one speaks. He looks down at his own thick-fingered hands, scars and burn marks hidden in the palms. He thinks, gentleman? So you call yourself, but who do you hope to mislead? Only the people who have never seen you, or the people you keep distanced with courtesy, legal clients and your fellows in the Commons, colleagues at Gray’s Inn, the household servants of courtiers, the courtiers themselves … His mind strays to the next letter he must write. Then Gregory says, his voice small as if he had receded into the past, ‘Do you remember that Christmas, when there was the giant in the pageant?’
‘Here in the parish? I remember.’
‘He said, “I am a giant, my name is Marlinspike.” They said he was as tall as the Cornhill maypole. What’s the Cornhill maypole?’
‘They took it down. The year of the riots. Evil May Day, they called it. You were only a baby then.’
‘Where’s the maypole now?’
‘The city has it in store.’
‘Shall we have our star again next year?’
‘If our fortunes look up.’
‘Shall we be poor now the cardinal is down?’
‘No.’
The little flames leap and flare, and Gregory looks into them. ‘You remember the year I had my face dyed black, and I was wrapped in a black calfskin? When I was a devil in the Christmas play?’
‘I do.’ His face softens. ‘I remember.’
Anne had wanted to be dyed, but her mother had said it was not suitable for a little girl. He wishes he had said that Anne must have her turn as a parish angel – even if, being dark, she had to wear one of the parish’s yellow knitted wigs, which slipped sideways, or fell over the children’s eyes.
The year that Grace was an angel, she had wings made of peacock feathers. He himself had contrived it. The other little girls were dowdy goose creatures, and their wings fell off if they caught them on the corners of the stable. But Grace stood glittering, her hair entwined with silver threads; her shoulders were trussed with a spreading, shivering glory, and the rustling air was perfumed as she breathed. Lizzie said, Thomas, there’s no end to you, is there? She has the best wings the city has ever seen.
Gregory stands up; he comes to kiss him good night. For a moment his son leans against him, as if he were a child; or as if the past, the pictures in the fire, were an intoxication.
Once the boy has gone to bed he sweeps his papers out of the tidy stack he has made. He refolds them. He sorts them with the endorsement out, ready for filing. He thinks of Evil May Day. Gregory did not ask, why were there riots? The riots were against foreigners. He himself had not long been home.
As 1530 begins, he does not hold an Epiphany feast, because so many people, sensible of the cardinal’s disgrace, would be obliged to refuse his invitation. Instead, he takes the young men to Gray’s Inn, for the Twelfth Night revels. He regrets it almost at once; this year they are noisier, and more bawdy, than any he remembers.
The law students make a play about the cardinal. They make him flee from his palace at York Place, to his barge on the Thames. Some fellows flap dyed sheets, to impersonate the river, and then others run up and throw water on them from leather buckets. As the cardinal scrambles into his barge, there are hunting cries, and one benighted fool runs into the hall with a brace of otter hounds on a leash. Others come with nets and fishing rods, to haul the cardinal back to the bank.
The next scene shows the cardinal floundering in the mud at Putney, as he runs to his bolt-hole at Esher. The students halloo and cry as the cardinal weeps and holds up his hands in prayer. Of all the people who witnessed this, who, he wonders, has offered it up as a comedy? If he knew, or if he guessed, the worse for them.
The cardinal lies on his back, a crimson mountain; he flails his hands; he offers his bishopric of Winchester to anyone who can get him back on his mule. Some students, under a frame draped with donkey skins, enact the mule, which turns about and jokes in Latin, and farts in the cardinal’s face. There is much wordplay about bishoprics and bishop’s pricks, which might pass as witty if they were street-sweepers, but he thinks law students should do better. He rises from his place, displeased, and his household has no choice but to stand up with him and walk out.
He stops to have a word with some of the benchers: how was this allowed to go forward? The Cardinal of York is a sick man, he may die, how will you and your students stand then before your God? What sort of young men are you breeding here, who are so brave as to assail a great man who has fallen on evil times – whose favour, a few short weeks ago, they would have begged for?
The benchers follow him, apologising; but their voices are lost in the roars of laughter that billow out from the hall. His young household are lingering, casting glances back. The cardinal is offering his harem of forty virgins to anyone who will help him mount; he sits on the ground and laments, while a flaccid and serpentine member, knitted of red wool, flops out from under his robes.
Outside, lights burn thin in the icy air. ‘Home,’ he says. He hears Gregory whisper, ‘We can only laugh if he permits us.’
‘Well, after all,’ he hears Rafe say, ‘he is the man in charge.’
He falls back a step, to speak with them. ‘Anyway, it was the wicked Borgia Pope, Alexander, who kept forty women. And none of them were virgins, I can tell you.’
Rafe touches his shoulder. Richard walks on his left, sticking close. ‘You don’t have to hold me up,’ he says mildly. ‘I’m not like the cardinal.’ He stops. He laughs. He says, ‘I suppose it was …’
‘Yes, it was quite entertaining,’ Richard says. ‘His Grace must have been five feet around his waist.’
The night is loud with the noise of bone rattles, and alive with the flames of torches. A troop of hobby horses clatters past them, singing, and a party of men wearing antlers, with bells at their heels. As they near home a boy dressed as an orange rolls past, with his friend, a lemon. ‘Gregory Cromwell!’ they call out, and to him as their senior they courteously raise, in lieu of hats, an upper slice of rind. ‘God send you a good new year.’
‘The same to you,’ he calls. And, to the lemon: ‘Tell your father to come and see me about that Cheapside lease.’
They get home. ‘Go to bed,’ he says. ‘It’s late.’ He feels it best to add, ‘God see you safe till morning.’
They leave him. He sits at his work table. He remembers Grace, at the end of her evening as an angel: standing in the firelight, her face white with fatigue, her eyes glittering, and the eyes of her peacock’s wings shining in the firelight, each like a topaz, golden, smoky. Liz said, ‘Stand away from the fire, sweetheart, or your wings will catch alight.’ His little girl backed off, into shadow; the feathers were the colours of ash and cinders as she moved towards the stairs, and he said, ‘Grace, are you going to bed in your wings?’
‘Till I say my prayers,’ she said, darting a look over her shoulder. He followed her, afraid for her, afraid of fire and some other danger, but he did not know what. She walked up the staircase, her plumes rustling, her feathers fading to black.
Ah, Christ, he thinks, at least I’ll never have to give her to anyone else. She’s dead and I’ll not have to sign her away to some purse-mouthed petty gent who wants her dowry. Grace would have wanted a title. She would have thought
