1‘Do you want Audley's post? ’ Henry asks him. ‘It's yours if you say so.’

2The summer is over. The Emperor has not come. Pope Clement is dead, and his judgments with him; the game is to play again, and he has left the door open, just a chink, for the next Bishop of Rome to hold a conversation with England. Personally, he would slam it shut; but these are not personal matters.

3Now he thinks carefully: would it suit him to be Chancellor? It would be good to have a post in the legal hierarchy, so why not at the top? ‘I have no wish to disturb Audley. If Your Majesty is satisfied with him, I am too.’

4He remembers how the post tied Wolsey to London, when the king was elsewhere. The cardinal was active in the law courts; but we have lawyers enough.

5Henry says, only tell me what you deem best. Abased, like a lover, he cannot think of the best presents. He says, Cranmer bids me, listen to Cromwell, and if he needs a post, a tax, an impost, a measure in Parliament or a royal proclamation, give it to him.

6The post of Master of the Rolls is vacant. It is an ancient judicial office, it commands one of the kingdom's great secretariats. His predecessors will be those men, bishops for the most part, eminent in learning: those who lie down on their tombs, with their virtues in Latin engraved beneath. He is never more alive than when he twists the stem of this ripe fruit and snaps it from the tree.

7‘You were also right about Cardinal Farnese,’ Henry says.

8‘Now we have a new Pope – Bishop of Rome, I should say – I have collected on my bets. ’

9‘You see,’ he says, smiling. ‘Cranmer is right. Be advised by me.’ The court is amused to hear how the Romans have celebrated Pope Clement's death. They have broken into his tomb, and dragged his naked body through the streets.

10The Master's house in Chancery Lane is the most curious house he has ever entered. It smells of must, mould and tallow, and behind its crooked facade it meanders back, a warren of little spaces with low doorways; were our forebears all dwarves, or were they not perfectly certain how to prop up a ceiling?

11This house was founded three hundred years ago, by the Henry that was then; he built it as a refuge for Jews who wished to convert. If they took this step – advisable if they wished to be preserved from violence – they would forfeit all their possessions to the Crown. This being so, it was just that the Crown should house and feed them for their natural lives.

12Christophe runs ahead of him, into the depths of the house. ‘Look!’ He trails his finger through a vast spider's web.

13‘You've broken up her home, you heartless boy. ’ He examines Ariane's crumbling prey: a leg, a wing. ‘Let's be gone, before she comes back.’

14Some fifty years after Henry had endowed the house, all Jews were expelled from the realm. Yet the refuge was never quite empty; even today two women live here. I shall call on them, he says.

15Christophe is tapping the walls and beams, for all the world as if he knew what he was looking for. ‘Wouldn't you run,’ he says with relish, ‘if someone tapped back?’

16‘Oh, Jesus! ’ Christophe crosses himself. ‘I expect a hundred men have died here, Jews and Christians both.’ Behind this wainscot, it is true, he can sense the tiny bones of mice: a hundred generations, their articulated forefeet folded in eternal rest.

17Their descendants, thriving, he can smell in the air. This is a job for Marlinspike, he says, if we can catch him. The cardinal's cat is feral now, ranging at will through London gardens, lured by the scent of carp from the ponds of city monasteries, tempted – for all he knows – across the river, to be snuggled to the bosoms of whores, slack breasts rubbed with rose petals and ambergris; he imagines Marlinspike lolling, purring, declining to come home again. He says to Christophe, ‘I wonder how I can be Master of the Rolls, if I am not master of a cat.’

18‘The Rolls have not paws to go walking. ’ Christophe is kicking a skirting. ‘My foot go through it,’ he says, demonstrating.

19Will he leave the comforts of Austin Friars, for the tiny windows with their warped panes, the creaking passages, the ancient draughts?

20‘It will be a shorter journey to Westminster,’ he says. His aim is bent there – Whitehall, Westminster and the river, Master Secretary's barge down to Greenwich or up to Hampton Court. I shall be back at Austin Friars often, he says to himself, almost every day. He is building a treasure room, a repository secure for any gold plate the king entrusts to him; whatever he deposits can quickly be turned into ready money.

