kept in her room, which was precious to her, she had told him, the most precious thing I own. Excuse me just a moment, she had said to him; she prayed in her own language, now coaxing, now almost threatening, and she must have teased from her silver saints some flicker of grace, or perceived some deflection in their glinting rectitude, because she stood up and turned to him, saying, ‘I'm ready now,’ tugging apart the silk ties of her gown so that he could take her breasts in his hands.
Rafe is standing over him, saying it is seven o'clock already. The king has gone to Mass.
He has slept in a bed of phantoms. ‘We did not want to wake you. You never sleep late.’
The wind is a muted sigh in the chimneys. A handful of rain like gravel rattles against the window, swirls away, and is thrown back again. ‘We may be in Calais for some time,’ he says.
When Wolsey had gone to France, five years ago, he had asked him to watch the situation at court and to pass on a report of when the king and Anne went to bed. He had said, how will I know when it happens? The cardinal had said, ‘I should think you'll know by his face.’
The wind has dropped and the rain respited by the time he reaches the church, but the streets have turned to mud, and the people waiting to see the lords come out still have their coats pulled over their heads, like a new race of walking decapitees. He pushes through the crowd, then threads and whispers his way through the gathered gentlemen: s'il vous plaît, c'est urgent, make way for a big sinner. They laugh and let him through.
Anne comes out on the Governor's arm. He looks tense – it seems his gout is troubling him – but he is attentive to her, murmuring pleasantries to which he gets no response; her expression is adjusted to a careful blankness. The king has a Wingfield lady on his arm, face uptilted, chattering. He is taking no notice of her at all. He looks large, broad, benign. His regal glance scans the crowd. It alights on him. The king smiles.
As he leaves the church, Henry puts on his hat. It is a big hat, a new hat. And in that hat there is a feather.
The two children sit on a bench in the hall of Austin Friars. They are so small that their legs stick straight out in front of them, and as they are still in smocks one cannot tell their sex. Under their caps, their dimpled faces beam. That they look so fat and contented is a credit to the young woman, Helen Barre, who now unwinds the thread of her tale: daughter of a bankrupt small merchant out of Essex, wife of one Matthew Barre who beat her and deserted her, ‘leaving me,’ she says, indicating, ‘with that one in my belly.’
The neighbours are always coming at him with parish problems. Unsafe cellar doors. A noisome goose house. A husband and wife who shout and bang pans all night, so the next house can't get to sleep. He tries not to fret if these things cut into his time, and he minds Helen less than a goose house. Mentally, he takes her out of cheap shrunken wool and re-dresses her in some figured velvet he saw yesterday, six shillings the yard. Her hands, he sees, are skinned and swollen from rough work; he supplies kid gloves.
‘Though when I say he deserted me, it may be that he is dead. He was a great drinker and a brawler. A man who knew him told me he came off worst in a fight, and I should seek him at the bottom of the river. But someone else saw him on the quays at Tilbury, with a travelling bag. So which am I – wife or widow?’
‘I will look into it. Though I think you would rather I didn't find him. How have you lived?’
‘When he went first I was stitching for a sailmaker. Since I came up to London to search, I've been hiring out by the day. I have been in the laundry at a convent near Paul's, helping at the yearly wash of their bed linen. They find me a good worker, they say they will give me a pallet in the attics, but they won't take the children.’
Another instance of the church's charity. He runs up against them all the time. ‘We cannot have you a slave to a set of hypocrite women. You must come here. I am sure you will be useful. The house is filling up all the time, and I am building, as you see.’ She must be a good girl, he thinks, to turn her back on making a living in the obvious way; if she walked along the street, she wouldn't be short of offers. ‘They tell me you would like to learn to read, so you can read the gospel.’
‘Some women I met took me to what they call a night school. It was in a cellar at Broadgate. Before that, I knew Noah, the Three Kings, and father Abraham, but St Paul I had never heard of. At home on our farm we had pucks who used to turn the milk and blow up thunderstorms, but I am told they are not Christians. I wish we had stayed farming, for all that. My father was no hand at town life.’ Her eyes, anxious, follow the children. They have launched themselves off the bench and toddled across the flagstones to see the picture that is growing on the wall, and their every step causes her to hold her breath. The workman is a German, a young boy Hans recommended for a simple job, and he turns around – he speaks no English – to explain to the children what he is doing. A rose. Three lions, see them jump. Two black birds.
‘Red,’ the elder child cries.
‘She knows colours,’ Helen says, pink with pride. ‘She is also beginning on one-two-three.’
The space where the arms of Wolsey used to be is being repainted with his own newly granted arms: azure, on a fess between three lions rampant or, a rose gules, barbed vert, between two Cornish choughs proper. ‘You see, Helen,’ he says, ‘those black birds were Wolsey's emblem.’ He laughs. ‘There are people who hoped they would never see them again.’
‘There are other people, of our sort, who do not understand it.’
‘You mean night school people?’
‘They say, how can a man who loves the gospel, have loved such a man as that?’
‘I never liked his haughty manners, you know, and his processions every day, the state he kept. And yet there was never a man more active in the service of England since England began. And also,’ he says sadly, ‘when you came into his confidence, he was a man of such grace and ease … Helen, can you come here today?’ He is thinking of those nuns and the yearly wash of their bed linen. He is imagining the cardinal's appalled face. Laundry women followed his train as whores follow an army, hot from their hour-by-hour exertions. At York Place he had a bath made, deep enough for a man to stand up in it, the room heated by a stove such as you find in the Low Countries, and many a time he had negotiated business with the cardinal's bobbing, boiled-looking head. Henry has taken it over now, and splashes about in it with favoured gentlemen, who submit to being ducked under the water and half-drowned by their lord, if his mood takes him that way.
The painter offers the brush to the elder child. Helen glows. ‘Careful, darling,’ she says. A blob of blue is applied. You are a little adept, the painter says. Gefällt es Ihnen, Herr Cromwell, sind Sie stolz darauf?'
He says to Helen, he asks if I am pleased and proud. She says, if you are not, your friends will be proud for you.
I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person. Anne to Henry. Henry
