of experience?’ Tom says.
Edward resettles his cap primly. ‘How old would our sister Jane be?’
‘Twenty-one, twenty-two. Why?’
Edward looks down at the board, reaches for his queen. He sees how he's trapped. He glances up in appreciation. ‘How did you manage that?’
Later, he sits with a blank piece of paper before him. He means to write a letter to Cranmer and cast it to the four winds, send it searching through Europe. He picks up his pen but does not write. He revisits in his mind his conversation with Henry, about the ruby. His king imagines he would take part in a backstairs deceit, the kind that might have entertained him in the days when he antiqued cupids and sold them to cardinals. But to defend yourself against such accusations makes you seem guilty. If Henry does not fully trust him, is it surprising? A prince is alone: in his council chamber, in his bedchamber, and finally in Hell's antechamber, stripped – as Harry Percy said – for Judgment.
This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travellers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind. He wonders where Tom Wyatt is, and in what sort of trouble. He doesn't think he can sleep: though not because he's worried about Wyatt. He goes to the window. The moon, as if disgraced, trails rags of black cloud.
In the gardens, torches burn in wall brackets, but he walks away from the light. The faint push and pull of the ocean is steady and insistent as his own heartbeat. He knows he shares this darkness, and within a moment there is a footstep, a rustle of skirts, a faint breathy gulp, a hand sliding on his arm. ‘You,’ Mary says.
‘Me.’
‘Do you know they unbolted the door between them?’ She laughs, a merciless giggle. ‘She is in his arms, naked as she was born. She can't change her mind now.’
‘Tonight I thought they would quarrel.’
‘They did. They like quarrelling. She claims Norfolk has broken her arm. Henry called her a Magdalene and some other names I forget, I think they were Roman ladies. Not Lucrece.’
‘No. At least, I hope not. What did she want the Bible for?’
‘To swear him. Before witnesses. Me. Norris. He made a binding promise. They are married in God's sight. And he swears he will marry her again in England and crown her queen when spring comes.’
He thinks of the nun, at Canterbury: if you enter into a form of marriage with this unworthy woman, you will not reign seven months.
‘So now,’ Mary says, ‘it is just a question of whether he will find he is able to do the deed.’
‘Mary.’ He takes her hand. ‘Don't frighten me.’
‘Henry is timid. He thinks you expect a kingly performance. But if he is shy, Anne will know how to help.’ She adds, carefully, ‘I mean to say, I have advised her.’ She slides her hand on to his shoulder. ‘So now, what about us? It has been a weary struggle to bring them here. I think we have earned our recreation.’
No answer. ‘You're not still frightened of my uncle Norfolk?’
‘Mary, I am terrified of your uncle Norfolk.’
Still, that's not the reason, not the reason why he hesitates, not quite pulling away. Her lips brush his. She asks, ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I was thinking that if I were not the king's most dutiful servant, it would be possible to be on the next boat out.’
‘Where would we go?’
He doesn't remember inviting a friend. ‘East. Though I grant this would not be a good starting point.’ East of the Boleyns, he thinks. East of everybody. He is thinking of the Middle Sea, not these northern waters; and one night especially, a warm midnight in a house in Larnaca: Venetian lights spilling out on to the dangerous waterfront, the slap of slave feet on tiles, a perfume of incense and coriander. He puts an arm around Mary, encountering something soft, totally unexpected: fox fur. ‘Clever of you,’ he says.
‘Oh, we brought everything. Every stitch. In case we are here till winter.’
A glow of light on flesh. Her throat very white, very soft. All things seem possible, if the duke stays indoors. His fingertip teases out the fur till fur meets flesh. Her shoulder is warm, scented and a little damp. He can feel the bounce of her pulse.
A sound behind him. He turns, dagger in hand. Mary screams, pulls at his arm. The point of the weapon comes to rest against a man's doublet, under the breastbone. ‘All right, all right,’ says a sober, irritated English voice. ‘Put that away.’
‘Heavens,’ Mary says. ‘You almost murdered William Stafford.’
He backs the stranger into the light. When he sees his face, not till then, he draws back the blade. He doesn't know who Stafford is: somebody's horse-keeper? ‘William, I thought you weren't coming,’ Mary says.
‘If I didn't, it seems you had a reserve.’
‘You don't know what a woman's life is! You think you've fixed something with a man, and you haven't. He says he'll meet you, and he doesn't turn up.’
It is a cry from the heart. ‘Give you good night,’ he says. Mary turns as if to say, oh, don't go. ‘Time I said my prayers.’
A wind has blown up from the Narrow Sea, snapping at the rigging in the harbour, rattling the windows inland. Tomorrow, he thinks, it may rain. He lights a candle and goes back to his letter. But his letter has no attraction for him. Leaves flurry from the gardens, from the orchards. Images move in the air beyond the glass, gulls blown like ghosts: a flash of his wife Elizabeth's white cap, as she follows him to the door on her last morning. Except that she didn't: she was sleeping, wrapped in damp linen, under the yellow turkey quilt. If he thinks of the fortune that brought him here he thinks equally of the fortune that brought him to that morning five years ago, going out of Austin Friars a married man, files of Wolsey's business under his arm: was he happy then? He doesn't know.
That night in Cyprus, long ago now, he had been on the verge of handing his resignation to his bank, or at least of asking them for letters of introduction to take him east. He was curious to see the Holy Land, its plant life and people, to kiss the stones where the disciples had walked, to bargain in the hidden quarters of strange cities and in black tents where veiled women scuttle like cockroaches into corners. That night his fortunes had been in equipoise. In the room behind him, as he looked out over the harbour lights, he heard a woman's throaty laughter, her soft ‘al-hamdu lillah’ as she shook the ivory dice in her hand. He heard her spill them, heard them rattle and come to rest: ‘What is it?’
East is high. West is low. Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.
‘It is three and three.’
Is that low? You must say it is. Fate has not given him a shove, more of a gentle tap. ‘I shall go home.’
‘Not tonight, though. It is too late for the tide.’
Next day he felt the gods at his back, like a breeze. He turned back towards Europe. Home then was a narrow shuttered house on a quiet canal, Anselma kneeling, creamily naked under her trailing
