shady gardens where gentlemen live in pleasant retreat from an England they claim they no longer understand. He knows the fortifications – crumbling – and beyond the city walls the lands of the Pale, its woods, villages and marshes, its sluices, dykes and canals. He knows the road to Boulogne, and the road to Gravelines, which is the Emperor's territory, and he knows that either monarch, Francis or Charles, could take this town with one determined push. The English have been here for two hundred years, but in the streets now you hear more French and Flemish spoken.
The Governor greets His Majesty; Lord Berners, old soldier and scholar, is the pattern of old-fashioned virtue, and if it were not for his limp, and his evident anxiety about the vast expenses he is about to incur, he would be straight out of the book called The Courtier. He has even arranged to lodge the king and the marquess in rooms with an interconnecting door. ‘I think that will be very suitable, my lord,’ he says. ‘As long as there is a sturdy bolt on both sides.’
Because Mary told him, before they left dry land, ‘Till now she wouldn't, but now she would, but he won't. He tells her he must be sure that if she gets a child it's born in wedlock.’
The monarchs are to meet for five days in Boulogne, then five days in Calais. Anne is aggrieved at the thought of being left behind. He can see by her restlessness that she knows this is a debatable land, where things might happen you cannot foretell. Meanwhile he has private business to transact. He leaves even Rafe behind, and slips away to an inn in a back court off Calk-well Street.
It is a low sort of place, and smells of wood smoke, fish and mould. On a side wall is a watery mirror through which he glimpses his own face, pale, only his eyes alive. For a moment it shocks him; you do not expect to see your own image in a hovel like this.
He sits at a table and waits. After five minutes there is a disturbance of the air at the back of the room. But nothing happens. He has anticipated they will keep him waiting; to pass the time, he runs over in his head the figures for last year's receipts to the king from the Duchy of Cornwall. He is about to move on to the figures submitted by the Chamberlain of Chester, when a dark shape materialises, and resolves itself into the person of an old man in a long gown. He totters forward, and in time two others follow him. You could change any one for the other: hollow coughs, long beards. According to some precedence which they negotiate by grunting, they take their seats on a bench opposite. He hates alchemists, and these look like alchemists to him: nameless splashes on their garments, watering eyes, vapour-induced sniffles. He greets them in French. They shudder, and one of them asks in Latin if they are not going to have anything to drink. He calls for the boy, and asks him without much hope what he suggests. ‘Drink somewhere else?’ the boy offers.
A jug of something vinegary comes. He lets the old men drink deeply before he asks, ‘Which of you is Maître Camillo?’
They exchange glances. It takes them as long as it takes the Graiae to pass their single shared eye.
‘Maître Camillo has gone to Venice.’
‘Why?’
Some coughing. ‘For consultations.’
‘But he does mean to return to France?’
‘Quite likely.’
‘The thing you have, I want it for my master.’
A silence. How would it be, he thought, if I take the wine away till they say something useful? But one pre-empts him, snatching up the jug; his hand shakes, and the wine washes over the table. The others bleat with irritation.
‘I thought you might bring drawings,’ he says.
They look at each other. ‘Oh, no.’
‘But there are drawings?’
‘Not as such.’
The spilt wine begins to soak into the splintered wood. They sit in miserable silence and watch this happen. One of them occupies himself in working his finger through a moth hole in his sleeve.
He shouts to the boy for a second jug. ‘We do not wish to disoblige you,’ the spokesman says. ‘You must understand that Maître Camillo is, for now, under the protection of King Francis.’
‘He intends to make a model for him?’
‘That is possible.’
‘A working model?’
‘Any model would be, by its nature, a working model.’
‘Should he find the terms of his employment in the least unsatisfactory, my master Henry would be happy to welcome him in England.’
There is another pause, till the jug is fetched and the boy has gone. This time, he does the pouring himself. The old men exchange glances again, and one says, ‘The magister believes he would dislike the English climate. The fogs. And also, the whole island is covered with witches.’
The interview has been unsatisfactory. But one must begin somewhere. As he leaves he says to the boy, ‘You might go and swab the table.’
‘I may as well wait till they've upset the second jug, monsieur.’
‘True. Take them in some food. What do you have?’
‘Pottage. I wouldn't recommend it. It looks like what's left when a whore's washed her shift.’
‘I never knew the Calais girls to wash anything. Can you read?’
‘A little.’
‘Write?’
‘No, monsieur.’
‘You should learn. Meanwhile use your eyes. If anyone else comes to talk to them, if they bring out any drawings, parchments, scrolls, anything of that kind, I want to know.’
The boy says, ‘What is it, monsieur? What are they selling?’
He almost tells him. What harm could it do? But then in the end he can't think of the right words.
Part-way through the talks in Boulogne, he has a message that Francis would like to see him. Henry deliberates before giving him permission; face-to-face, monarchs should deal only with fellow monarchs, and lords and churchmen of high rank. Since they landed, Brandon and Howard, who were friendly enough on board ship, have been distant with him, as if to make it quite clear to the French that they accord him no status; he is some whim of Henry's, they pretend, a novelty councillor who will soon vanish in favour of a viscount, baron or bishop.
The French messenger tells him, ‘This is not an audience.’
‘No,’ he says, ‘I understand. Nothing of that sort.’
Francis sits waiting, attended only by a handful of courtiers, for what is not an audience. He is a beanpole of a man, his elbows and knees jutting at the air, his big bony feet restless inside vast padded slippers. ‘Cremuel,’ he says. ‘Now, let me understand you. You are a Welshman.’
‘No, Your Highness.’
Sorrowful dog eyes; they look him over, they look him over again. ‘Not a Welshman.’
He sees the French king's difficulty. How has he got his passport
