my lord.’ A shadow of anxiety crosses the priest’s face. ‘Must she come down? Is she forbidden?’
He smiles. ‘I just thought she’s a long way from the sea.’
‘She’s stinking fish.’ Christophe yells with laughter.
‘Forgive the boy. He’s no poet.’
A feeble smile from the priest. On an oak screen St Anne holds a book for the instruction of her little daughter, the Virgin Mary; St Michael the Archangel hacks away with a scimitar at a devil entwining his feet. ‘Are you here to see the queen, sir? I mean,’ the priest corrects himself, ‘the Lady Katherine?’
This priest doesn’t know me from Adam, he thinks. I could be any emissary. I could be Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. I could be Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. They have both tried on Katherine their scant persuasive powers and their best bully-boy tricks.
He doesn’t give his name, but he leaves an offering. The priest’s hand enfolds the coins as if to warm them. ‘You will forgive my slip, my lord? Over the lady’s title? I swear I meant no harm by it. For an old countryman such as I am, it is hard to keep up with the changes. By the time we have understood one report from London, it is contradicted by the next.’
‘It’s hard for us all,’ he says, shrugging. ‘You pray for Queen Anne every Sunday?’
‘Of course, my lord.’
‘And what do your parishioners say to that?’
The priest looks embarrassed. ‘Well, sir, they are simple people. I would not pay heed to what they say. Though they are all very loyal,’ he adds hastily. ‘Very loyal.’
‘No doubt. Will you please me now, and this Sunday in your prayers remember Tom Wolsey?’
The late cardinal? He sees the old fellow revising his ideas. This can’t be Thomas Howard or Charles Brandon: for if you speak the name of Wolsey, they can hardly restrain themselves from spitting at your feet.
When they leave the church, the last light is vanishing into the sky, and a stray snowflake drifts along towards the south. They remount; it has been a long day; his clothes feel heavy on his back. He doesn’t believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there’s no harm in hedging your bets. When the woodcock flew up in its flash of reddish brown, his heart had knocked hard. As they rode he was aware of it, each beat a heavy wing-beat; as the bird found the concealment of trees, its tracing of feathers inked out to black.
They arrive in the half-dark: a hallooing from the walls, and an answering shout from Christophe: ‘Thomas Cremuel, Secretary to the king and Master of the Rolls.’
‘How do we know you?’ a sentry bellows. ‘Show your colours.’
‘Tell him show a light and let me in,’ he says, ‘or I’ll show his backside my boot.’
He has to say these things, when he’s up-country; it’s expected of him, the king’s common adviser.
The drawbridge must come down for them: an antique scrape, a creak and rattling of bolts and chains. At Kimbolton they lock in early: good. ‘Remember,’ he says to his party, ‘do not make the priest’s mistake. When you talk to her household she is the Dowager Princess of Wales.’
‘What?’ Christophe says.
‘She is not the king’s wife. She never was the king’s wife. She is the wife of the king’s deceased brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales.’
‘Deceased means dead,’ Christophe says. ‘I know it.’
‘She is not a queen, or former queen, as her second so-called marriage was not licit.’
‘That is, not permissible,’ Christophe says. ‘She make the mistake of conjugation with both brothers, Arthur first then Henry.’
‘And what are we to think of such a woman?’ he says, smiling.
Flare of torches and, taking form out of dimness, Sir Edmund Bedingfield: Katherine’s keeper. ‘I think you might have warned us, Cromwell!’
‘Grace, you didn’t want warning of me, did you?’ He kisses Lady Bedingfield. ‘I didn’t bring my supper. But there’s a mule cart behind me, it will be here tomorrow. I have venison for your own table, and some almonds for the queen, and a sweet wine that Chapuys says she favours.’
‘I am glad of anything that will tempt her appetite.’ Grace Bedingfield leads the way into the great hall. In the firelight she stops and turns to him: ‘Her doctor suspects she has a growth in her belly. But it may take a long course. When you would think she has suffered enough, poor lady.’
He hands his gloves, his riding coat, to Christophe. ‘Will you wait upon her straight away?’ Bedingfield asks. ‘Though we were not expecting you, she may be. It is hard for us, because the townspeople favour her and word slips in with servants, you cannot prevent it, I believe they stand and signal from beyond the moat. I think she knows most of what goes on, who passes on the road.’
Two ladies, Spanish by their dress and well-advanced in age, press themselves against a plaster wall and look at him with resentment. He bows to them, and one remarks in her own tongue that this is the man who has sold the King of England’s soul. The wall behind them is painted, he sees, with the fading figures of a scene from paradise: Adam and Eve, hand in hand, stroll among beasts so new to creation they have not yet learned their names. A small elephant with a rolling eye peeps shyly through the foliage. He has never seen an elephant, but understood them to be higher by far than a warhorse; perhaps it’s not had time to grow yet. Branches bowed with fruit hang above its head.
‘Well, you know the form,’ Bedingfield says. ‘She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps.’
Katherine is sitting by the fire shrunk into a cape of very good ermines. The king will want that back, he thinks, if she dies. She glances up, and puts out a hand for him to kiss: unwilling, but more because of the chill, he thinks, than because she is reluctant to acknowledge him. She is jaundiced, and there is an invalid fug in the room – the faint animal scent of the furs, a vegetal stench of undrained cooking water, and the sour reek from a bowl with which a girl hurries away: containing, he suspects, the evacuated contents of the dowager’s stomach. If she is ill in the night, perhaps she dreams of the gardens of the Alhambra, where she grew up: the marble pavements, the bubbling of crystal water into basins, the drag of a white peacock’s tail and the scent of lemons. I could have brought her a lemon in my saddlebag, he thinks.
As if reading his thoughts, she speaks to him in Castilian. ‘Master Cromwell, let us abandon this weary pretence that you do not speak my language.’
He nods. ‘It has been hard in times past, standing by while your maids talked about me. “Jesu, isn’t he ugly, do you think he has a hairy body like Satan?”’
‘My maids said that?’ Katherine seems amused. She withdraws her hand, out of his sight. ‘They are long gone, those lively girls. Only old women remain, and a handful of licensed traitors.’
