lining the thin, folded paper. Unwraps it: ‘She must have good eyes.’
‘She does.’
‘And lovely eyes too?’ He glances up, smiling. The boy looks him in the face. For a moment he seems startled, and as if he will speak; then he drops his gaze and turns away.
‘Just tormenting you, Tom, don't take it to heart.’ He is reading Tyndale's letter. ‘If she is a good girl, and in Stephen's household, what harm?’
‘What does Tyndale say?’
‘You carried it without reading it?’
‘I would rather not know. In case.’
In case you found yourself Thomas More's guest. He holds the letter in his left hand; his right hand curls loosely into a fist. ‘Let him come near my people. I'll drag him out of his court at Westminster and beat his head on the cobbles till I knock into him some sense of the love of God and what it means.’
The boy grins and flops down on a stool. He, Cromwell, glances again at the letter. ‘Tyndale says, he thinks he can never come back, even if my lady Anne were queen … a project he does nothing to aid, I must say. He says he would not trust a safe conduct, even if the king himself were to sign it, while Thomas More is alive and in office, because More says you need not keep a promise you have made to a heretic. Here. You may as well read. Our Lord Chancellor respects neither ignorance nor innocence.’
The boy flinches, but he takes the paper. What a world is this, where promises are not kept. He says gently, ‘Tell me who is Jenneke. Do you want me to write to her father for you?’
‘No.’ Avery looks up, startled; he is frowning. ‘No, she's an orphan. Master Vaughan keeps her at his own charge. We are all teaching her English.’
‘No money to bring you, then?’
The boy looks confused. ‘I suppose Stephen will give her a dowry.’
The day is too mild for a fire. The hour is too early for a candle. In lieu of burning, he tears up Tyndale's message. Marlin-spike, his ears pricked, chews a fragment of it. ‘Brother cat,’ he says. ‘He ever loved the scriptures.’
Scriptura sola. Only the gospel will guide and console you. No use praying to a carved post or lighting a candle to a painted face. Tyndale says ‘gospel’ means good news, it means singing, it means dancing: within limits, of course. Thomas Avery says, ‘Can I truly come home next spring?’
John Petyt at the Tower is to be allowed to sleep in a bed: no chance, though, that he will go home to Lion's Quay.
Cranmer said to him, when they were talking late one night, St Augustine says we need not ask where our home is, because in the end we all come home to God.
Lent saps the spirits, as of course it is designed to do. Going in again to Anne, he finds the boy Mark, crouched over his lute and picking at something doleful; he flicks a finger against his head as he breezes past, and says, ‘Cheer it up, can't you?’
Mark almost falls off his stool. It seems to him they are in a daze, these people, vulnerable to being startled, to being ambushed. Anne, waking out of her dream, says, ‘What did you just do?’
‘Hit Mark. Only,’ he demonstrates, ‘with one finger.’
Anne says, ‘Mark? Who? Oh. Is that his name?’
This spring, 1531, he makes it his business to be cheerful. The cardinal was a great grumbler, but he always grumbled in some entertaining way. The more he complained, the more cheerful his man Cromwell became; that was the arrangement.
The king is a complainer too. He has a headache. The Duke of Suffolk is stupid. The weather is too warm for the time of year. The country is going to the dogs. He's anxious too; afraid of spells, and of people thinking bad thoughts about him in any specific or unspecific way. The more anxious the king becomes, the more tranquil becomes his new servant, the more hopeful, the more staunch. And the more the king snips and carps, the more do his petitioners seek out the company of Cromwell, so unfailing in his amiable courtesy.
At home, Jo comes to him looking perplexed. She is a young lady now, with a womanly frown, a soft crinkle of flesh on her forehead, which Johane her mother has too. ‘Sir, how shall we paint our eggs at Easter?’
‘How did you paint them last year?’
‘Every year before this we gave them hats like the cardinal's.’ She watches his face, to read back the effect of her words; it is his own habit exactly, and he thinks, not only your children are your children. ‘Was it wrong?’
‘Not at all. I wish I'd known. I would have taken him one. He would have liked it.’
Jo puts her soft little hand into his. It is still a child's hand, the skin scuffed over the knuckles, the nails bitten. ‘I am of the king's council now,’ he says. ‘You can paint crowns if you like.’
This piece of folly with her mother, this ongoing folly, it has to stop. Johane knows it too. She used to make excuses, to be where he was. But now, if he's at Austin Friars, she's at the house in Stepney.
‘Mercy knows,’ she murmurs in passing.
The surprise is it took her so long, but there is a lesson here; you think people are always watching you, but that is guilt, making you jump at shadows. But finally, Mercy finds she has eyes in her head, and a tongue to speak, and picks a time when they can be alone. ‘They tell me that the king has found a way around at least one of his stumbling blocks. I mean, the difficulty of how he can marry Lady Anne, when her sister Mary has been in his bed.’
‘We have had all the best advice,’ he says easily. ‘Dr Cranmer at my recommendation sent to Venice, to a learned body of rabbis, to take opinions on the meaning of the ancient texts.’
‘So it is not incest? Unless you have actually been married to one sister?’
‘The divines say not.’
‘How much did that cost?’
‘Dr Cranmer wouldn't know. The priests and the scholars go to the negotiating table, then some less godly sort of man comes after them, with a bag of money. They don't have to meet each other, coming in or going out.’
‘It hardly helps your case,’ she says bluntly.
‘There is no help in my case.’
‘She wants to talk to you. Johane.’
‘What's there to say? We all know –’ We all know it can go nowhere. Even though her husband John Williamson is still coughing: one is always half listening for it, here and at Stepney, the annunciatory wheezing on a stairway or in the next room; one thing about John Williamson, he'll never take you by surprise. Dr Butts has recommended him country air, and keeping away from fumes and smoke. ‘It was a moment of weakness,’ he says. Then … what? Another moment. ‘God sees all. So they tell me.’
‘You must listen to her.’ Mercy's face, when she turns back, is incandescent. ‘You owe her that.’
‘The way it seems to me, it seems like part of the past.’ Johane's voice is unsteady; with a little twitch of her fingers she settles her