21His treasure comes through the street on ordinary carts, to attract no attention, though there are vigilant outriders. The chalices are fitted into soft leather cases made for them. The bowls and dishes travel in canvas bags, interleaved with white woollen cloth at seven pence the yard. The jewels are swaddled in silk and packed into chests with new and shiny locks: and he has the keys. There are great pearls which gleam wet from the ocean, sapphires hot as India. There are jewels like the fruit you pick on a country afternoon: garnets like sloes, pink diamonds like rosehips. Alice says, ‘For a handful of these I would, myself, overthrow any queen in Christendom.’ ‘What a good thing the king hasn't met you, Alice.’ Jo says, ‘I would as soon have it in export licences. Or army contracts. Someone will make a fortune in the Irish wars. Beans, flour, malt, horseflesh …’

22‘I shall see what I can do for you,’ he says.

23At Austin Friars he holds the lease for ninety-nine years. His great- grandchildren will have it: some unknown Londoners. When they look at the documents his name will be there. His arms will be carved over the doorways. He rests his hand on the banister of the great staircase, looks up into the dust-mote glitter from a high window. When did I do this? At Hatfield, early in the year: looking up, listening for the sounds of Morton's household, long ago. If he himself went to Hatfield, must not Thomas More have gone up too? Perhaps it was his light footstep he expected, overhead?

24He starts to think again, about that fist that came out of nowhere.

25His first idea had been, move clerks and papers to the Rolls, then Austin Friars will become a home again. But for whom? He has taken out Liz's book of hours, and on the page where she kept the family listed he has made alterations, additions. Rafe will be moving out soon, to his new house in Hackney; and Richard is building in the same neighbourhood, with his wife Frances. Alice is marrying his ward Thomas Rotherham. Her brother Christopher is ordained and beneficed. Jo's wedding clothes are ordered; she is snapped up by his friend John ap Rice, a lawyer, a scholar, a man he admires and on whose loyalty he counts. I have done well for my folk, he thinks: not one of them poor, or unhappy, or uncertain of their place in this uncertain world. He hesitates, looking up into the light: now gold, now blue as a cloud passes. Whoever will come downstairs and claim him, must do it now. His daughter Anne with her thundering feet: Anne, he would say to her, couldn't we have felt mufflers over those hooves of yours? Grace skimming down like dust, drawn into a spiral, a lively swirl … going nowhere, dispersing, gone.

26Liz, come down.

27But Liz keeps her silence; she neither stays nor goes. She is always with him and not with him. He turns away. So this house will become a place of business. As all his houses will become places of business.

28My home will be where my clerks and files are; otherwise, my home will be with the king, where he is.

29Christophe says, ‘Now we are removed to the Rolls House, I can tell you, cher maître, how I am happy that you did not leave me behind.

30For in your absence they would call me snail brain and turnip head. ’ ‘Alors …’ he takes a view of Christophe, ‘your head is indeed like a turnip. Thank you for attracting my attention to it.’ Installed at the Rolls, he takes a view of his situation: satisfactory.

31He has sold off his two Kent manors, but the king has given him one in Monmouthshire and he is buying another in Essex. He has his eye on plots in Hackney and Shoreditch, and is taking in leases on the properties around Austin Friars, which he intends to enfold in his building plans; and then, build a big wall around the lot. He has surveys to hand of a manor in Bedfordshire, one in Lincolnshire, and two Essex properties he intends to put in trust for Gregory. All this is small stuff. It's nothing to what he intends to have, or to what Henry will owe him.

32Meanwhile, his outgoings would frighten a lesser man. If the king wants something done, you have to be able to staff the enterprise and fund it. It is hard to keep up with the spending of his noble councillors, and yet there are a crew of them who live at the pawn-shop and come to him month by month to patch the holes in their accounts. He knows when to let these debts run; there is more than one kind of currency in England. What he senses is a great net is spreading about him, a web of favours done and favours received. Those who want access to the king expect to pay for it, and no one has better access than he. And at the same time, the word is out: help Cromwell and he will help you.

33Be loyal, be diligent, be intelligent on his behalf; you will come into a reward. Those who commit their service to him will be promoted and protected. He is a good friend and master; this is said of him everywhere. Otherwise, it is the usual abuse. His father was a blacksmith, a crooked brewer, he was an Irishman, he was a criminal, he was a Jew, and he himself was just a wool-trader, he was a shearsman, and now he is a sorcerer: how else but by being a sorcerer would he get the reins of power in his hand? Chapuys writes to the Emperor about him; his early life remains a mystery, but he is excellent company, and he keeps his household and retainers in magnificent style. He is a master of language, Chapuys writes, a man of most eloquent address; though his French, he adds, is only assez bien.

