him out of the king’s private rooms. Not smiling for once, rather stern, he says, ‘I wouldn’t be his tax collector.’
He thinks, are the most remarkable moments of my life to be spent under the scrutiny of Henry Norris?
‘He killed his father’s best men. Empson, Dudley. Didn’t the cardinal get one of their houses?’
A spider scuttles from under a stool and presents him with a fact. ‘Empson’s house on Fleet Street. Granted the ninth of October, the first year of this reign.’
‘This glorious reign,’ Norris says: as if he were issuing a correction.
Gregory is fifteen as summer begins. He sits a horse beautifully, and there are good reports of his swordsmanship. His Greek … well, his Greek is where it was.
But he has a problem. ‘People in Cambridge are laughing at my greyhounds.’
‘Why?’ The black dogs are a matched pair. They have curving muscled necks and dainty feet; they keep their eyes lowered, mild and demure, till they sight prey.
‘They say, why would you have dogs that people can’t see at night? Only felons have dogs like that. They say I hunt in the forests, against the law. They say I hunt badgers, like a churl.’
‘What do you want?’ he asks. ‘White ones, or some spots of colour?’
‘Either would be correct.’
‘I’ll take your black dogs.’ Not that he has time to go out, but Richard or Rafe will use them.
‘But what if people laugh?’
‘Really, Gregory,’ Johane says. ‘This is your father. I assure you, no one will dare laugh.’
When the weather is too wet to hunt, Gregory sits poring over The Golden Legend; he likes the lives of the saints. ‘Some of these things are true,’ he says, ‘some not.’ He reads Le Morte d’Arthur, and because it is the new edition they crowd around him, looking over his shoulder at the title page. ‘Here beginneth the first book of the most noble and worthy prince King Arthur sometime King of Great Britain …’ In the forefront of the picture, two couples embrace. On a high-stepping horse is a man with a mad hat, made of coiled tubes like fat serpents. Alice says, sir, did you wear a hat like that when you were young, and he says, I had a different colour for each day in the week, but mine were bigger.
Behind this man, a woman rides pillion. ‘Do you think this represents Lady Anne?’ Gregory asks. ‘They say the king does not like to be parted from her, so he perches her up behind him like a farmer’s wife.’ The woman has big eyes, and looks sick from jolting; it might just be Anne. There is a small castle, not much taller than a man, with a plank for a drawbridge. The birds, circling above, look like flying daggers. Gregory says, ‘Our king takes his descent from this Arthur. He was never really dead but waited in the forest biding his time, or possibly in a lake. He is several centuries old. Merlin is a wizard. He comes later. You will see. There are twenty-one chapters. If it keeps on raining I mean to read them all. Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.’
When the king next calls him to court, he wants a message sent to Wolsey. A Breton merchant whose ship was seized by the English eight years ago is complaining he has not had the compensation promised. No one can find the paperwork. It was the cardinal who handled the case – will he remember it? ‘I’m sure he will,’ he says. ‘That will be the ship with powdered pearls for ballast, the hold packed with unicorns’ horns?’
God forbid! says Charles Brandon; but the king laughs and says, ‘That will be the one.’
‘If the sums are in doubt, or indeed the whole case, may I look after it?’
The king hesitates. ‘I’m not sure you have a locus standi in the matter.’
It is at this moment that Brandon, quite unexpectedly, gives him a testimonial. ‘Harry, let him. When this fellow has finished, the Breton will be paying you.’
Dukes revolve in their spheres. When they confer, it is not for pleasure in each other’s society; they like to be surrounded by their own courts, by men who reflect them and are subservient to them. For pleasure, they are as likely to be found with a kennel-man as another duke; so it is that he spends an amiable hour with Brandon, looking over the king’s hounds. It is not yet the season for hunting the hart, so the running dogs are well fed in their kennels; their musical barking rises into the evening air, and the tracking dogs, silent as they are trained to be, rise on their hind legs and watch, dripping saliva, the progress of their suppers. The kennel children are carrying baskets of bread and bones, buckets of offal and basins of pigs’-blood pottage. Charles Brandon inhales, appreciative: like a dowager in a rose garden.
A huntsman calls forward a favourite bitch, white patched with chestnut, Barbada, four years old. He straddles her and pulls back her head to show her eyes, clouded with a fine film. He will hate to kill her, but he doubts she will be much use this season. He, Cromwell, cups the bitch’s jaw in his hand. ‘You can draw off the membrane with a curved needle. I’ve seen it done. You need a steady hand and to be quick. She doesn’t like it, but then she won’t like to be blind.’ He runs his hand over her ribs, feels the panicked throb of her little animal heart. ‘The needle must be very fine. And just this length.’ He shows them, between finger and thumb. ‘Let me talk to your smith.’
Suffolk looks sideways at him. ‘You’re a useful sort of man.’
They walk away. The duke says, ‘Look here. The problem is my wife.’ He waits. ‘I have always wanted Henry to have what he wants, I have always been loyal to him. Even when he was talking about cutting my head off because I’d married his sister. But now, what am I to do? Katherine is the queen. Surely? My wife was always a friend of hers. She’s beginning to talk of, I don’t know, I’d give my life for the queen, that sort of thing. And for Norfolk’s niece to have precedence over my wife, who was Queen of France – we can’t live with it. You see?’
He nods. I see. ‘Besides,’ the duke says, ‘I hear Wyatt is due back from Calais.’ Yes, and? ‘I wonder if I ought to tell him. Tell Henry, I mean. Poor devil.’
‘My lord, leave it alone,’ he says. The duke lapses into what, in another man, you would call silent thought.
Summer: the king is hunting. If he wants him, he has to chase him, and if he is sent for, he goes. Henry visits, on his summer progress, his friends in Wiltshire, in Sussex, in Kent, or stays at his own houses, or the ones he has taken from the cardinal. Sometimes, even now, the queen in her stout little person rides out with a bow, when the king hunts within one of his great parks, or in some lord’s park, where the deer are driven to the archers. Lady Anne rides too – on separate occasions – and enjoys the pursuit. But there is a season to leave the ladies at home, and ride into the forest with the trackers and the running hounds; to rise before dawn when the light is clouded like a pearl; to consult with the huntsman, and then unharbour the chosen stag. You do not know where the chase will end, or when.
Harry Norris says to him, laughing, your turn soon, Master Cromwell, if he continues to favour you as he does. A word of advice: as the day begins, and you ride out, pick a ditch. Picture it in your mind. When he has worn out three good horses, when the horn is blowing for another chase, you will be dreaming of that ditch, you will imagine lying down in it: dead leaves and cool ditch-water will be all you desire.
He looks at Norris: his charming self-deprecation. He thinks, you were
