style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Oh yes. He spat in my face.’
‘I would expect no better of him,’ Riche says.
‘I wiped his spit off with a napkin. It's black. It has the stench of Hell.’
‘What is that like?’
‘Like something rotting.’
‘Where is it now, the napkin? I suppose you didn't send it to the laundry?’
‘Dom Edward has it.’
‘Does he show it to people? For money?’
‘For offerings.’
‘For money.’
Cranmer takes his face from his hands. ‘Shall we pause?’
‘A quarter hour?’ Riche says.
Audley: ‘I told you he was young and hearty.’
‘Perhaps we will meet tomorrow,’ Cranmer says. ‘I need to pray. And a quarter of an hour will not do it.’
‘But tomorrow is Sunday,’ the nun says. ‘There was a man who went out hunting on a Sunday and he fell down a bottomless pit into Hell. Imagine that.’
‘How was it bottomless,’ Riche asks, ‘if Hell was there to receive him?’
‘I wish I were going hunting,’ Audley says. ‘Christ knows, I'd take a chance on it.’
Alice rises from her stool and signals for her escort. The Maid gets to her feet. She is smiling broadly. She has made the archbishop flinch, and himself grow cold, and the Solicitor General all but weep with her talk of scalded babies. She thinks she is winning; but she is losing, losing, losing all the time. Alice puts a gentle hand on her arm, but the Maid shakes it off.
Outside, Richard Riche says, ‘We should burn her.’
Cranmer says, ‘Much as we may mislike her talk of the late cardinal appearing to her, and devils in her bedchamber, she speaks in this way because she has been taught to ape the claims of certain nuns who have gone before her, nuns whom Rome is pleased to recognise as saints. I cannot convict them of heresy, retrospectively. Nor have I evidence to try her for heresy.’
‘Burned for treason, I meant.’
It is the woman's penalty; where a man is half-hanged and castrated, then slowly gutted by the executioner.
He says, ‘There is no overt action. She has only expressed an intent.’
‘Intent to raise rebellion, to depose the king, should that not be treason? Words have been construed as treasons, there are precedents, you know them.’
‘I should be astonished,’ Audley says, ‘if they have escaped Cromwell's attention.’
It is as if they can smell the devil's spit; they are almost jostling each other to get into the air, which is mild, damp: a faint scent of leaves, a green-gold, rustling light. He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.
‘I think new laws are needed,’ Riche says.
‘I have it in hand.’
‘And I think this woman is too leniently kept. We are too soft. We are just playing with her.’
Cranmer walks away, shoulders stooped, his trailing habit brushing up the leaves. Audley turns to him, bright and resolute, a man keen to change the subject. ‘So, the princess, you say she was well?’
The princess, unswaddled, had been placed on cushions at Anne's feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature. It seems stories have been put about that Anne's child was born with teeth, has six fingers on each hand, and is furred all over like a monkey, so her father has shown her off naked to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display in the hope of countering the rumours. The king has chosen Hatfield for her seat, and Anne says, ‘It seems to me waste might be saved, and the proper order of things asserted, if Spanish Mary's household were broken up and she were to become a member of the household of the princess Elizabeth my daughter.’
‘In the capacity of …?’ The child is quiet; only, he notes, because she has crammed a fist into her maw, and is cannibalising herself.
‘In the capacity of my daughter's servant. What else should she be? There can be no pretence at equality. Mary is a bastard.’
The brief respite is over; the princess sets up a screech that would bring out the dead. Anne's glance slides away sideways, and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, and she leans down towards her daughter, but at once women swoop, flapping and bustling; the screaming creature is plucked up, wrapped up, swept away, and the queen's eyes follow pitifully as the fruit of her womb exits, in procession. He says gently, ‘I think she was hungry.’
Saturday evening: supper at Austin Friars for Stephen Vaughan, so often in transit: William Butts, Hans, Kratzer, Call-Me Risley. Conversation is in various tongues and Rafe Sadler translates adroitly, smoothly, his head turning from side to side: high topics and low, statecraft and gossip, Zwingli's theology, Cranmer's wife. About the latter, it has not been possible to suppress the talk at the Steelyard and in the city; Vaughan says, ‘Can Henry know and not know?’
‘That is perfectly possible. He is a prince of very large capacities.’
Larger by the day, Wriothesley says, laughing; Dr Butts says, he is one of those men who must be active, and recently his leg is troubling him, that old injury; but think, is it likely that a man who has not spared himself on the hunting field and in the tilt yard should not get some injury by the time he is the king's age? He is forty-three this year, you know, and I should be glad, Kratzer, to have your view on what the planets suggest, for the later years of a man whose chart is so dominated by air and fire; by the by, did I not always warn of his moon in Aries (rash and hasty planet) in the house of marriage?
He says, impatient, we heard very little about the Aries moon when he was settled with Katherine for twenty years. It is not the stars that make us, Dr Butts, it is circumstance and necessità, the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't you agree?
He beckons to Christophe to fill their glasses. They talk about the Mint, where Vaughan is to have a position; about Calais, where Honor Lisle seems more busy in affairs than her husband the Governor. He thinks about Guido Camillo in Paris, pacing and fretting between the wooden walls of his memory machine, while knowledge grows unseen and of itself in its cavities and concealed inner spaces. He thinks of the Holy Maid – by now established as not holy, and not a maid – no doubt at this moment sitting down to supper with his nieces. He thinks of his fellow interrogators: Cranmer on his knees in prayer, Sir Purse frowning over the day's transcripts, Audley – what will the Lord Chancellor be doing? Polishing his chain of office, he decides. He thinks of saying to Vaughan,