34He thinks, it's good enough for you. A nod and a wink will do for you.

35These last months, the council has never been out of harness. A hard summer of negotiating has brought a treaty with the Scots. But Ireland is in revolt. Only Dublin Castle itself and the town of Waterford hold out for the king, while the rebel lords are offering their services and their harbours to the Emperor's troops. Among these isles it is the most wretched of territories, which does not pay the king what it costs him to garrison it; but he cannot turn his back on it, for fear of who else might come in. Law is barely respected there, for the Irish think you can buy off murder with money, and like the Welsh they cost out a man's life in cattle. The people are kept poor by imposts and seizures, by forfeitures and plain daylight robbery; the pious English abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, but the joke runs that the Irish are so godly they abstain every other day as well. Their great lords are brutal and imperious men, treacherous and fickle, inveterate feuders, extortionists and hostage takers, and their allegiance to England they hold cheap, for they are loyal to nothing and prefer force of arms to law. As for the native chiefs, they recognise no natural limit to their claims. They say that on their land they own every ferny slope and lake, they own the heather, the meadow grass and the winds that riffle it; they own every beast and every man, and in times of scarcity they take the bread to feed their hunting dogs.

36No wonder they don't want to be English. It would interrupt their status as slave-owners. The Duke of Norfolk still has serfs on his land, and even if the law courts move to free them the duke expects a fee from it. The king proposes to send Norfolk to Ireland, but he says he's spent enough futile months over there and the only way he'll go back is if they build a bridge so he can get home at the end of the week without getting his feet wet.

37He and Norfolk fight in the council chamber. The duke rants, and he sits back and folds his arms and watches him ranting. You should have sent young Fitzroy to Dublin, he tells the council. An apprentice king – make a show, stage a spectacle, throw some money about.

38Richard says to him, ‘Perhaps we should go to Ireland, sir.’ ‘I think my campaigning days are over.’

39‘I would like to be in arms. Every man should be a soldier once in his life. ’

40‘That is your grandfather speaking through you. Ap Evans the archer. Concentrate for now on making a show in the tournaments. ’ Richard has proved a formidable man in the lists. It is more or less as Christophe says: biff, and they are flat. You would think the sport was in his nephew's blood, as it is in the blood of the lords who compete. He carries the Cromwell colours, and the king loves him for it, as he loves any man with flair and courage and physical strength.

41Increasingly, his bad leg forces him to sit with the spectators. When he is in pain he is panicked, you can see it in his eyes, and when he is recovering he is restless. Uncertainty about his own state of health makes him less inclined for the expense and trouble of organising a large tournament. When he does run a course, with his experience, his weight and height, his superb horses and the steel of his temperament, he is likely to win. But to avoid accidents, he prefers to run against opponents he knows.

42Henry says, ‘The Emperor, two or three years back when he was in Germany, did he not have an evil humour in his thigh? They say the weather didn't suit him. But then his dominions offer a change of climate. Whereas from one part of my kingdom to the next there is no change to be found.’

43‘Oh, I expect it's worse in Dublin. ’

44Henry looks out, hopeless, at the teeming rain. ‘And when I ride out the people shout at me. They rise up out of ditches, and shout about Katherine, how I should take her back. How would they like it if I told them how to order their houses and wives and children?’ Even when the weather clears the king's fears do not diminish. ‘She will escape and raise an army against me,’ he says. ‘Katherine. You do not know what she would do.’

45‘She told me she would not run. ’

46‘And you think she never lies? I know she lies. I have proof of it.

47She lied about her own virginity. ’

48Oh, that, he thinks tiredly.

49It seems Henry doesn't believe in the power of armed guards, in locks and keys. He thinks an angel recruited by the Emperor Charles will make them fall away. When he travels, he takes with him a great iron lock, which is affixed to his chamber door by a servant who goes with him for the purpose. His food is tasted for poison and his bed examined, last thing at night, for concealed weapons, such as needles; but even so, he is afraid he will be murdered as he sleeps.

