want to spend time with her.’ She raises her eyes, a pale momentary brightness. ‘Very few do.’
Every rising family needs information. With the king considering himself a bachelor, any little girl can hold the key to the future, and not all his money is on Anne. ‘Well, good luck,’ he says. ‘I’ll try to keep it in English.’
‘I would be obliged.’ She bows. ‘Dr Cranmer.’
He turns to watch her as she patters off in the direction of Anne Boleyn. A small suspicion enters his mind, about the paper in the bed. But no, he thinks. That is not possible.
Dr Cranmer says, smiling, ‘You have a wide acquaintance among the court ladies.’
‘Not very wide. I still don’t know which daughter that was, there are three at least. And I suppose Seymour’s sons are ambitious.’
‘I hardly know them.’
‘The cardinal brought Edward up. He’s sharp. And Tom Seymour is not such a fool as he pretends.’
‘The father?’
‘Stays in Wiltshire. We never see him.’
‘One could envy him,’ Dr Cranmer murmurs.
Country life. Rural felicity. A temptation he has never known. ‘How long were you at Cambridge, before the king called you up?’
Cranmer smiles. ‘Twenty-six years.’
They are both dressed for riding. ‘You are going back to Cambridge today?’
‘Not to stay. The family’ – the Boleyns, he means – ‘want to have me at hand. And you, Master Cromwell?’
‘A private client. I can’t make a living from Lady Anne’s black looks.’
Boys wait with their horses. From various folds of his garments Dr Cranmer produces objects wrapped in cloth. One of them is a carrot cut carefully lengthways, and another a wizened apple, quartered. As if he were a child, fair-minded with a treat, he gives him two slices of carrot and half the apple, to feed to his own horse; as he does so, he says, ‘You owe much to Anne Boleyn. More than perhaps you think. She has formed a good opinion of you. I’m not sure she cares to be your sister-in-law, mind …’
The beasts bend their necks, nibbling, their ears flicking in appreciation. It is a moment of peace, like a benediction. He says, ‘There are no secrets, are there?’
‘No. No. Absolutely none.’ The priest shakes his head. ‘You asked why I would not come to your college.’
‘I was making conversation.’
‘Still … as we heard it in Cambridge, you performed such labours for the foundation … the students and Fellows all commend you … no detail escapes Master Cromwell. Though to be sure, this comfort on which you pride yourselves …’ His tone, smooth and unemphatic, doesn’t change. ‘In the fish cellar? Where the students died?’
‘My lord cardinal did not take that lightly.’
Cranmer says, lightly, ‘Nor did I.’
‘My lord was never a man to ride down another for his opinions. You would have been safe.’
‘I assure you he would have found no heresy in me. Even the Sorbonne could not fault me. I have nothing to be afraid of.’ A wan smile. ‘But perhaps … ah well … perhaps I’m just a Cambridge man at heart.’
He says to Wriothesley, ‘Is he? At all points orthodox?’
‘It’s hard to say. He doesn’t like monks. You should get on.’
‘Was he liked at Jesus College?’
‘They say he was a severe examiner.’
‘I suppose he doesn’t miss much. Although. He thinks Anne is a virtuous lady.’ He sighs. ‘And what do we think?’
Call-Me-Risley snorts. He has just married – a connection of Gardiner’s – but his relations with women are not, on the whole, gentle.
‘He seems a melancholy sort of man,’ he says. ‘The kind who wants to live retired from the world.’
Wriothesley’s fair eyebrows rise, almost imperceptibly. ‘Did he tell you about the barmaid?’
When Cranmer comes to the house, he feeds him the delicate meat of the roe deer; they take supper privately, and he gets his story from him, slowly, slowly and easily. He asks the doctor where he comes from, and when he says, nowhere you know, he says, try me, I’ve been to most places.
‘If you had been to Aslockton, you wouldn’t know you were there. If a man goes fifteen miles to Nottingham, let him only spend the night away, and it vanishes clear from his mind.’ His village has not even a church; only some poor cottages and his father’s house, where his family has lived for three generations.
‘Your father is a gentleman?’
‘He is indeed.’ Cranmer sounds faintly shocked: what else could he be? ‘The Tamworths of Lincolnshire are among my connections. The Cliftons of Clifton. The Molyneux family, of whom you will have heard. Or have you?’
‘And you have much land?’
‘If I had thought, I would have brought the ledgers.’
‘Forgive me. We men of business …’
Eyes rest on him, assessing. Cranmer nods. ‘A small acreage. And I am not the eldest. But he brought me up well. Taught me horsemanship. He gave me my first bow. He gave me my first hawk to train.’
Dead, he thinks, the father long dead: still looking for his hand in the dark.
‘When I was twelve he sent me to school. I suffered there. The master was harsh.’
‘To you? Or others as well?’
‘If I am honest, I only thought of myself. I was weak, no doubt. I suppose he sought out weakness. Schoolmasters do.’
‘Could you not complain to your father?’
‘I wonder now why I did not. But then he died. I was thirteen. Another year and my mother sent me to Cambridge. I was glad of the escape. To be from under his rod. Not that the flame of learning burnt bright. The east wind put it out. Oxford – Magdalen especially, where your cardinal was – it was everything in those days.’
He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you: the touch of warm terracotta, the night sky of another climate, alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people’s saints. But if you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no further.
