will be too late, if he is excommunicate, and put outside the church.’
‘We all hope – I am sure you do, madam – that day will never come.’
‘Nulla salus extra ecclesiam. Outside the church there is no salvation. Even kings come to judgment. Henry knows it, and is afraid.’
‘Madam, give way to him. For the present. Tomorrow, who knows? Do not cut off every chance of rapprochement.’
‘I hear Thomas Boleyn's daughter is having a child.’
‘Indeed, but …’
Katherine, above anyone, should know that guarantees nothing. She takes his meaning; thinks about it; nods. ‘I see circumstances in which he might turn back to me. I have had much opportunity to study that lady's character, and she is neither patient nor kind.’
It doesn't matter; she only has to be lucky. ‘In the event they have no children, you should think of your daughter Lady Mary. Conciliate him, madam. He may confirm her as his heir. And if you will give way, he will offer you every honour, and a great estate.’
‘A great estate!’ Katherine stands up. Her sewing slides from her skirts, the prayer book hits the floor with a fat leathery thump, and her silver thimble goes skittering across the boards and rolls into a corner. ‘Before you make me any more preposterous offers, Master Cromwell, let me offer you a chapter from my history. After my lord Arthur died, I passed five years in poverty. I could not pay my servants. We bought in the cheapest food we could find, coarse food, stale food, yesterday's fish – any small merchant kept a better table than the daughter of Spain. The late King Henry would not let me go back to my father because he said he was owed money – he haggled over me like one of the doorstep women who sold us bad eggs. I put my faith in God, I did not despair, but I tasted the depth of humiliation.’
‘So why would you want to taste it again?’
Face to face. They glare at each other. ‘Assuming,’ he says, ‘humiliation is all the king intends.’
‘Say it plainly.’
‘If you are found out in treason the law will take its course with you, as if you were any other subject. Your nephew is threatening to invade us in your name.’
‘That will not happen. Not in my name.’
‘That is what I say, madam.’ He softens his tone. ‘I say the Emperor is busy with the Turks, he is not so fond of his aunt – saving your presence – that he will raise another army. But others say, oh, be quiet, Cromwell, what do you know? They say we must fortify our harbours, we must raise troops, we must put the country in a state of alert. Chapuys, as you know, continually agitates with Charles to blockade our ports and impound our goods and our merchant ships abroad. He urges war in every dispatch.’
‘I have no knowledge of what Chapuys puts in his dispatches.’
It is a lie so staggering that he has to admire it. Having delivered it, Katherine seems weakened; she sinks down again into her chair, and before he can do it for her she wearily bends from the waist to pick up her sewing; her fingers are swollen, and bending seems to leave her breathless. She sits for a moment, recovering herself, and when she speaks again she is calm, deliberate. ‘Master Cromwell, I know I have failed you. That is to say, I have failed your country, which by now is my country too. The king was a good husband to me, but I could not do that which is most necessary for a wife to do. Nevertheless, I was, I am, a wife – you see, do you, that it is impossible for me to believe that for twenty years I was a harlot? Now the truth is, I have brought England little good, but I would be loath to bring her any harm.’
‘But you do, madam. You may not will it, but the harm is done.’
‘England is not served by a lie.’
‘That is what Dr Cranmer thinks. So he will annul your marriage, whether you come to the court or not.’
‘Dr Cranmer will be excommunicated too. Does it not cause him a qualm? Is he so lost to everything?’
‘This archbishop is the best guardian of the church, madam, that we have seen in many centuries.’ He thinks of what Bainham said, before they burned him; in England there have been eight hundred years of mystification, just six years of truth and light; six years, since the gospel in English began to come into the kingdom. ‘Cranmer is no heretic. He believes as the king believes. He will reform what needs reformation, that is all.’
‘I know where this will end. You will take the church's lands and give them to the king.’ She laughs. ‘Oh, you are silent? You will. You mean to do it.’ She sounds almost light-hearted, as people do sometimes when they're told they're dying. ‘Master Cromwell, you may assure the king I will not bring an army against him. Tell him I pray for him daily. Some people, those who do not know him as I do, they say, “Oh, he will work his will, he will have his desire at any price.” But I know that he needs to be on the side of the light. He is not a man like you, who just packs up his sins in his saddlebags and carries them from country to country, and when they grow too heavy whistles up a mule or two, and soon commands a train of them and a troop of muleteers. Henry may err, but he needs to be forgiven. I therefore believe, and will continue to believe, that he will turn out of this path of error, in order to be at peace with himself. And peace is what we all wish for, I am sure.’
‘What a placid end you make, madam. “Peace is what we all wish for.” Like an abbess. You are quite sure by the way that you would not think of becoming an abbess?’
A smile. Quite a broad smile. ‘I shall be sorry if I don't see you again. You are so much quicker in conversation than the dukes.’
‘The dukes will be back.’
‘I am braced. Is there news of my lady Suffolk?’
‘The king says she is dying. Brandon has no heart for anything.’
‘I can well believe it,’ she murmurs. ‘Her income as dowager queen of France dies with her, and that is the greater part of his revenue. Still, no doubt you will arrange him a loan, at some iniquitous rate of interest.’ She looks up. ‘My daughter will be curious to know I have seen you. She believes you were kind to her.’
He only remembers giving her a stool to sit on. Her life must be bleak, if she remembers that.
‘Properly, she should have remained standing, awaiting a sign from me.’
Her own pain-racked little daughter. She may smile, but she doesn't yield an inch. Julius Caesar would have had more compunction. Hannibal.
‘Tell me,’ she says, testing the ground. ‘The king would read a letter from me?’
Henry has taken to tearing her letters up unread, or burning them. He says they disgust him with their expressions of love. He does not have it in him to tell her this. ‘Then rest for an hour,’ she says, ‘while I write it. Unless you will stay a night with us? I should be glad of company at supper.’
‘Thank you, but I must start back, the council meets tomorrow. Besides, if I stayed, where would I put my mules? Not to mention my team of drivers.’
‘Oh, the stables are half-empty. The king makes sure I am kept short of mounts. He thinks that I will give my household the slip and ride to the coast and escape on a ship to Flanders.’
‘And