50* * *

51Autumn: Thomas More is losing weight, a wiry little man emerging from what was never a superfluity of flesh. He lets Antonio Bonvisi send him food in. ‘Not that you Lucchese know how to eat. I'd send it myself, but if he took ill, you know what people would say. He likes dishes of eggs. I don't know if he likes much else.’ A sigh. ‘Milk puddings.’

52He smiles. These are carnivorous days. ‘No wonder he doesn't thrive.’

53‘I've known him for forty years,’ Bonvisi says. ‘A lifetime, Tommaso. You wouldn't hurt him, would you? Please assure me, if you can, that no one will hurt him.’

54‘Why do you think I'm no better than he is? Look, I have no need to put him under pressure. His family and friends will do it. Won't they? ’ ‘Can't you just leave him there? Forget him?’ ‘Of course. If the king allows.’

55He arranges for Meg Roper to visit. Father and daughter walk in the gardens, arm in arm. Sometimes he watches them from a window in the Lord Lieutenant's lodgings.

56By November, this policy has failed. Turned back, really, and bitten his hand, like a dog that out of kindness you pick up in the street. Meg says, ‘He has told me, and he has asked me to tell his friends, that he will have no more to do with oaths of any kind, and that if we hear he has sworn, we are to take it that he has been forced, by ill-usage and rough handling. And if a paper is shown to the council, with his signature on it, we are to understand it is not his hand.’ More is now required to swear to the Act of Supremacy, an act which draws together all the powers and dignities assumed by the king in the last two years. It doesn't, as some say, make the king head of the church. It states that he is head of the church, and always has been. If people don't like new ideas, let them have old ones. If they want precedents, he has precedents. A second enactment, which will come into force in the new year, defines the scope of treason. It will be a treasonable offence to deny Henry's titles or jurisdiction, to speak or write maliciously against him, to call him a heretic or a schismatic.

57This law will catch the friars who spread panic and say the Spanish are landing with the next tide to seize the throne for the Lady Mary. It will catch the priests who in their sermons rant against the king's authority and say he is dragging his subjects after him to Hell. Is it much for a monarch to ask, that a subject keep a civil tongue in his head?

58This is new, people say to him, this treason by words, and he says, no, be assured, it is old. It casts into statute law what the judges in their wisdom have already defined as common law. It is a measure for clarification. I am all for clarity.

59Upon More's refusal of this second oath, a bill is brought in against him, forfeiting his goods to the Crown. He now has no hope of release; or rather, the hope lies in himself. It is his duty to visit him, tell him he will no longer be allowed visitors, or strolls in the gardens.

60‘Nothing to see, this time of year. ’ More casts a glance at the sky, a narrow strip of grey through the high window. ‘I can still have my books? Write letters?’

61‘For now. ’

62‘And John Wood, he stays with me? ’

63His servant. ‘Yes, of course.’

64‘He brings me a little news from time to time. They say the sweating sickness has broken out among the king's troops in Ireland. So late in the year, too. ’

65Plague has also broken out; he's not going to tell More that, or that the whole Irish campaign is a debacle and a money sink and that he wishes he had done as Richard said and gone out there himself.

66‘The sweat takes off so many,’ More says, ‘and so swiftly, and in their prime too. And if you survive it, you are in no condition to fight the wild Irish, that's for sure. I remember when Meg took it, she nearly died. Have you had it? No, you're never ill, are you?’ He is chattering pointlessly, then he looks up. ‘Tell me, what do you hear from Antwerp? They say Tyndale is there. They say he lives straitly. He dare not stray beyond the English merchants' house. They say he is in prison, almost as I am.’

67It is true, or partly true. Tyndale has laboured in poverty and obscurity, and now his world has shrunk to a little room; while outside in the city, under the Emperor's laws, printers are branded and have their eyes put out, and brothers and sisters are killed for their faith, the men beheaded, the women buried alive. More has a sticky web in Europe still, a web made of money; it is his belief that his men have followed Tyndale these many months, but all his ingenuity, and Stephen Vaughan's on the spot, have not been able to find out which of the Englishmen who pass through that busy town are More's agents.

