says, everywhere the king looks. Now I have no quarrel with Richmond, except he was born out of wedlock. Can he reign? Ask yourselves this. How did the Tudors get the crown? By title? No. By force? Exactly. By God's grace they won the battle. The old king, he had such a fist as you will go many a mile to meet, he had great books into which he entered his grudges and he forgave, when? Never! That's how one rules, masters.’ He turns to his audience, to the councillors waiting and watching and to the gentlemen of the court and the bedchamber; to Henry Norris, to his friend William Brereton, to Master Secretary Gardiner; to, incidentally, as it happens, Thomas Cromwell, who is increasingly where he shouldn't be. He says, ‘The old king bred, and by the help of Heaven he bred sons. But when Arthur died, there were swords sharpened in Europe, and they were sharpened to carve up this kingdom. Henry that is now, he was a child, nine years old. If the old king had not staggered on a few more years, the wars would have been to fight all over again. A child cannot hold England. And a bastard child? God give me strength! And it's November again!’
It's hard to fault what the duke says. He understands it all; even that last cry, wrung from the duke's heart. It's November, and a year has passed since Howard and Brandon walked into York Place and demanded the cardinal's chain of office, and turned him out of his house.
There is a silence. Then someone coughs, someone sighs. Someone – probably Henry Norris – laughs. It is he who speaks. ‘The king has one child born in wedlock.’
Norfolk turns. He flushes, a deep mottled purple. ‘Mary?’ he says. ‘That talking shrimp?’
‘She will grow up.’
‘We are all waiting,’ Suffolk says. ‘She has now reached fourteen, has she not?’
‘But her face,’ Norfolk says, ‘is the size of my thumbnail.’ The duke shows off his digit to the company. ‘A woman on the English throne, it flies in the face of nature.’
‘Her grandmother was Queen of Castile.’
‘She cannot lead an army.’
‘Isabella did.’
Says the duke, ‘Cromwell, why are you here? Listening to the talk of gentlemen?’
‘My lord, when you shout, the beggars on the street can hear you. In Calais.’
Gardiner has turned to him; he is interested. ‘So you think Mary can rule?’
He shrugs. ‘It depends who advises her. It depends who she marries.’
Norfolk says, ‘We have to act soon. Katherine has half the lawyers of Europe pushing paper for her. This dispensation. That dispensation. The other dispensation with the different bloody wording that they say they've got in Spain. It doesn't matter. This has gone beyond paper.’
‘Why?’ Suffolk says. ‘Is your niece in foal?’
‘No! More's the pity. Because if she were, he'd have to do something.’
‘What?’ Suffolk says.
‘I don't know. Grant his own divorce?’
There is a shuffle, a grunt, a sigh. Some look at the duke; some look at their shoes. There's no man in the room who doesn't want Henry to have what he wants. Their lives and fortunes depend on it. He sees the path ahead: a tortuous path through a flat terrain, the horizon deceptively clear, the country intersected by ditches, and the present Tudor, a certain amount of mud bespattering his person and his face, fished gasping into clear air. He says, ‘That good man who pulled the king out of the ditch, what was his name?’
Norfolk says, drily, ‘Master Cromwell likes to hear of the deeds of those of low birth.’
He doesn't suppose any of them will know. But Norris says, ‘I know. His name was Edmund Mody.’
Muddy, more like, Suffolk says. He yells with laughter. They stare at him.
It is All Souls' Day: as Norfolk puts it, November again. Alice and Jo have come to speak to him. They are leading Bella – the Bella that is now – on a ribbon of pink silk. He looks up: may I be of service to you two ladies?
Alice says, ‘Master, it is more than two years since my aunt Elizabeth died, your lady wife. Will you write to the cardinal, and ask him to ask the Pope to let her out of Purgatory?’
He says, ‘What about your aunt Kat? And your little cousins, my daughters?’
The children exchange glances. ‘We don't think they have been there so long. Anne Cromwell was proud of her working of numbers and boasted that she was learning Greek. Grace was vain of her hair and used to state that she had wings, this was a lie.
We think perhaps they must suffer more. But the cardinal could try.’
Don't ask, don't get, he thinks.
Alice says, encouragingly, ‘You have been so active in the cardinal's business that he would not refuse. And although the king does not favour the cardinal any more, surely the Pope favours him?’
‘And I expect,’ says Jo, ‘that the cardinal writes to the Pope every day. Though I do not know who sews his letters. And I suppose the cardinal might send him a present for his trouble. Some money, I mean. Our aunt Mercy says that the Pope does nothing except on cash terms.’
‘Come with me,’ he says. They exchange glances. He sweeps them along before him. Bella's small legs race. Jo drops her lead, but still Bella runs behind.
Mercy and the elder Johane are sitting together. The silence is not companionable. Mercy is reading, murmuring the words to herself. Johane is staring at the wall, sewing in her lap. Mercy marks her place. ‘What's this, an embassy?’
‘Tell her,’ he says. ‘Jo, tell your mother what you have been asking me.’
Jo starts to cry. It is Alice who speaks up and puts their case. ‘We want our aunt Liz to come out of Purgatory.’
‘What have you been teaching them?’ he asks.
Johane shrugs. ‘Many grown persons believe what they believe.’
‘Dear God, what is going on under this roof? These children believe the Pope can go down to the underworld with a bunch of keys. Whereas Richard denies the sacrament –’
‘What?’ Johane's mouth falls open. ‘He does what?’
Mercy says, ‘Richard is right. When the good Lord said, this is my body, he meant, this signifies my body. He did not license priests to be conjurers.’
‘But he said, it is. He did not say, this is like my body, he said, it is. Can God lie? No. He is incapable of it.’
‘God can do anything,’ Alice says.
Johane stares at her. ‘You little minx.’
‘If my mother were here, she would slap you for that.’
‘No fighting,’ he says. ‘Please?’ The Austin Friars is like the world in little. These few years it's been more like a battlefield than a household; or like one of the tented encampments in which the survivors look in despair at their shattered limbs and spoiled
