north, and she used to turn it away before she got into bed with him. Walter had said, dear God, Thomas, it was St fucking Felicity if I'm not mistaken, and her face was to the wall for sure the night I got you.
Johane walks about the room. It is a large room and filled with light. ‘All these things,’ she says, ‘these things we have now. The clock. That new chest you had Stephen send you from Flanders, the one with the carving of the birds and flowers, I heard with my own ears you say to Thomas Avery, oh, tell Stephen I want it, I don't care what it costs. All these painted pictures of people we don't know, all these, I don't know what, lutes and books of music, we never used to have them, when I was a girl I never used to look at myself in a mirror, but now I look at myself every day. And a comb, you gave me an ivory comb. I never had one of my own. Liz used to plait my hair and push it under my hood, and then I did hers, and if we didn't look how we ought to look, somebody soon told us.’
Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of ourselves for having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice. Even Liz, once when they were young, when she'd seen him early in the morning putting Gregory's shirt to warm before the fire, even Liz had said sharply, don't do that, he'll expect it every day.
He says, ‘Liz – I mean, Johane …’
You've done that once too often, her face says.
‘I want to be good to you. Tell me what I can give you.’
He waits for her to shout, as women do, do you think you can buy me, but she doesn't, she listens, and he thinks she is entranced, her face intent, her eyes on his, as she learns his theory about what money can buy. ‘There was a man in Florence, a friar, Fra Savonarola, he induced all the people to think beauty was a sin. Some people think he was a magician and they fell under his spell for a season, they made fires in the streets and they threw in everything they liked, everything they had made or worked to buy, bolts of silk, and linen their mothers had embroidered for their marriage beds, books of poems written in the poet's hand, bonds and wills, rent-rolls, title deeds, dogs and cats, the shirts from their backs, the rings from their fingers, women their veils, and do you know what was worst, Johane – they threw in their mirrors. So then they couldn't see their faces and know how they were different from the beasts in the field and the creatures screaming on the pyre. And when they had melted their mirrors they went home to their empty houses, and lay on the floor because they had burned their beds, and when they got up next day they were aching from the hard floor and there was no table for their breakfast because they'd used the table to feed the bonfire, and no stool to sit on because they'd chopped it into splinters, and there was no bread to eat because the bakers had thrown into the flames the basins and the yeast and the flour and the scales. And you know the worst of it? They were sober. Last night they took their wine-skins …’ He turns his arm, in a mime of a man lobbing something into a fire. ‘So they were sober and their heads were clear, but they looked around and they had nothing to eat, nothing to drink and nothing to sit on.’
‘But that wasn't the worst. You said the mirrors were the worst. Not to be able to look at yourself.’
‘Yes. Well, so I think. I hope I can always look myself in the face. And you, Johane, you should always have a fine glass to see yourself. As you're a woman worth looking at.’
You could write a sonnet, Thomas Wyatt could write her a sonnet, and not make this effect … She turns her head away, but through the thin film of her veil he can see her skin glow. Because women will coax: tell me, just tell me something, tell me your thoughts; and this he has done.
They part friends. They even manage without one last time for old time's sake. Not that they are parted, really, but now they are on different terms. Mercy says, ‘Thomas, when you're cold and under a stone, you'll talk yourself out of your grave.’
The household is quiet, calm. The turmoil of the city is locked outside the gate; he is having the locks renewed, the chains reinforced. Jo brings him an Easter egg. ‘Look, we have saved this one for you.’ It is a white egg with no speckles. It is featureless, but a single curl, the colour of onion-skin, peeps out from under a lopsided crown. You pick your prince and you know what he is: or do you?
The child says, ‘My mother sends a message: tell your uncle, for a present, I'd like a drinking cup made of the shell of a griffin's egg. It's a lion with the head and wings of a bird; it's died out now, so you can't get them any more.’
He says, ‘Ask her what colour she wants.’
Jo plants a kiss on his cheek.
He looks into the glass and the whole bright room comes bouncing back to him: lutes, portraits, silk hangings. In Rome there was a banker called Agostino Chigi. In Siena, where he came from, they maintained he was the richest man in the world. When Agostino had the Pope around for dinner he fed him on gold plates. Then he looked at the aftermath – the sprawled, sated cardinals, the mess they left behind, the half-picked bones and fish skeletons, the oyster shells and the orange rinds – and he said, stuff it, let's save the washing-up.
The guests tossed their plates out of the open windows and straight into the Tiber. The soiled table linen flew after them, white napkins unfurling like greedy gulls diving for scraps. Peals of Roman laughter unfurled into the Roman night.
Chigi had netted the banks, and he had divers standing by for whatever escaped. Some sharp-eyed servant of his upper household stood by the bank when dawn came, and checked off the list, pricking with a pin each item retrieved as it came up from the deep.
1531: it is the summer of the comet. In the long dusk, beneath the curve of the rising moon and the light of the strange new star, black-robed gentlemen stroll arm in arm in the garden, speaking of salvation. They are Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, the priests and clerks of Anne's household detached and floated to Austin Friars on a breeze of theological chit-chat: where did the church go wrong? How can we drift her into the right channel again? ‘It would be a mistake,’ he says, watching them from the window, ‘to think any of those gentlemen agree one with the other on any point of the interpretation of scripture. Give them a season's respite from Thomas More, and they will fall to persecuting each other.’
Gregory is sitting on a cushion and playing with his dog. He is whisking her nose with a feather and she is sneezing to amuse him. ‘Sir,’ he says, ‘why are your dogs always called Bella and always so small?’
Behind him at an oak table, Nikolaus Kratzer, the king's astronomer, sits with his astrolabe before him, his paper and ink. He puts down his pen and looks up. ‘Master Cromwell,’ he says lightly, ‘either my calculations are wrong, or the universe is not as we think it.’
He says, ‘Why are comets bad signs? Why not good signs? Why do they prefigure the fall of nations? Why not their rise?’
Kratzer is from Munich, a dark man of his own age with a long humorous mouth. He comes here for the company, for the good and learned conversation, some of it in his own language. The cardinal had been his patron, and he had made him a beautiful gold sundial. When he saw it the great man had flushed with pleasure. ‘Nine faces, Nikolaus! Seven more than the Duke of Norfolk.’
In the year 1456 there was a comet like this one. Scholars recorded it, Pope Calixtus excommunicated it, and it may be that there are one or two old men alive who saw it. Its tail was noted down as sabre-shaped, and in that year the Turks laid siege to Belgrade. It is as well to take note of any portents the heavens may offer; the king seeks the best advice. The alignment of the planets in Pisces, in the autumn of 1524, was followed by great wars in Germany, the rise of Luther's sect, uprisings among common men and the deaths of 100,000 of the Emperor's subjects;
