For a moment he thinks the king is crying.
He didn't run away the next year, for bear-keeping or any other trade. It was next year that the Cornishmen came roaring up the country, rebels bent on burning London and taking the English king and bending him to their Cornish will. Fear went before their army, for they were known for burning ricks and ham-stringing cattle, for firing houses with the people inside, for slaughtering priests and eating babies and trampling altar bread.
The king lets him go abruptly. ‘Away to our cold beds. Or is that only mine? Tomorrow you will hunt. If you are not well mounted we will provide. I will see if I can tire you out, though Wolsey said it was a thing impossible. You and Gardiner, you must learn to pull together. This winter you must be yoked to the plough.’
It is not oxen he wants, but brutes who will go head-to-head, injure and maim themselves in the battle for his favour. It's clear his chances with the king are better if he doesn't get on with Gardiner than if he does. Divide and rule. But then, he rules anyway.
Though Parliament has not been recalled, Michaelmas term is the busiest he has ever known. Fat files of the king's business arrive almost hourly, and the Austin Friars fills up with city merchants, monks and priests of various sorts, petitioners for five minutes of his time. As if they sense something, a shift of power, a coming spectacle, small groups of Londoners begin to gather outside his gate, pointing out the liveries of the men who come and go: the Duke of Norfolk's man, the Earl of Wiltshire's servant. He looks down on them from a window and feels he recognises them; they are sons of the men who every autumn stood around gossiping and warming themselves by the door of his father's forge. They are boys like the boy he used to be: restless, waiting for something to happen.
He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: ‘put on a mask, as it were.’ He applies that to each place, each castle or inn or nobleman's seat, where he finds himself waking up. He sends some money to Erasmus, as the cardinal used to do. ‘To buy him his gruel,’ he used to say, ‘and keep the poor soul in quills and ink.’ Erasmus is surprised; he has heard only bad things of Thomas Cromwell.
From the day he was sworn into the king's council, he has had his face arranged. He has spent the early months of the year watching the faces of other people, to see when they register doubt, reservation, rebellion – to catch that fractional moment before they settle into the suave lineaments of the courtier, the facilitator, the yes-man. Rafe says to him, we cannot trust Wriothesley, and he laughs: I know where I am with Call-Me. He is well connected at court, but got his start in the cardinal's household: as who did not? But Gardiner was his master at Trinity Hall, and he has watched us both rise in the world. He has seen us put on muscle, two fighting dogs, and he cannot decide where to put his money. He says to Rafe, I might in his place feel the same; it was easy in my day, you just put your shirt on Wolsey. He has no fear of Wriothesley, or anyone like him. You can calculate the actions of unprincipled men. As long as you feed them they'll run at your heels. Less calculable, more dangerous, are men like Stephen Vaughan, men who write to you, as Vaughan does: Thomas Cromwell, I would do anything for you. Men who say they understand you, whose embrace is so tight and ungiving they will carry you over the abyss.
At Austin Friars he has beer and bread sent out to the men who stand at the gate: broth, as the mornings get sharper. Thurston says, well, if you aim to be feeding the whole district. It's only last month, he says, that you were complaining the larders were overflowing and the cellars were full. St Paul tells us we must know how to flourish in times of abasement and times of abundance, with a full stomach and an empty. He goes down to the kitchens to talk to the boys Thurston has taken on. They shout up with their names and what they can do, and gravely he notes their abilities in a book: Simon, can dress a salad and play a drum, Matthew, he can say his Pater Noster. All these garzoni must be trainable. One day they must be able to walk upstairs, as he did, and take a seat in the counting house. All must have warm and decent clothes, and be encouraged to wear them, not sell them, for he remembers from his days at Lambeth the profound cold of store rooms; in Wolsey's kitchens at Hampton Court, where the chimneys draw well and confine the heat, he has seen stray snowflakes drifting in the rafters and settling on sills.
When in the crisp mornings at dawn he comes out of his house with his entourage of clerks, the Londoners are already assembling. They drop back and watch him, neither friendly nor hostile. He calls out good morning to them and may God bless you, and some of them shout good morning back. They pull off their caps and, because he is a king's councillor, they stand bareheaded till he has gone by.
October: Monsieur Chapuys, the Emperor's ambassador, comes to Austin Friars to dine, and Stephen Gardiner is on the menu. ‘No sooner appointed to Winchester, than sent abroad,’ Chapuys says. ‘And how do you think King Francis will like him? What can he do as a diplomat that Sir Thomas Boleyn cannot? Though I suppose he is parti pris. Being the lady's father. Gardiner more … ambivalent, you would say? More disinterested, that is the word. I cannot see what King Francis will get out of supporting the match, unless your king were to offer him – what? Money? Warships? Calais?’
At table with the household, Monsieur Chapuys has talked pleasantly of verse, portraiture, and his university years in Turin; turning to Rafe, whose French is excellent, he has spoken of falconry, as a thing likely to interest young men. ‘You must go out with our master,’ Rafe tells him. ‘It is almost his only recreation these days.’
Monsieur Chapuys turns his bright little eyes upon him. ‘He plays kings' games now.’
Rising from table, Chapuys praises the food, the music, the furnishings. One can see his brain turning, hear the little clicks, like the gins of an elaborate lock, as he encodes his opinions for his dispatches to his master the Emperor.
Afterwards, in his cabinet, the ambassador unleashes his questions; rattling on, not pausing for a reply. ‘If the Bishop of Winchester is in France, how will Henry do without his Secretary? Master Stephen's embassy cannot be short. Perhaps this is your chance to creep closer, do you think? Tell me, is it true Gardiner is Henry's bastard cousin? And your boy Richard, also? Such things perplex the Emperor. To have a king who is so very little royal. It is perhaps no wonder he seeks to wed a poor gentlewoman.’
‘I would not call Lady Anne poor.’
‘True, the king has enriched her family.’ Chapuys smirks. ‘Is it usual in this country, to pay the girl for her services in advance?’
‘Indeed it is – you should remember it – I should be sorry to see you chased down the street.’
‘You advise her, Lady Anne?’
‘I look over accounts. It is not much to do, for a dear friend.’
Chapuys laughs merrily. ‘A friend! She is a witch, you know? She has put the king under an enchantment, so he risks everything – to be cast out of Christendom, to be damned. And I think he half knows it. I have seen him under her eye, his wits scattered and fleeing, his soul turning and twisting like a hare under the eye of a hawk. Perhaps she has enchanted you too.’ Monsieur Chapuys leans forward and rests, on his own hand, his little monkey's paw. ‘Break the enchantment, mon cher ami. You will not regret it. I serve a most liberal prince.’
November: Sir Henry Wyatt stands in the hall at Austin Friars; he looks at the blank space on the wall, where the cardinal's arms have been painted out. ‘He has only been gone a year, Thomas. To me it seems more. They say that when you are an old man one year is the same as the next. I can tell you that is not true.’
Oh, come sir, the little girls shout, you are not so old you cannot tell a story. They tow him towards one of the new velvet armchairs and enthrone him. Sir Henry would be everyone's father, if they had their choice, everyone's grandfather.