68‘Tyndale would be safer in London,’ More says. ‘Under yourself, the protector of error. Now, look at Germany today. You see, Thomas, where heresy leads us. It leads us to Münster, does it not?’ Sectaries, anabaptists, have taken over the city of Münster. Your worst nightmares – when you wake, paralysed, and think you have died – are bliss compared with this. The burgomasters have been ejected from the council, and thieves and lunatics have taken their places, proclaiming that the end times have come and all must be rebaptised. Citizens who dissent have been driven beyond the walls, naked, to perish in the snow. Now the city is under siege from its own prince-bishop, who intends to starve it out. The defenders, they say, are for the most part the women and children left behind; they are held in dread by a tailor called Bockelson, who has crowned himself King of Jerusalem. It is rumoured that Bockelson's friends have instituted polygamy, as recommended in the Old Testament, and that some of the women have been hanged or drowned rather than submit to rape under cover of Abraham's law. These prophets engage in daylight robbery, in the name of holding goods in common. It is said they have seized the houses of the rich, burned their letters, slashed their pictures, mopped the floors with fine embroidery, and shredded the records of who owns what, so former times can never come back.

69‘Utopia,’ he says. ‘Is it not?’

70‘I hear they are burning the books from the city libraries. Erasmus has gone into the flames. What kind of devils would burn the gentle Erasmus? But no doubt, no doubt,’ More nods, ‘Münster will be restored to order. Philip the prince of Hesse, Luther's friend, I have no doubt he will lend the good bishop his cannon and his cannoneers, and one heretic will put down another. The brethren fall to scrapping, do you see? Like rabid dogs drooling in the streets, who tear out each other's entrails when they meet.’

71‘I tell you how Münster will end. Someone inside the city will surrender it. ’

72‘You think so? You look as if you would offer me odds. But there, I was never much of a gambler. And now the king has all my money. ’ ‘A man like that, a tailor, jumps up for a month or two –’ ‘A wool merchant, a blacksmith's son, he jumps up for a year or two …’

73He stands, picks up his cape: black wool, lambskin lining. More's eyes gleam, ah, look, I have you on the run. Now he murmurs, as if it were a supper party, must you go? Stay a little, can't you? He lifts his chin. ‘So I shall not see Meg again?’

74The man's tone, the emptiness, the loss: it goes straight to his heart.

75He turns away, to keep his reply calm and trite. ‘You have to say some words. That's all.’

76‘Ahh. Just words. ’

77‘And if you don't want to say them I can put them to you in writing.

78Sign your name and the king will be happy. I will send my barge to row you back to Chelsea, and tie up at the wharf at the end of your own garden – not much to see, as you say, at this time of year, but think of the warm welcome within. Dame Alice is waiting – Alice's cooking, well, that alone would restore you; she is standing by your side watching you chew and the minute you wipe your mouth she picks you up in her arms and kisses away the mutton fat, why husband I have missed you! She bears you off to her bedchamber, locks the door and drops the key in her pocket and pulls off your clothes till there you are in your shirt and nothing but your little white legs sticking out – well, admit it, the woman is within her rights. Then next day – think of it – you rise before dawn, shuffle to your familiar cell and flog yourself, call for your bread and water, and by eight o'clock back in your hair shirt, and over it your old woollen gown, that blood- coloured one with the rent in … feet up on a stool, and your only son bringing in your letters … snapping the seal on your darling Erasmus … Then when you have read your letters, you can hobble out – let's say it's a sunny day – and look at your caged birds, and your little fox in its pen, and you can say, I was a prisoner too, but no more, because Cromwell showed me I could be free … Don't you want it? Don't you want to come out of this place? ’

79‘You should write a play,’ More says wonderingly.

80He laughs. ‘Perhaps I shall.’

81‘It's better than Chaucer. Words. Words. Just words. ’ He turns. He stares at More. It's as if the light has changed. A window has opened on a strange country, where a cold wind from childhood blows. ‘That book … Was it a dictionary?’ More frowns. ‘I'm sorry?’

82‘I came up the stairs at Lambeth – give me a moment … I came running up the stairs, carrying your measure of small beer and your wheaten loaf, to keep you from being hungry if you woke in the night.

83It was seven in the evening. You were reading, and when you looked up you held your hands over the book,’ he makes the shape of wings, ‘as if you were protecting it. I asked you, Master More, what is in that great book? You said, words, words, just words.’ More tilts his head. ‘This was when?’

