He thinks, perhaps I have got over Liz. It didn't seem possible that weight would ever shift from inside his chest, but it has lightened enough to let him get on with his life. I could marry again, he thinks, but is this not what people are always telling me? He says to himself, I never think of Johane Williamson now: not Johane as she was for me.

137Her body once had special meaning, but that meaning is now unmade; the flesh created beneath his fingertips, hallowed by desire, becomes just the ordinary substance of a city wife, a fading woman with no particular looks. He says to himself, I never think of Anselma now; she is just the woman in the tapestry, the woman in the weave.

138He reaches for his pen. I have got over Liz, he says to himself.

139Surely? He hesitates, the quill in his hand, weighted by ink. He holds the pages down flat, and strikes out the name of her first husband. He thinks, I've meant to do that for years.

140It is late. Upstairs he closes the shutter, where the moon gapes in hollow-eyed, like a drunk lost in the street. Christophe, folding garments, says, ‘Is there loups? In this kingdom?’ ‘I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down.

141That howling you hear is only the Londoners. ’ Sunday: in rose-tinted light they set out from Austin Friars, his men in their new livery of grey marbled cloth collecting the party from the city house where the nun has been held. It would be convenient, he thinks, if I had Master Secretary's barge, instead of making ad hoc arrangements when we have to cross the river. He has already heard Mass; Cranmer insists they all hear another. He watches the girl and sees her tears flow. Alice is right; she is at the end of her invention.

142By nine o'clock she is unwinding the threads she has spent years ravelling up. She confesses in style, so hard and fast that Riche can hardly keep track, and she appeals to them as men of the world, as people with their way to make: ‘You know how it is. You mention something and people are at you, what do you mean, what do you mean? You say you've had a vision and they won't leave you alone.’ ‘You can't disappoint people?’ he says; she agrees, that's it, you can't. Once you start you have to keep going. If you try to go back they'll slaughter you.

143She confesses that her visions are inventions. She never spoke to heavenly persons. Or raised the dead; that was all a fraud. She never had a hand in miracles. The letter from Mary Magdalene, Father Bocking wrote it, and a monk put gilding on the letters, in a minute she'll think of his name. The angels came out of her own invention, she seemed to see them but she knows now that they were just flashes of light against the wall. The voices she heard were not their voices, they were not distinct voices at all, just the sounds of her sisters singing in the chapel, or a woman in the road crying because she has been beaten and robbed, or perhaps the meaningless clatter of dishes from the kitchen; and those groans and cries, that seemed to come from the throats of the damned, it was someone above scraping a trestle across the floor, it was the whimper of a lost dog. ‘I know now, sirs, that those saints were not real. Not in the way you are real.’ Something has broken inside her, and he wonders what that thing is.

144She says, ‘Is there any chance I could go home again to Kent?’ ‘I'll see what can be arranged.’

145Hugh Latimer is sitting with them, and he gives him a hard look, as if he's making false promises. No, really, he says. Leave it with me.

146Cranmer tells her gently, ‘Before you can go anywhere, it will be necessary for you to make public acknowledgement of your imposture.

147Public confession. ’

148‘She's not shy of crowds, are you? ’ These many years she's been on the road, a travelling show, and will be again, though now the nature of the show has changed; he means to display her, repentant, at Paul's Cross, and perhaps outside London too. He feels that she will take to the role of fraud, with the same relish with which she took to her role as saint.

149He says to Riche, Niccolò tells us unarmed prophets always fail. He smiles and says, I mention this, Ricardo, because I know you like to have it by the book.

150Cranmer leans forward and says to the Maid, these men about you, Edward Bocking and the rest, which of them were your lovers?

151She is shocked: perhaps because the question has come from him, the sweetest of her interrogators. She just stares at him, as if one of them were stupid.

152He says, murmuring, she may think lovers is not the word.

153Enough. To Audley, to Latimer, to Riche, he says, ‘I shall begin bringing in her followers, and her leaders. She has ruined many, if we care to press for their ruin. Fisher certainly, Margaret Pole perhaps, Gertrude and her husband for sure. Lady Mary the king's daughter, quite possibly. Thomas More no, Katherine no, but a fat haul of Franciscans.’

154The court rises, if court is what you call it. Jo stands up. She has been sewing – or rather, unsewing, teasing out the pomegranate border from a crewel-work panel – these remnants of Katherine, of the dusty kingdom of Granada, linger in England still. She folds her work, dropping her scissors into her pocket, pinching up her sleeve and feeding her needle into the fabric for later use. She walks up to the prisoner and puts a hand on her arm. ‘We must say adieu.’ ‘William Hawkhurst,’ the girl says, ‘I remember the name now. The monk who gilded the letter from Mary Magdalene.’ Richard Riche makes a note.

