from her and reties them, not with silk tags but serviceable string. ‘Do you always carry string, Master Secretary?’
Mary says, ‘Oh, my book of love poems! Shelton has it.’ She pitches from the room.
‘She'll need that,’ he says. ‘No poems down in Kent.’
‘Lady Rochford would tell her that sonnets don't keep you warm. Not,’ Jane says, ‘that I've ever had a sonnet. So I wouldn't really know.’
Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain? He turns. ‘Jane –’
‘Master Secretary?’ She dips her knees and rolls sideways on to the mattress; she sits up, drags her skirts from under her, finds her footing: gripping the bedpost, she scrambles up, reaches above her head, and begins to unhook the hangings.
‘Come down! I'll do that. I'll send a wagon after Mistress Stafford. She can't carry all she owns.’
‘I can do it. Master Secretary doesn't deal with bed hangings.’
‘Master Secretary deals with everything. I'm surprised I don't make the king's shirts.’
Jane sways gently above him. Her feet sink into the feathers. ‘Queen Katherine does. Still.’
‘The Dowager Katherine. Come down.’
She hops down to the rushes, giving her skirts a shake. ‘Even now after all that has passed between them. She sent a new parcel last week.’
‘I thought the king had forbidden her.’
‘Anne says they should be torn up and used for, well, you know what for, in a jakes. He was angry. Possibly because he doesn't like the word “jakes”.’
‘No more does he.’ The king deprecates coarse language, and not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling some dirty story. ‘Is it true what Mary says? That the queen is afraid?’
‘For now he is sighing over Mistress Shelton. Well, you know that. You have observed.’
‘But surely that is harmless? A king is obliged to be gallant, till he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the fire with his chaplains.’
‘Explain it to Anne, she doesn't see it. She wanted to send Shelton away. But her father and her brother would not have it. Because the Sheltons are their cousins, so if Henry is going to look elsewhere, they want it to be close to home. Incest is so popular these days! Uncle Norfolk said – I mean, His Grace –’
‘It's all right,’ he says, distracted, ‘I call him that too.’
Jane puts a hand over her mouth. It is a child's hand, with tiny gleaming nails. ‘I shall think of that when I am in the country and have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew Cromwell?’
‘You are leaving court?’ No doubt she has a husband in view: some country husband.
‘I hope that when I have served another season I might be released.’
Mary rips into the room, snarling. She juggles two embroidered cushions above the bulk of her child, a bulk which now seems evident; she has a hand free for her gilt basin, in which is her poetry book. She throws down the cushions, opens her fist and scatters a handful of silver buttons, which rattle into the basin like dice. ‘Shelton had these. Curse her for a magpie.’
‘It is not as if the queen likes me,’ Jane says. ‘And it is a long time since I saw Wolf Hall.’
For the king's new-year gift he has commissioned from Hans a miniature on vellum, which shows Solomon on his throne receiving Sheba. It is to be an allegory, he explains, of the king receiving the fruits of the church and the homage of his people.
Hans gives him a withering look. ‘I grasp the point.’ Hans prepares sketches. Solomon is seated in majesty. Sheba stands before him, unseen face raised, her back to the onlooker.
‘In your own mind,’ he says, ‘can you see her face, even though it's hidden?’
‘You pay for the back of her head, that's what you get!’ Hans rubs his forehead. He relents. ‘Not true. I can see her.’
‘See her like a woman you meet in the street?’
‘Not quite like that. More like someone you remember. Like some woman you used to know when you were a child.’
They are seated in front of the tapestry the king gave him. The painter's eyes stray to it. ‘This woman on the wall. Wolsey had her, Henry had her, now you.’
‘I assure you, she has no counterpart in real life.’ Well, not unless Westminster has some very discreet and versatile whore.
‘I know who she is.’ Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase it. ‘They talk about it in Antwerp. Why don't you go over and claim her?’
‘She is married.’ He is taken aback, to think that his private business is common talk.
‘You think she would not come away with you?’
‘It's years. I have changed.’
‘Ja. Now you are rich.’
‘But what would be said of me, if I enticed away a woman from her husband?’
Hans shrugs. They are so matter-of-fact, the Germans. More says the Lutherans fornicate in church. ‘Besides,’ Hans says, ‘there is the matter of the –’
‘The what?’
Hans shrugs: nothing. ‘Nothing! You are going to hang me up by my hands till I confess?’
‘I don't do that. I only threaten to do it.’
‘I meant only,’ Hans says soothingly, ‘there is the matter of all the other women who want to marry you. The wives of England, they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you are the top of everyone's list.’
In his idle moments – in the week there are two or three – he has been picking through the records of the Rolls House. Though the Jews are forbidden the realm, you cannot know what human flotsam will be washed up by the tide of fortune, and only once, for a single month in these three hundred years, has the house been empty. He runs his eye over the accounts of the successive wardens, and he handles, curious, the receipts for their relief given by the dead inhabitants, written in Hebrew characters. Some of them spent fifty years within these walls, flinching from the Londoners outside. When he walks the crooked passages, he feels their footsteps under his.
He goes to see the two who remain. They are silent and vigilant women of indeterminate age, and the names they go by are Katherine Wheteley and Mary Cook.
‘What do you do?’ With your time, he means.
‘We say our prayers.’
They watch him for evidence of his intentions, good or ill. Their faces