84‘I believe I was seven. ’

85‘Oh, nonsense,’ More says genially. ‘I didn't know you when you were seven. Why, you were …’ he frowns, ‘you must have been … and I was …’

86‘About to go to Oxford. You don't remember. But why would you? ’ He shrugs. ‘I thought you were laughing at me.’ ‘Oh, very probably I was,’ More says. ‘If indeed such a meeting took place. Now witness these present days, when you come here and laugh at me. Talking about Alice. And my little white legs.’ ‘I think it must have been a dictionary. You are sure you don't remember? Well … my barge is waiting, and I don't want to keep the oars out in the cold.’

87‘The days are very long in here,’ More says. ‘The nights are longer.

88My chest is bad. My breathing is tight. ’ ‘Back to Chelsea then, Dr Butts will visit, tut-tut Thomas More, what have you been doing to yourself? Hold your nose and drink off this foul mixture …’

89‘Sometimes I think I shall not see morning. ’ He opens the door. ‘Martin?’

90Martin is thirty, wiry, his fair hair under his cap already sparse: pleasant face with a crinkly smile. His native town is Colchester, his father a tailor, and he learned to read on Wycliffe's gospel, which his father hid in their roof under the thatch. This is a new England; an England where Martin can dust the old text down, and show it to his neighbours. He has brothers, all of them Bible men. His wife is just now confined with her third child, ‘crawled into the straw,’ as he puts it. ‘Any news?’

91‘Not yet. But will you stand godfather? Thomas if it's a boy, or if it's a girl you name her, sir. ’

92A touch of palms and a smile. ‘Grace,’ he says. A money gift is understood; the child's start in life. He turns back to the sick man, who now slumps over his table. ‘Sir Thomas says at night his breath comes short. Bring him some bolsters, cushions, whatever you can find, prop him up to ease him. I want him to have every opportunity to live to rethink his position, show loyalty to our king, and go home. And now, bid you both good afternoon.’

93More looks up. ‘I want to write a letter.’ ‘Of course. You shall have ink and paper.’ ‘I want to write to Meg.’

94‘Then send her a human word. ’

95More's letters are beyond the human. They may be addressed to his daughter, but they are written for his friends in Europe to read.

96‘Cromwell …? ’ More's voice calls him back. ‘How is the queen?’ More is always correct, not like those who slip up and say ‘Queen Katherine’. How is Anne? he means. But what could he tell him? He is on his way. He is out of the door. In the narrow window a blue dusk has replaced the grey.

97He had heard her voice, from the next room: low, relentless. Henry yelping in indignation. ‘Not me! Not me.’ In the antechamber, Thomas Boleyn, Monseigneur, his narrow face rigid. Some Boleyn hangers-on, exchanging glances: Francis Weston, Francis Bryan. In a corner, trying to make himself inconspicuous, the lutenist Mark Smeaton; what's he doing here? Not quite a family conclave: George Boleyn is in Paris, holding talks. An idea has been floated that the infant Elizabeth should marry a son of France; the Boleyns really think this is going to happen.

98‘Whatever can have occurred,’ he says, ‘to upset the queen?’ His tone is astonished: as if she were the most placid of women.

99Weston says, ‘It's Lady Carey, she is – that is to say she finds herself –’

100Bryan snorts. ‘With a bellyful of bastard.’ ‘Ah. Didn't you know?’ The shock around him is gratifying. He shrugs. ‘I thought it a family matter.’

101Bryan's eyepatch winks at him, today a jaundiced yellow. ‘You must watch her very closely, Cromwell.’

102‘A matter in which I have failed,’ Boleyn says. ‘Evidently. She claims the child's father is William Stafford, and she has married him.

103You know this Stafford, do you? ’

104‘Just about. Well,’ he says cheerfully, ‘shall we go in? Mark, we are not setting this affair to music, so take yourself off to where you can be useful.’

105Only Henry Norris is attending the king: Jane Rochford, the queen.

106Henry's big face is white. ‘You blame me, madam, for what I did before I even knew you.’

107They have crowded in behind him. Henry says, ‘My lord Wiltshire, can you not control either of your daughters?’ ‘Cromwell knew,’ Bryan says. He snorts with laughter.

108Monseigneur begins to talk, stumbling – he, Thomas Boleyn, diplomat famed for his silver-tongued finesse. Anne cuts him off: ‘Why should she get a child by Stafford? I don't believe it's his. Why would he agree to marry her, unless for ambition – well, he has made a false move there, for he will never come to court again, nor will she.

