his surprise, the small pale girl catches his glance; behind the retreating back of Mary Boleyn, she raises her own eyes to Heaven.
Walking away – eight antechambers back to the rest of his day – he knows that Anne has stepped forward to a place where he can see her, the morning light lying along the curve of her throat. He sees the thin arch of her eyebrow, her smile, the turn of her head on her long slender neck. He sees her speed, intelligence and rigour. He didn’t think she would help the cardinal, but what do you lose by asking? He thinks, it is the first proposition I have put to her; probably not the last.
There was a moment when Anne gave him all her attention: her skewering dark glance. The king, too, knows how to look; blue eyes, their mildness deceptive. Is this how they look at each other? Or in some other way? For a second he understands it; then he doesn’t. He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture towards the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
In Lent, there are butchers who will sell you red meat, if you know where to go. At Austin Friars he goes down to talk to his kitchen staff, and says to his chief man, ‘The cardinal is sick, he is dispensed from Lent.’
His cook takes off his hat. ‘By the Pope?’
‘By me.’ He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, ‘Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?’
A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, ‘At this moment, master, I would have to say …’
‘No, but suppose I were making my way to Gray’s Inn … Can you picture to yourself? Carrying a folio of papers and an inkhorn?’
‘I do suppose a clerk would be carrying those.’
‘So you can’t picture it?’
Thurston takes off his hat again, and turns it inside out. He looks at it as if his brains might be inside it, or at least some prompt as to what to say next. ‘I see how you would look like a lawyer. Not like a murderer, no. But if you will forgive me, master, you always look like a man who knows how to cut up a carcase.’
He has the kitchen make beef olives for the cardinal, stuffed with sage and marjoram, neatly trussed and placed side by side in trays, so that the cooks at Richmond need do nothing but bake them. Show me where it says in the Bible, a man shall not eat beef olives in March.
He thinks of Lady Anne, her unslaked appetite for a fight; the sad ladies about her. He sends those ladies some flat baskets of small tarts, made of preserved oranges and honey. To Anne herself he sends a dish of almond cream. It is flavoured with rose-water and decorated with the preserved petals of roses, and with candied violets. He is above riding across the country, carrying food himself; but not that much above it. It’s not so many years since the Frescobaldi kitchen in Florence; or perhaps it is, but his memory is clear, exact. He was clarifying calf’s-foot jelly, chatting away in his mixture of French, Tuscan and Putney, when somebody shouted, ‘Tommaso, they want you upstairs.’ His movements were unhurried as he nodded to a kitchen child, who brought him a basin of water. He washed his hands, dried them on a linen cloth. He took off his apron and hung it on a peg. For all he knows, it is there still.
He saw a young boy – younger than him – on hands and knees, scrubbing the steps. He sang as he worked:
‘Scaramella va alla guerra Colla lancia et la rotella La zombero boro borombetta, La boro borombo …’
‘If you please, Giacomo,’ he said. To let him pass, the boy moved aside, into the curve of the wall. A shift of the light wiped the curiosity from his face, blanking it, fading his past into the past, washing the future clean. Scaramella is off to war … But I’ve been to war, he thought.
He had gone upstairs. In his ears the roll and stutter of the song’s military drum. He had gone upstairs and never come down again. In a corner of the Frescobaldi counting house, a table was waiting for him. Scaramella fa la gala, he hummed. He had taken his place. Sharpened a quill. His thoughts bubbled and swirled, Tuscan, Putney, Castilian oaths. But when he committed his thoughts to paper they came out in Latin and perfectly smooth.
Even before he walks in from the kitchens at Austin Friars, the women of the house know that he has been to see Anne.
‘So,’ Johane demands. ‘Tall or short?’
‘Neither.’
‘I’d heard she was very tall. Sallow, is she not?’
‘Yes, sallow.’
‘They say she is graceful. Dances well.’
‘We did not dance.’
Mercy says, ‘But what do you think? A friend to the gospel?’
He shrugs. ‘We did not pray.’
Alice, his little niece: ‘What was she wearing?’
Ah, I can tell you that; he prices and sources her, hood to hem, foot to fingertip. For her headdress Anne affects the French style, the round hood flattering the fine bones of her face. He explains this, and though his tone is cool, mercantile, the women somehow do not appreciate it.
‘You don’t like her, do you?’ Alice says, and he says it’s not for him to have an opinion; or you either, Alice, he says, hugging her and making her giggle. The child Jo says, our master is in a good mood. This squirrel trim, Mercy says, and he says, Calabrian. Alice says, oh, Calabrian, and wrinkles her nose; Johane remarks, I must say, Thomas, it seems you got close.
‘Are her teeth good?’ Mercy says.
‘For God’s sake, woman: when she sinks them into me, I’ll let you know.’
When the cardinal had heard that the Duke of Norfolk was coming out to Richmond to tear him with his teeth, he had laughed and said, ‘Marry, Thomas, time to be going.’
But to go north, the cardinal needs funding. The problem is put to the king’s council, who fall out, and continue the quarrel in his hearing. ‘After all,’ Charles Brandon says, ‘one can’t let an archbishop creep away to his enthronement like a servant who’s stolen the spoons.’
‘He’s done more than steal the spoons,’ Norfolk says. ‘He’s eaten the dinner that would have fed all England. He’s filched the tablecloth, by God, and drunk the cellar dry.’
The king can be elusive. One day when he thinks he has an appointment to meet Henry, he gets Master Secretary instead. ‘Sit down,’ Gardiner says. ‘Sit down and listen to me. Contain yourself in patience, while I put you straight on a few matters.’
He watches him ranging to and fro, Stephen the noonday devil.
