are asked what the cardinal said in his last days, tell them nothing.’
George raises his eyebrows. ‘I already have. Told them nothing. The king questioned me. My lord Norfolk.’
‘If you tell Norfolk anything, he will twist it into treason.’
‘Still, as he is Lord Treasurer, he has paid me my back wages. I was three-quarters of the year in arrears.’
‘What were you paid, George?’
‘Ten pounds a year.’
‘You should have come to me.’
These are the facts. These are the figures. If the Lord of the Underworld rose up tomorrow in the privy chamber, and offered a dead man back, fresh from the grave, fresh from the crypt, the miracle of Lazarus for £20,000 – Henry Tudor would be pushed to scrape it together. Norfolk as Lord Treasurer? Fine; it doesn't matter who holds the title, who holds the clanking keys to the empty chests.
‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘if the cardinal could say, as he used to say to me, Thomas, what would you like for a New Year's gift, I would say, I would like sight of the nation's accounts.’
Cavendish hesitates; he begins to speak; he stops; he starts again. ‘The king said certain things to me. At Hampton Court. “Three may keep counsel, if two are away.”’
‘It is a proverb, I think.’
‘He said, “If I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would cast it into the fire.”’
‘I think that also is a proverb.’
‘He means to say that he will not choose any adviser now: not my lord of Norfolk, nor Stephen Gardiner, or anyone, any person to be close to him, to be so close as the cardinal was.’
He nods. That seems a reasonable interpretation.
Cavendish looks ill. It is the strain of the long sleepless nights, of the vigil around the coffin. He is worried about various sums of money the cardinal had on the journey, which he did not have when he died. He is worried about how to get his own effects from Yorkshire to his home; apparently Norfolk has promised him a cart and a transport allowance. He, Cromwell, talks about this while he thinks about the king, and out of sight of George folds his fingers, one by one, tight into the palm of his hand. Mary Boleyn traced, in his palm, a certain shape; he thinks, Henry, I have your heart in my hand.
When Cavendish has gone, he goes to his secret drawer and takes out the package that the cardinal gave him on the day he began his journey north. He unwinds the thread that binds it. It snags, knots, he works at it patiently; before he had expected it, the turquoise ring rolls into his palm, cold as if it came from the tomb. He pictures the cardinal's hands, long-fingered, white and unscarred, steady for so many years on the wheel of the ship of state; but the ring fits as if it had been made for him.
The cardinal's scarlet clothes now lie folded and empty. They cannot be wasted. They will be cut up and become other garments. Who knows where they will get to over the years? Your eye will be taken by a crimson cushion or a patch of red on a banner or ensign. You will see a glimpse of them in a man's inner sleeve or in the flash of a whore's petticoat.
Another man would go to Leicester to see where he died and talk to the abbot. Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet's ground, the flush of the robin's breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the colour of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.
At Hampton Court in the great hall they perform an interlude; its name is ‘The Cardinal's Descent into Hell’. It takes him back to last year, to Gray's Inn. Under the eye of the officials of the king's household, the carpenters have been working furiously and for bonus rates, erecting frames upon which to drape canvas cloths painted with scenes of torture. At the back of the hall, the screens are entirely hung with flames.
The entertainment is this: a vast scarlet figure, supine, is dragged across the floor, howling, by actors dressed as devils. There are four devils, one for each limb of the dead man. The devils wear masks. They have tridents with which they prick the cardinal, making him twitch and writhe and beg. He had hoped the cardinal died without pain but Cavendish had said no. He died conscious, talking of the king. He had started out of sleep and said, whose is that shadow on the wall?
The Duke of Norfolk walks around the hall chortling, ‘Isn't it good, eh? It's good enough to be printed! By the Mass, that's what I shall do! I shall have it printed, so I can take it home with me, and at Christmas we can play it all over again.’
Anne sits laughing, pointing, applauding. He has never seen her like this before: lit up, glowing. Henry sits frozen by her side. Sometimes he laughs, but he thinks if you could get close you would see that his eyes are afraid. The cardinal rolls across the floor, kicking out at the demons, but they harry him, in their woolly suits of black, and cry, ‘Come, Wolsey, we must fetch you to Hell, for our master Beelzebub is expecting you to supper.’
When the scarlet mountain pops up his head and asks, ‘What wines does he serve?’ he almost forgets himself and laughs. ‘I'll have no English wine,’ the dead man declares. ‘None of that cats' piss my lord of Norfolk lays on.’
Anne crows; she points; she points to her uncle; the noise rises high to the roof beams with the smoke from the hearth, the laughing and chanting from the tables, the howling of the fat prelate. No, they assure him, the devil is a Frenchman, and there are catcalls and whistles, and songs break out. The devils now catch the cardinal's head in a noose. They haul him to his feet, but he fights them. The flailing punches are not all fake, and he hears their grunts, as the breath is knocked out of them. But there are four hangmen, and one great scarlet bag of nothingness, who chokes, who claws; the court cries, ‘Let him down! Let him down alive!’
The actors throw up their hands; they prance back and let him fall. When he rolls on the ground, gasping, they thrust their forks into him and wind out lengths of scarlet woollen bowel.
The cardinal utters blasphemies. He utters farts, and fireworks blast out from corners of the hall. From the corner of his eye, he sees a woman run away, a hand over her mouth; but Uncle Norfolk marches about, pointing: ‘Look, there his guts are wound out, as the hangman would draw them! Why, I'd pay to see this!’
Someone calls, ‘Shame on you, Thomas Howard, you'd have sold your own soul to see Wolsey down.’ Heads turn, and his head turns, and nobody knows who has spoken; but he thinks it might be, could it be, Thomas Wyatt? The gentlemen devils have dusted themselves down and got their breath back. Shouting ‘Now!’ they pounce; the cardinal is dragged off to Hell, which is located, it seems, behind the screens at the back of the hall.
He follows them behind the screens. Pages run out with linen towels for the actors, but the satanic influx knocks them aside. At least one of the children gets an elbow in the eye, and drops his bowl of steaming water on his feet. He sees the devils wrench off their masks, and toss them, swearing, into a corner; he watches as they try to claw off their knitted devil-coats. They turn to each other, laughing, and begin to pull them over each other's heads. ‘It's like the shirt of Nessus,’ George Boleyn says, as Norris wrenches him free.
George tosses his head to settle his hair back into place; his white skin has flared from contact with the rough wool. George and Henry Norris are the hand-devils, who seized the cardinal by his forepaws. The two foot-devils are still wrestling each other from their
