pot is sound, and if you don't believe me, madam, you can piss in it. Come, tell me what you will give me. There is no pot to equal this since Merlin was a boy. Toss in a mouse from your trap and the next thing you know it's a spiced boar's head with the apple ready in its mouth.’
‘How old are you?’ a woman asks him.
‘That I couldn't say.’
‘Come back next year, and we can lie in my feather bed.’
He hesitates. ‘Next year I'm run away.’
‘You're going on the road as a travelling show? With your pot?’
‘No, I thought I'd be a robber on the heath. Or a bear-keeper's a steady job.’
The woman says, ‘I hope it keeps fine for you.’
That night, after his bath, his supper, his singing, his dancing, the king wants a walk. He has country tastes, likes what you call hedge wine, nothing strong, but these days he knocks back his first drink quickly and nods to signal for more; so he needs Francis Weston's arm to steady him as he leaves the table. A heavy dew has fallen, and gentlemen with torches squelch over the grass. The king takes a few breaths of damp air. ‘Gardiner,’ he says. ‘You don't get on.’
‘I have no quarrel with him,’ he says blandly.
‘Then he has a quarrel with you.’ The king vanishes into blackness; next he speaks from behind a torch flame, like God out of the burning bush. ‘I can manage Stephen. I have his measure. He is the kind of robust servant I need, these days. I don't want men who are afraid of controversy.’
‘Your Majesty should come inside. These night vapours are not healthy.’
‘Spoken like the cardinal.’ The king laughs.
He approaches on the king's left hand. Weston, who is young and lightly built, is showing signs of buckling at the knees. ‘Lean on me, sir,’ he advises. The king locks an arm around his neck, in a sort of wrestling hold. Bear-keeper's a steady job. For a moment he thinks the king is crying.
He didn't run away the next year, for bear-keeping or any other trade. It was next year that the Cornishmen came roaring up the country, rebels bent on burning London and taking the English king and bending him to their Cornish will. Fear went before their army, for they were known for burning ricks and ham-stringing cattle, for firing houses with the people inside, for slaughtering priests and eating babies and trampling altar bread.
The king lets him go abruptly. ‘Away to our cold beds. Or is that only mine? Tomorrow you will hunt. If you are not well mounted we will provide. I will see if I can tire you out, though Wolsey said it was a thing impossible. You and Gardiner, you must learn to pull together. This winter you must be yoked to the plough.’
It is not oxen he wants, but brutes who will go head-to-head, injure and maim themselves in the battle for his favour. It's clear his chances with the king are better if he doesn't get on with Gardiner than if he does. Divide and rule. But then, he rules anyway.
Though Parliament has not been recalled, Michaelmas term is the busiest he has ever known. Fat files of the king's business arrive almost hourly, and the Austin Friars fills up with city merchants, monks and priests of various sorts, petitioners for five minutes of his time. As if they sense something, a shift of power, a coming spectacle, small groups of Londoners begin to gather outside his gate, pointing out the liveries of the men who come and go: the Duke of Norfolk's man, the Earl of Wiltshire's servant. He looks down on them from a window and feels he recognises them; they are sons of the men who every autumn stood around gossiping and warming themselves by the door of his father's forge. They are boys like the boy he used to be: restless, waiting for something to happen.
He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: ‘put on a mask, as it were.’ He applies that to each place, each castle or inn or nobleman's seat, where he finds himself waking up. He sends some money to Erasmus, as the cardinal used to do. ‘To buy him his gruel,’ he used to say, ‘and keep the poor soul in quills and ink.’ Erasmus is surprised; he has heard only bad things of Thomas Cromwell.
From the day he was sworn into the king's council, he has had his face arranged. He has spent the early months of the year watching the faces of other people, to see when they register doubt, reservation, rebellion – to catch that fractional moment before they settle into the suave lineaments of the courtier, the facilitator, the yes-man. Rafe says to him, we cannot trust Wriothesley, and he laughs: I know where I am with Call-Me. He is well connected at court, but got his start in the cardinal's household: as who did not? But Gardiner was his master at Trinity Hall, and he has watched us both rise in the world. He has seen us put on muscle, two fighting dogs, and he cannot decide where to put his money. He says to Rafe, I might in his place feel the same; it was easy in my day, you just put your shirt on Wolsey. He has no fear of Wriothesley, or anyone like him. You can calculate the actions of unprincipled men. As long as you feed them they'll run at your heels. Less calculable, more dangerous, are men like Stephen Vaughan, men who write to you, as Vaughan does: Thomas Cromwell, I would do anything for you. Men who say they understand you, whose embrace is so tight and ungiving they will carry you over the abyss.
At Austin Friars he has beer and bread sent out to the men who stand at the gate: broth, as the mornings get sharper. Thurston says, well, if you aim to be feeding the whole district. It's only last month, he says, that you were complaining the larders were overflowing and the cellars were full. St Paul tells us we must know how to flourish in times of abasement and times of abundance, with a full stomach and an empty. He goes down to the kitchens to talk to the boys Thurston has taken on. They shout up with their names and what they can do, and gravely he notes their abilities in a book: Simon, can dress a salad and play a drum, Matthew, he can say his Pater Noster. All these garzoni must be trainable. One day they must be able to walk upstairs, as he did, and take a seat in the counting house. All must have warm and decent clothes, and be encouraged to wear them, not sell them, for he remembers from his days at Lambeth the profound cold of store rooms; in Wolsey's kitchens at Hampton Court, where the chimneys draw well and confine the heat, he has seen stray snowflakes drifting in the rafters and settling on sills.
When in the crisp mornings at dawn he comes out of his house with his entourage of clerks, the Londoners are already assembling. They drop back and watch him, neither friendly nor hostile. He calls out good morning to them and may God bless you, and some of them shout good morning back. They pull off their caps and, because he is a king's councillor, they stand bareheaded till he has gone by.
October: Monsieur Chapuys, the Emperor's ambassador, comes to Austin Friars to dine, and Stephen Gardiner is on the menu. ‘No sooner appointed to Winchester, than sent abroad,’ Chapuys says. ‘And how do you think King Francis will like him? What can he do as a diplomat that Sir Thomas Boleyn cannot? Though I suppose he is parti pris. Being the lady's father. Gardiner more … ambivalent, you would say? More disinterested, that is the word. I cannot see what King Francis will get out of supporting the match, unless your king were to offer him – what? Money? Warships? Calais?’
At table with the household, Monsieur Chapuys has talked pleasantly of verse, portraiture, and his university years in Turin; turning to Rafe, whose French is excellent, he has spoken of falconry, as a thing likely to interest young men. ‘You must go out with our master,’ Rafe tells him. ‘It is almost his only recreation these days.’
Monsieur Chapuys turns his bright little eyes upon him. ‘He plays kings' games now.’
Rising from table, Chapuys praises the food, the music,
