off to her own apartments. He, Cromwell, goes about like some public poet, carrying assurances of desire, each to each.
It is hardly three o'clock, and already the room is half-dark. He picks up the younger child, who flops against his shoulder and falls asleep with the speed at which someone pushed falls off a wall. ‘Helen,’ he says, ‘this household is full of pert young men, and they will all put themselves forward in teaching you to read, bringing you presents and trying to sweeten your days. Do learn, and take the presents, and be happy here with us, but if anyone is too forward, you must tell me, or tell Rafe Sadler. He is the boy with the little red beard. Though I should not say boy.’ It will be twenty years, soon, since he brought Rafe in from his father's house, a lowering, dark day like this, rain bucketing from the heavens, the child slumped against his shoulder as he carried him into his hall at Fenchurch Street.
The storms had kept them in Calais for ten days. Ships out of Boulogne were wrecked, Antwerp flooded, much of the countryside put under water. He would like to get messages to his friends, enquiring after their lives and property, but the roads are impassable, Calais itself a floating island upon which a happy monarch reigns. He goes to the king's lodgings to ask for an audience – business doesn't stop in bad weather – but he is told, ‘The king cannot see you this morning. He and Lady Anne are composing some music for the harp.’
Rafe catches his eye and they walk away. ‘Let us hope in time they have a little song to show for it.’
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Norris get drunk together in a low tavern. They swear eternal friendship. But their followers have a fight in the inn yard and roll each other in mud.
He never sets eyes on Mary Boleyn. Presumably she and Stafford have found some bolt-hole where they can compose together.
By candlelight, at noon, Lord Berners shows him his library, limping energetically from desk to desk, handling with care the old folios from which he has made his scholarly translations. Here is a romance of King Arthur: ‘When I started reading it I almost gave up the project. It was clear to me it was too fantastical to be true. But little by little, as I read, you know, it appeared to me that there was a moral in this tale.’ He does not say what it is. ‘And here is Froissart done into English, which His Majesty himself bade me undertake. I could not do other, for he had just lent me five hundred pounds. Would you like to see my translations from the Italian? They are private ones, I have not sent them to the printer.’
He spends an afternoon with the manuscripts, and they discuss them at supper. Lord Berners holds a position, chancellor of the exchequer, which Henry has given him for life, but because he is not in London and attending to it, it does not bring him in much money, or the influence it should. ‘I know you are a good man for business. Might you in confidence look over my accounts? They're not what you'd call in order.’
Lord Berners leaves him alone with the dog's breakfast that he calls his ledgers. An hour passes: the wind whistles across the rooftops, the candle flames tremble, hail batters the glass. He hears the scrape of his host's bad foot: an anxious face peers around the door. ‘What joy?’
All he can find is money owing. This is what you get for devoting yourself to scholarship and serving the king across the sea, when you could be at court with sharp teeth and eyes and elbows, ready to seize your advantage. ‘I wish you'd called on me earlier. There are always things that can be done.’
‘Ah, but who knew you, Master Cromwell?’ the old man says. ‘One exchanged letters, yes. Wolsey's business, king's business. But I never knew you. It did not seem at all likely I should know you, until now.’
On the day they are finally ready to embark, the boy from the alchemists' inn turns up. ‘You at last! What have you got for me?’
The boy displays his empty hands, and launches into English, of a sort. ‘On dit those magi have retoured to Paris.’
‘Then I am disappointed.’
‘You are hard to find, monsieur. I go to the place where le roi Henri and the Grande Putain are lodged, “je cherche milord Cremuel,” and the persons there laughed at me and beat me.’
‘That is because I am not a milord.’
‘In that case, I do not know what a milord in your country looks like.’ He offers the boy a coin for his efforts, and another for the beating, but he shakes his head. ‘I thought to take service with you, monsieur. I have made up my mind to go travelling.’
‘Your name is?’
‘Christophe.’
‘You have a family name?’
‘Ça ne fait rien.’
‘You have parents?’
A shrug.
‘Your age?’
‘What age would you say?’
‘I know you can read. Can you fight?’
‘There is much fighting chez vous?’
Christophe has his own squat build; he needs feeding up, but a year or two from now he will be hard to knock over. He puts him at fifteen, no more. ‘You are in trouble with the law?’
‘In France,’ he says, disparagingly: as one might say, in far Cathay.
‘You are a thief?’
The boy makes a jabbing motion, invisible knife in his fist.
‘You left someone dead?’
‘He didn't look well.’
He grins. ‘You're sure you want Christophe for your name? You can change it now, but not later.’
‘You understand me, monsieur.’
Christ, of course I do. You could be my son. Then he looks at him closely, to make sure that he isn't; that he isn't one of these brawling children the cardinal spoke of, whom he has left by the Thames, and not impossibly by other rivers, in other climes. But Christophe's eyes are a wide, untroubled blue. ‘You are not afraid of the sea voyage?’ he asks. ‘In my house in London there are many French speakers. You'll soon be one of us.’
Now at Austin Friars, Christophe pursues him with questions. Those magi, what is it they have? Is it a carte of buried treasure? Is it – he flaps his arms – the instructions for one to make a flying machine? Is it a machine to faire great explosions, or a military dragon, breathes out fire?
He says, ‘Have you ever heard of Cicero?’
‘No. But I am prepared to hear of him. Till today I have never heard of Bishop Gardineur. On dit you have stole his strawberry beds and give them to the king's mistress, and now he intends …’ the boy breaks off, and again gives his impression of a military dragon, ‘to ruin you utterly and pursue you unto death.’
‘And well beyond, if I know my man.’
There have been worse accounts of his situation. He wants to say, she is not a mistress, not any more, but the secret – though it must soon be an open secret – is not his to tell.
Twenty-fifth of January 1533, dawn, a chapel at Whitehall, his friend Rowland
