trouble is, though Anne has remade the court, there are still people who knew her before, in the days when she came from France, when she set herself to seduce Harry Percy. They compete to tell stories of how she is not worthy. Or not human. How she is a snake. Or a swan. Una candida cerva. One single white doe, concealed in leaves of silver-grey; shivering, she hides in the trees, waiting for the lover who will turn her back from animal to goddess. ‘Send me back to Italy,’ Wyatt says. Her dark, her lustrous, her slanting eyes: she haunts me. She comes to me in my solitary bed at night.
‘Solitary? I don't think so.’
Wyatt laughs. ‘You're right. I take it where I can.’
‘You drink too much. Water your wine.’
‘It could have been different.’
‘Everything could.’
‘You never think about the past.’
‘I never talk about it.’
Wyatt pleads, ‘Send me away somewhere.’
‘I will. When the king needs an ambassador.’
‘Is it true that the Medici have offered for the Princess Mary's hand?’
‘Not Princess Mary, you mean the Lady Mary. I have asked the king to think about it. But they are not grand enough for him. You know, if Gregory showed any interest in banking, I would look for a bride for him in Florence. It would be pleasant to have an Italian girl in the house.’
‘Send me back there. Deploy me where I can be useful, to you or the king, as here I am useless and worse than useless to myself, and necessary to no one's pleasure.’
He says, ‘Oh, by the bleached bones of Becket. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’
Norfolk has his own view of the queen's friends. He rattles a little while he expresses it, his relics clinking, his grey disordered eyebrows working over wide-open eyes. These men, he says, these men who hang around with women! Norris, I thought better of him! And Henry Wyatt's son! Writing verse. Singing. Talk-talk-talking. ‘What's the use of talking to women?’ he asks earnestly. ‘Cromwell, you don't talk to women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic? What would you find to say?’
I'll speak to Norfolk, he decides when he comes back from France; ask him to incline Anne to caution. The French are meeting the Pope in Marseilles, and in default of his own attendance Henry must be represented by his most senior peer. Gardiner is already there. For me every day is like a holiday, he says to Tom Wyatt, when those two are away.
Wyatt says, ‘I think Henry may have a new interest by then.’
In the days following he follows Henry's eyes, as they rest on various ladies of the court. Nothing in them, perhaps, except the speculative interest of any man; it's only Cranmer who thinks that if you look twice at a woman you have to marry her. He watches the king dancing with Lizzie Seymour, his hand lingering on her waist. He sees Anne watching, her expression cold, pinched.
Next day, he lends Edward Seymour some money on very favourable terms.
In the damp autumn mornings, when it is still half-light, his household are out early, in the damp and dripping woods. You don't get torta di funghi unless you pick the raw ingredients.
Richard Riche arrives at eight o'clock, his face astonished and alarmed. ‘They stopped me at your gate, sir, and said, where's your bag of mushrooms? No one comes in here without mushrooms.’ Riche's dignity is affronted. ‘I don't think they would have asked the Lord Chancellor for mushrooms.’
‘Oh, they would, Richard. But in an hour you will eat them with eggs baked in cream, and the Lord Chancellor will not. Shall we get down to work?’
Through September he has been rounding up the priests and monks who have been close to the Maid. He and Sir Purse sift the papers and conduct the interrogations. The clerics are no sooner under lock and key than they begin to deny her, and deny each other: I never believed in her, it was Father So-and-So who convinced me, I never wanted any trouble. As for their contacts with Exeter's wife, with Katherine, with Mary – each disclaims his own involvement and rushes to implicate his brother-in-Christ. The Maid's people have been in constant contact with the Exeter household. She herself has been at many of the chief monastic houses of the realm – Syon Abbey, the Charterhouse at Sheen, the Franciscan house at Richmond. He knows this because he has many contacts among disaffected monks. In every house there are a few, and he seeks out the most intelligent. Katherine herself has not met the nun. Why should she? She has Fisher to act as a go-between, and Gertrude, Lord Exeter's wife.
The king says, ‘It is hard for me to believe Henry Courtenay would betray me. A Garter knight, a great man in the lists, my friend since I was a boy. Wolsey tried to part us, but I wouldn't have it.’ He laughs. ‘Brandon, do you remember Greenwich, that Christmas, which year was it? Remember the snowball fight?’
This is the whole difficulty of dealing with them, men who are always talking about ancient pedigrees, and boyhood friendships, and things that happened when you were still trading wool on the Antwerp exchange. You put the evidence under their noses, and they start getting teary over snowball fights. ‘Look,’ Henry says, ‘it is Courtenay's wife that is to blame. When he knows the whole of her practices he will want to be rid of her. She is fickle and weak like all her sex, easily led into scheming.’
‘So forgive her,’ he says. ‘Write her a pardon. Put these people under a debt of gratitude to you, if you want them to leave off their foolish sentiment towards Katherine.’
‘You think you can buy hearts?’ Charles Brandon says. He sounds as if he would be sad if the answer were yes.
He thinks, the heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale. ‘It is not a price in money we are offering. I have enough to put the Courtenay family on trial, all Exeter's people. If we forbear to do it, we are offering their freedom and their lands. We are giving them a chance to recoup the honour of their name.’
Henry says, ‘His grandfather left Crookback for my father's service.’
‘If we forgive them they will play us for fools,’ Charles says.
‘I think not, my lord. Everything they do from now on, they do under my eye.’
‘And the Poles, Lord Montague: what do you propose there?’
‘He should not assume he will be pardoned.’
‘Make him sweat, eh?’ Charles says. ‘I am not sure I like your way of dealing with noblemen.’
‘They get their deserts,’ the king says. ‘Hush, my lord, I need to think.’
A pause. Brandon's position is too complicated for him to sustain. He wants to say, pay them out as traitors, Cromwell: but mind you butcher them respectfully. Suddenly his face clears. ‘Ah, now I remember Greenwich. The snow was knee-deep that year. Ah, we were young then, Harry. You don't get snow any more, like you did when we were young.’
He gathers up his papers and begs to be excused. Reminiscence is setting in for the afternoon and there is work to be done. ‘Rafe, ride over to West Horsley. Tell Exeter's wife the king thinks all women fickle and weak – though I should have thought he has plenty of evidence to the contrary. Tell her to set down in writing that she