109She can crawl on her knees to me. I care not. She can starve. ’ If Anne were my wife, he thinks, I'd go out for the afternoon. She looks haggard, and she cannot stay still; you wouldn't trust her near a sharp knife. ‘What to do?’ Norris whispers. Jane Rochford is standing back against the tapestries, where nymphs entwine themselves in trees; the hem of her skirt is dipped in some fabulous stream, and her veil brushes a cloud, from which a goddess peeps. She lifts her face; her look is one of sober triumph.

110I could have the archbishop fetched, he thinks. Anne wouldn't rage and stamp under his eyes. Now she has Norris by the sleeve; what is she doing? ‘My sister has done this to spite me. She thinks she will sail about the court with her great belly, and pity me and laugh at me, because I have lost my own child.’

111‘I feel sure that, if the matter were to be viewed –’ her father begins.

112‘Get out! ’ she says. ‘Leave me, and tell her – Mistress Stafford – that she has forfeited any claim on my family. I don't know her. She is no longer a Boleyn.’

113‘Wiltshire, go. ’ Henry adds, in the tone in which a schoolboy is promised a whipping, ‘I shall speak to you later.’ He says to the king, innocent, ‘Majesty, shall we do no business today?’ Henry laughs.

114Lady Rochford runs beside him. He does not slow his pace so she has to pick up her skirts. ‘Did you really know, Master Secretary? Or did you say that just to see their faces?’

115‘You are too good for me. You see through all my ploys. ’ ‘Lucky I see through Lady Carey's.’

116‘It was you who detected her? ’ Who else, he thinks? With her husband George away she has no one to spy on.

117Mary's bed is strewn with silks – flame, orange, carnation – as if a fire has broken out in the mattress. Across stools and a window seat trail lawn smocks, entangled ribbons and unpaired gloves. Are those the same green stockings she once revealed to the knee, running full- tilt towards him on the day she proposed marriage?

118He stands in the doorway. ‘William Stafford, eh?’ She straightens up, her cheeks flushed, a velvet slipper in her hand.

119Now the secret is out, she has loosened her bodice. Her eyes slide past him. ‘Good girl, Jane, bring that here.’ ‘Excuse me, Master.’ It is Jane Seymour, tiptoeing past him with an armful of folded laundry. Then a boy after her, bumping a yellow leather chest. ‘Just here, Mark.’

120‘Behold me, Master Secretary,’ Smeaton says. ‘I'm making myself useful.’

121Jane kneels before the chest and swings it opens. ‘Cambric to line it?’

122‘Never mind cambric. Where's my other shoe? ’ ‘Best be gone,’ Lady Rochford warns. ‘If Uncle Norfolk sees you he'll take a stick to you. Your royal sister thinks the king has fathered your child. She says, why would it be William Stafford?’ Mary snorts. ‘So much does she know. What would Anne know of taking a man for himself? You can tell her he loves me. You can tell her he cares for me and no one else does. No one else in this world.’ He leans down and whispers, ‘Mistress Seymour, I did not think you were a friend of Lady Carey.’

123‘No one else will help her. ’ She keeps her head down; the nape of her neck flushes pink.

124‘Those bed hangings are mine,’ Mary says. ‘Pull them down.’ Embroidered on them, he sees, are the arms of her husband Will Carey, dead what – seven years now? ‘I can unpick the badges.’ Of course: what use are a dead man and his devices? ‘Where's my gilt basin, Rochford, have you got it?’ She gives the yellow chest a kick; it is stamped all over with Anne's falcon badge. ‘If they see me with this, they'll take it off me and tip my stuff in the road.’ ‘If you can wait an hour,’ he says, ‘I'll send someone with a chest for you.’

125‘Will it be stamped Thomas Cromwell? God save me, I haven't an hour. I know what! ’ She begins to haul the sheets off the bed. ‘Make bundles!’

126‘For shame,’ Jane Rochford says. ‘And run off like a servant who's stolen the silver? Besides, you won't need these things down in Kent.

127Stafford has a farm or something, hasn't he? Some little manor? Still, you can sell them. You'll have to, I suppose. ’ ‘My sweet brother will help me when he returns from France. He will not see me cut off.’