155‘Do not say any more today,’ Jo advises.

156‘Will you come with me, mistress? Where I am going? ’ ‘Nobody will come with you,’ Jo says. ‘I do not think you have the sense of it, Dame Eliza. You are going to the Tower, and I am going home to my dinner.’

157This summer of 1533 has been a summer of cloudless days, of strawberry feasts in London gardens, the drone of fumbling bees, warm evenings to stroll under rose arbours and hear from the allées the sound of young gentlemen quarrelling over their bowls. The grain harvest is abundant even in the north. The trees are bowed under the weight of ripening fruit. As if he has decreed that the heat must continue, the king's court burns bright through the autumn.

158Monseigneur the queen's father shines like the sun, and around him spins a smaller but still blazing noonday planet, his son George Rochford. But it is Brandon who leads the dancing, galloping through the halls towing his new bride, whose age is fourteen. She is an heiress, and was betrothed to his son, but Charles thought an experienced man like him could turn her to better use.

159The Seymours have put their family scandal behind them, and their fortunes are mending. Jane Seymour says to him, looking at her feet, ‘Master Cromwell, my brother Edward smiled last week.’ ‘That was rash of him, what made him do so?’ ‘He heard his wife is sick. The wife he used to have. The one that my father, you know.’

160‘Is she likely to die? ’

161‘Oh, very likely. Then he will get a new one. But he will keep her at his house in Elvetham, and never let her come within a mile of Wolf Hall. And when my father visits Elvetham, she will be locked in the linen room till he has gone again. ’

162Jane's sister Lizzie is at court with her husband, the Governor of Jersey, who is some connection of the new queen's. Lizzie comes packaged into her velvet and lace, her outlines as firm as her sister's are indefinite and blurred, her eyes bold and hazel and eloquent. Jane whispers in her wake; her eyes are the colour of water, where her thoughts slip past, like gilded fishes too small for hook or net.

163It is Jane Rochford – whose mind, in his view, is underoccupied – who sees him watching the sisters. ‘Lizzie Seymour must have a lover,’ she says, ‘it cannot be her husband who puts that glow in her cheeks, he is an old man. He was old when he was in the Scots wars.’ The two sisters are just a little alike, she points out; they have the same habit of dipping their head and drawing in their underlip. ‘Otherwise,’ she says, smirking, ‘you would think their mother had been up to the same tricks as her husband. She was a beauty in her day, you know, Margery Wentworth. And nobody knows what goes on down in Wiltshire.’

164‘I'm surprised you don't, Lady Rochford. You seem to know everyone's business. ’

165‘You and me, we keep our eyes open. ’ She lowers her head, and says, as if directing the words inward, to her own body, ‘I could keep my eyes open, if you like, in places you cannot go.’ Dear God, what does she want? It can't be money, surely? The question comes out colder than he means: ‘Upon what possible inducement?’

166She lifts her eyes to his. ‘I should like your friendship.’ ‘No conditions attach to that.’

167‘I thought I might help you. Because your ally Lady Carey has gone down to Hever now to see her daughter. She is no longer wanted since Anne is back on duty in the bedchamber. Poor Mary. ’ She laughs.

168‘God dealt her a good enough hand but she never knew how to play it.

169Tell me, what will you do if the queen does not have another child? ’ ‘There is no reason to fear it. Her mother had a child a year. Boleyn used to complain it kept him poor.’

170‘Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife?

171And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad. ’ ‘It's the same in the gospels. The stony ground gets the blame.’ The stony places, the thorny unprofitable waste. Jane Rochford is childless after seven years of marriage. ‘I believe my husband wishes I would die.’ She says it lightly. He does not know how to answer. He has not asked for her confidence. ‘If I do die,’ she says, in the same bright tone, ‘have my body opened. I ask you this in friendship. I am afraid of poison. My husband and his sister are closeted together for hours, and Anne knows all manner of poisons. She has boasted that she will give Mary a breakfast she will not recover from.’ He waits.

172‘Mary the king's daughter, I mean. Though I am sure if it pleased Anne she would not scruple to make away with her own sister. ’ She glances up again. ‘In your heart, if you are honest, you would like to know the things I know.’

173She is lonely, he thinks, and breeding a savage heart, like Leon-tina in her cage. She imagines everything is about her, every glance or secret conversation. She is afraid the other women pity her, and she hates to be pitied. He says, ‘What do you know of my heart?’ ‘I know where you have disposed it.’

174‘It is more than I know myself. ’

175‘That is not uncommon among men. I can tell you who you love.

176Why do you not ask for her, if you want her? The Seymours are not rich. They will sell you Jane, and be glad of the bargain. ’ ‘You are mistaken in the nature of my interest. I have young gentlemen in my house, I have wards, their marriages are my business.’