you are found out in treason the law will take its course with you, as if you were any other subject. Your nephew is threatening to invade us in your name.’
‘That will not happen. Not in my name.’
‘That is what I say, madam.’ He softens his tone. ‘I say the Emperor is busy with the Turks, he is not so fond of his aunt – saving your presence – that he will raise another army. But others say, oh, be quiet, Cromwell, what do you know? They say we must fortify our harbours, we must raise troops, we must put the country in a state of alert. Chapuys, as you know, continually agitates with Charles to blockade our ports and impound our goods and our merchant ships abroad. He urges war in every dispatch.’
‘I have no knowledge of what Chapuys puts in his dispatches.’
It is a lie so staggering that he has to admire it. Having delivered it, Katherine seems weakened; she sinks down again into her chair, and before he can do it for her she wearily bends from the waist to pick up her sewing; her fingers are swollen, and bending seems to leave her breathless. She sits for a moment, recovering herself, and when she speaks again she is calm, deliberate. ‘Master Cromwell, I know I have failed you. That is to say, I have failed your country, which by now is my country too. The king was a good husband to me, but I could not do that which is most necessary for a wife to do. Nevertheless, I was, I am, a wife – you see, do you, that it is impossible for me to believe that for twenty years I was a harlot? Now the truth is, I have brought England little good, but I would be loath to bring her any harm.’
‘But you do, madam. You may not will it, but the harm is done.’
‘England is not served by a lie.’
‘That is what Dr Cranmer thinks. So he will annul your marriage, whether you come to the court or not.’
‘Dr Cranmer will be excommunicated too. Does it not cause him a qualm? Is he so lost to everything?’
‘This archbishop is the best guardian of the church, madam, that we have seen in many centuries.’ He thinks of what Bainham said, before they burned him; in England there have been eight hundred years of mystification, just six years of truth and light; six years, since the gospel in English began to come into the kingdom. ‘Cranmer is no heretic. He believes as the king believes. He will reform what needs reformation, that is all.’
‘I know where this will end. You will take the church's lands and give them to the king.’ She laughs. ‘Oh, you are silent? You will. You mean to do it.’ She sounds almost light-hearted, as people do sometimes when they're told they're dying. ‘Master Cromwell, you may assure the king I will not bring an army against him. Tell him I pray for him daily. Some people, those who do not know him as I do, they say, “Oh, he will work his will, he will have his desire at any price.” But I know that he needs to be on the side of the light. He is not a man like you, who just packs up his sins in his saddlebags and carries them from country to country, and when they grow too heavy whistles up a mule or two, and soon commands a train of them and a troop of muleteers. Henry may err, but he needs to be forgiven. I therefore believe, and will continue to believe, that he will turn out of this path of error, in order to be at peace with himself. And peace is what we all wish for, I am sure.’
‘What a placid end you make, madam. “Peace is what we all wish for.” Like an abbess. You are quite sure by the way that you would not think of becoming an abbess?’
A smile. Quite a broad smile. ‘I shall be sorry if I don't see you again. You are so much quicker in conversation than the dukes.’
‘The dukes will be back.’
‘I am braced. Is there news of my lady Suffolk?’
‘The king says she is dying. Brandon has no heart for anything.’
‘I can well believe it,’ she murmurs. ‘Her income as dowager queen of France dies with her, and that is the greater part of his revenue. Still, no doubt you will arrange him a loan, at some iniquitous rate of interest.’ She looks up. ‘My daughter will be curious to know I have seen you. She believes you were kind to her.’
He only remembers giving her a stool to sit on. Her life must be bleak, if she remembers that.
‘Properly, she should have remained standing, awaiting a sign from me.’
Her own pain-racked little daughter. She may smile, but she doesn't yield an inch. Julius Caesar would have had more compunction. Hannibal.
‘Tell me,’ she says, testing the ground. ‘The king would read a letter from me?’
Henry has taken to tearing her letters up unread, or burning them. He says they disgust him with their expressions of love. He does not have it in him to tell her this. ‘Then rest for an hour,’ she says, ‘while I write it. Unless you will stay a night with us? I should be glad of company at supper.’
‘Thank you, but I must start back, the council meets tomorrow. Besides, if I stayed, where would I put my mules? Not to mention my team of drivers.’
‘Oh, the stables are half-empty. The king makes sure I am kept short of mounts. He thinks that I will give my household the slip and ride to the coast and escape on a ship to Flanders.’
‘And will you?’
He has retrieved her thimble; he hands it back; she bounces it in her hand as if it were a die and she were ready to cast it.
‘No. I shall stay here. Or go where I am sent. As the king wills. As a wife should.’
Until the excommunication, he thinks. That will free you from all bonds, as wife, as subject. ‘This is yours too,’ he says. He opens his palm; in it a needle, tip towards her.
The word is about town that Thomas More has fallen into poverty. He laughs about it with Master Secretary Gardiner. ‘Alice was a rich widow when he married her,’ Gardiner says. ‘And he has land of his own; how can he be poor? And the daughters, he's married them well.’
‘And he still has his pension from the king.’ He is sifting through paperwork for Stephen, who is preparing to appear as leading counsel for Henry at Dunstable. He has filed away all the depositions from the Blackfriars hearings, which seem to have happened in another era.
‘Angels defend us,’ Gardiner says, ‘is there anything you don't file?’
‘If we keep on to the bottom of this chest I'll find your father's love letters to your mother.’ He blows dust off the last batch. ‘There you are.’ The papers hit the table. ‘Stephen, what can we do for John Frith? He was your pupil at Cambridge. Don't abandon him.’
But Gardiner shakes his head and busies himself with the documents, leafing through them, humming under his breath, exclaiming ‘Well, who'd have known!’ and ‘Here's a nice point!’
He gets a boat down to Chelsea. The ex-Chancellor is at ease in his parlour, daughter Margaret translating from the Greek in a drone barely audible; as he approaches, he hears him pick her up on some error. ‘Leave us, daughter,’ More says, when he sees him. ‘I won't have you in this devil's company.’ But Margaret looks up and smiles, and More rises from his chair, a little stiff as if his back is bad, and offers a hand.
It is Reginald Pole, lying in Italy, who says he is a devil. The point is, he means it; it's not an image with him, as in a fable, but something he takes