128‘I beg to differ. Lord Rochford will be sensible, as I am, that you have disgraced all your kin. ’

129Mary turns on her, arm sweeping out like a cat flashing claws. ‘This is better than your wedding day, Rochford. It's like getting a houseful of presents. You can't love, you don't know what love is, and all you can do is envy those who do know, and rejoice in their troubles. You are a wretched unhappy woman whose husband loathes her, and I pity you, and I pity my sister Anne, I would not change places with her, I had rather be in the bed of an honest poor gentleman who cares only for me than be like the queen and only able to keep her man with old whore's tricks – yes, I know it is so, he has told Norris what she offers him, and it doesn't conduce to getting a child, I can tell you. And now she is afraid of every woman at court – have you looked at her, have you looked at her lately? Seven years she schemed to be queen, and God protect us from answered prayers. She thought it would be like her coronation every day.’ Mary, breathless, reaches into the mill of her possessions and throws Jane Seymour a pair of sleeves. ‘Take these, sweetheart, with my blessing. You have the only kind heart at court.’

130Jane Rochford, in departing, slams the door.

131‘Let her go,’ Jane Seymour murmurs. ‘Forget her.’ ‘Good riddance!’ Mary snaps. ‘I must be glad she didn't pick my things over, and offer me a price.’ In the silence, her words go crash, flap, rattling around the room like trapped birds who panic and shit down the walls: he has told Norris what she offers him. By night, her ingenious proceedings. He is rephrasing it: as, surely, one must? I'll bet Norris is all ears. Christ alive, these people! The boy Mark is standing, gapey-faced, behind the door. ‘Mark, if you stand there like a landed fish I shall have you filleted and fried.’ The boy flees.

132When Mistress Seymour has tied the bundles they look like birds with broken wings. He takes them from her and reties them, not with silk tags but serviceable string. ‘Do you always carry string, Master Secretary?’

133Mary says, ‘Oh, my book of love poems! Shelton has it.’ She pitches from the room.

134‘She'll need that,’ he says. ‘No poems down in Kent.’ ‘Lady Rochford would tell her that sonnets don't keep you warm.

135Not,’ Jane says, ‘that I've ever had a sonnet. So I wouldn't really know.’

136Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain? He turns. ‘Jane –’ ‘Master Secretary?’ She dips her knees and rolls sideways on to the mattress; she sits up, drags her skirts from under her, finds her footing: gripping the bedpost, she scrambles up, reaches above her head, and begins to unhook the hangings.

137‘Come down! I'll do that. I'll send a wagon after Mistress Stafford.

138She can't carry all she owns. ’

139‘I can do it. Master Secretary doesn't deal with bed hangings. ’ ‘Master Secretary deals with everything. I'm surprised I don't make the king's shirts.’

140Jane sways gently above him. Her feet sink into the feathers. ‘Queen Katherine does. Still.’

141‘The Dowager Katherine. Come down. ’

142She hops down to the rushes, giving her skirts a shake. ‘Even now after all that has passed between them. She sent a new parcel last week.’

143‘I thought the king had forbidden her. ’

144‘Anne says they should be torn up and used for, well, you know what for, in a jakes. He was angry. Possibly because he doesn't like the word “jakes”. ’

145‘No more does he. ’ The king deprecates coarse language, and not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling some dirty story. ‘Is it true what Mary says? That the queen is afraid?’ ‘For now he is sighing over Mistress Shelton. Well, you know that.

146You have observed. ’

147‘But surely that is harmless? A king is obliged to be gallant, till he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the fire with his chaplains. ’

148‘Explain it to Anne, she doesn't see it. She wanted to send Shelton away. But her father and her brother would not have it. Because the Sheltons are their cousins, so if Henry is going to look elsewhere, they want it to be close to home. Incest is so popular these days! Uncle Norfolk said – I mean, His Grace –’

149‘It's all right,’ he says, distracted, ‘I call him that too.’ Jane puts a hand over her mouth. It is a child's hand, with tiny gleaming nails. ‘I shall think of that when I am in the country and have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew Cromwell?’ ‘You are leaving court?’ No doubt she has a husband in view: some country husband.

150‘I hope that when I have served another season I might be released. ’ Mary rips into the room, snarling. She juggles two embroidered cushions above the bulk of her child, a bulk which now seems evident; she has a hand free for her gilt basin, in which is her poetry book. She throws down the cushions, opens her fist and scatters a handful of silver buttons, which rattle into the basin like dice. ‘Shelton had these.