the steadiest hand I know.’
He smiles, puzzled; nothing in his world seems steady to him.
‘I understand you,’ Wyatt says. ‘I know our old fellow in scarlet nearly brought you down. But look at you, eating almonds, with all your teeth in your head, and your household around you, and your affairs prospering, and men like Norfolk speaking to you civil.’ Whereas, he doesn't need to add, a year ago they were wiping their feet on you. Sir Henry breaks up, in his fingers, a cinnamon wafer, and dabs it on to his tongue, a careful, secular Eucharist. It is forty years, more, since the Tower, but his smashed-up jaw still stiffens and plagues him with pain. ‘Thomas, I have something to ask you … Will you keep an eye on my son? Be a father to him?’
‘Tom is, what, twenty-eight? He may not like another father.’
‘You cannot do worse than I did. I have much to regret, his marriage chiefly … He was seventeen, he did not want it, it was I who wanted it, because her father was Baron Cobham, and I wanted to keep my place up among my neighbours in Kent. Tom was always good to look at, a kind boy and courteous as well, you'd have thought he would have done for the girl, but I don't know if she was faithful to him a month. So then, of course, he paid her in kind … the place is full of his doxies, open a closet at Allington and some wench falls out of it. He roams off abroad and what comes of that? He ends up a prisoner in Italy, I shall never understand that affair. Since Italy he's had even less sense. Write you a piece of terza rima, of course, but sit down and work out where his money's gone …’ He rubs his chin. ‘But there you have it. When all's said, there is no braver boy than my boy.’
‘Will you come back now, and join the company? You know we take a holiday when you visit us.’
Sir Henry levers himself upright. He is a portly man, though he lives on pottage and mashes. ‘Thomas, how did I get old?’
When they return to the hall it is to find a play in progress. Rafe is acting the part of Leontina and the household is roaring him on. It is not that the boys don't believe the lion tale; it is just that they like to put their own words to it. He extends a peremptory hand to Richard, who has been standing on a joint-stool, squealing. ‘You are jealous of Tom Wyatt,’ he says.
‘Ah, don't be out of temper with us, master.’ Rafe resumes human form and throws himself on to a bench. ‘Tell us about Florence. Tell us what else you did, you and Giovannino.’
‘I don't know if I should. You will make a play of it.’
Ah, do, they persuade him, and he looks around: Rafe encourages him with a purr. ‘Are we sure Call-Me-Risley is not here? Well … when we had a day off, we used to take down buildings.’
‘Take them down?’ Henry Wyatt says. ‘Did you so?’
‘What I mean is, blow them up. But not without the owner's permission. Unless we thought they were crumbling and a danger to passers-by. We only charged for explosive materials. Not for our expertise.’
‘Which was considerable, I suppose?’
‘It's a lot of digging for a few seconds of excitement. But I knew some boys who went into it as a profession. In Florence,’ he says, ‘it was just what you might do for your recreation. Like fishing. It kept us out of trouble.’ He hesitates. ‘Well, no, it didn't. Not really.’
Richard says, ‘Did Call-Me tell Gardiner? About your Cupid?’
‘What do you think?’
The king had said to him, I hear you antiqued a statue. The king was laughing, but perhaps also making a note; laughing because the joke's against clerics, against cardinals, and he's in the mood for such a joke.
Secretary Gardiner: ‘Statue, statute, not much difference.’
‘One letter is everything, in legislating. But my precedents are not faked.’
‘Stretched?’ Gardiner says.
‘Majesty, the Council of Constance granted your ancestor, Henry V, such control over the church in England as no other Christian king exercised in his realm.’
‘The concessions were not applied. Not with consistency. Why is that?’
‘I don't know. Incompetence?’
‘But we have better councillors now?’
‘Better kings, Your Majesty.’
Behind Henry's back, Gardiner makes a gargoyle face at him. He almost laughs.
The legal term closes. Anne says, come and eat a poor Advent supper with me. We'll use forks.
He goes, but he doesn't like the company. She has made pets of the king's friends, the gentlemen of his privy chamber: Henry Norris, William Brereton, those people, and her brother, of course, Lord Rochford. Anne is brittle in their company, and as ruthless with their compliments as a housewife snapping the necks of larks for the table. If her precise smile fades for a moment, they all lean forward, anxious to know how to please her. A bigger set of fools you would go far to seek.
For himself, he can go anywhere, he has been anywhere. Brought up on the table talk of the Frescobaldi family, the Portinari family, and latterly at the cardinal's table among the savants and wits, he is unlikely to find himself at a loss among the pretty people Anne gathers around her. God knows, they do their best, the gentlemen, to make him uncomfortable; he imports his own comfort, his calm, his exact and pointed conversation. Norris, who is a witty man, and not young, stultifies himself by keeping such company: and why? Proximity to Anne makes him tremble. It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
After that first occasion, Norris follows him out, touches his sleeve, and brings him to a standstill, face to face. ‘You don't see it, do you? Anne?’
He shakes his head.
‘So what would be your idea? Some fat frau from your travels?’
‘A woman I could love, would be a woman in whom the king has no interest at all.’
‘If that is a piece of advice, tell it to your friend Wyatt's son.’
‘Oh, I think young Wyatt has worked it out. He is a married man. He says to himself, from your deprivations make a verse. Don't we all grow wiser, from pinpricks to the amour propre?’
‘Can you look at me,’ Norris says, ‘and think I grow wiser?’
He hands Norris his handkerchief. Norris mops his face and gives the handkerchief back. He thinks of St Veronica, swabbing with her veil the features of the suffering Christ; he wonders if, when he gets home, Henry's gentlemanly features will be imprinted on the cloth, and if so, will he hang the result on the wall? Norris turns away, with a little laugh: ‘Weston – young Weston, you know – he is jealous of a boy she brings in to sing for us some nights. He is jealous of the man who comes in to mend the fire, or the maid who pulls her stockings off. Every time she looks at you, he keeps count, he says, there, there, do you see, she is looking at that fat butcher, she looked at him fifteen times in two hours.’
‘It was the cardinal who was the fat butcher.’
‘To Francis, one tradesman's the same as the next.’
‘I
