consults Richard's day-book: John Fisher is waiting. It is time to be enraged. He tries thinking about Gardiner, but he keeps laughing. ‘Arrange your face,’ Richard says.
‘You'd never imagine that Stephen owed me money. I paid for his installation at Winchester.’
‘Call it in, sir.’
‘But I have already taken his house for the queen. He is still grieving. I had better not drive him to an extremity. I ought to leave him a way back.’
Bishop Fisher is seated, his skeletal hands resting on an ebony cane. ‘Good evening, my lord,’ he says. ‘Why are you so gullible?’
The bishop seems surprised that they are not to start off with a prayer. Nevertheless, he murmurs a blessing.
‘You had better ask the king's pardon. Beg the favour of it. Plead with him to consider your age and infirmities.’
‘I do not know my offence. And, whatever you think, I am not in my second childhood.’
‘But I believe you are. How else would you have given credence to this woman Barton? If you came across a puppet show in the street, would you not stand there cheering, and shout, “Look at their little wooden legs walking, look how they wave their arms? Hear them blow their trumpets”. Would you not?’
‘I don't think I ever saw a puppet show,’ Fisher says sadly. ‘At least, not one of the kind of which you speak.’
‘But you're in one, my lord bishop! Look around you. It's all one great puppet show.’
‘And yet so many did believe in her,’ Fisher says mildly. ‘Warham himself, Canterbury that was. A score, a hundred of devout and learned men. They attested her miracles. And why should she not voice her knowledge, being inspired? We know that before the Lord goes to work, he gives warning of himself through his servants, for it is stated by the prophet Amos …’
‘Don't prophet Amos me, man. She threatened the king. Foresaw his death.’
‘Foreseeing it is not the same as desiring it, still less plotting it.’
‘Ah, but she never foresaw anything that she didn't hope would happen. She sat down with the king's enemies and told them how it would be.’
‘If you mean Lord Exeter,’ the bishop says, ‘he is already pardoned, of course, and so is Lady Gertrude. If they were guilty, the king would have proceeded.’
‘That does not follow. Henry wishes for reconciliation. He finds it in him to be merciful. As he may be to you even yet, but you must admit your faults. Exeter has not been writing against the king, but you have.’
‘Where? Show me.’
‘Your hand is disguised, my lord, but not from me. Now you will publish no more.’ Fisher's glance shoots upwards. Delicately, his bones move beneath his skin; his fist grips his cane, the handle of which is a gilded dolphin. ‘Your printers abroad are working for me now. My friend Stephen Vaughan has offered them a better rate.’
‘It is about the divorce you are hounding me,’ Fisher says. ‘It is not about Elizabeth Barton. It is because Queen Katherine asked my counsel and I gave it.’
‘You say I am hounding you, when I ask you to keep within the law? Do not try to lead me away from your prophetess, or I will lead you where she is and lock you up next door to her. Would you have been so keen to believe her, if in one of her visions she had seen Anne crowned queen a year before it occurred, and Heaven smiling down on the event? In that case, I put it to you, you would have called her a witch.’
Fisher shakes his head; he retreats into bafflement. ‘I always wondered, you know, it has puzzled me many a year, if in the gospels Mary Magdalene was the same Mary who was Martha's sister. Elizabeth Barton told me for a certainty she was. In the whole matter, she didn't hesitate.’
He laughs. ‘Oh, she's familiar with these people. She's in and out of their houses. She's shared a bowl of pottage many a time with our Blessed Lady. Look now, my lord, holy simplicity was well enough in its day, but its day is over. We're at war. Just because the Emperor's soldiers aren't running down the street, don't deceive yourself – this is a war and you are in the enemy camp.’
The bishop is silent. He sways a little on his stool. Sniffs. ‘I see why Wolsey retained you. You are a ruffian and so was he. I have been a priest forty years, and I have never seen such ungodly men as those who flourish today. Such evil councillors.’
‘Fall ill,’ he says. ‘Take to your bed. That's what I recommend.’
The bill of attainder against the Maid and her allies is laid before the House of Lords on a Saturday morning, 21 February. Fisher's name is in it and so, at Henry's command, is More's. He goes to the Tower to see the woman Barton, to see if she has anything else to get off her conscience before her death is scheduled.
She has survived the winter, trailed across country to her outdoor confessions, standing exposed on scaffolds in the cutting wind. He brings a candle in with him, and finds her slumped on her stool like a badly tied bundle of rags; the air is both cold and stale. She looks up and says, as if they were resuming a conversation, ‘Mary Magdalene told me I should die.’
Perhaps, he thinks, she has been talking to me in her head. ‘Did she give you a date?’
‘You'd find that helpful?’ she asks. He wonders if she knows that Parliament, indignant over More's inclusion, could delay the bill against her till spring. ‘I'm glad you've come, Master Cromwell. Nothing happens here.’
Not even his most prolonged, his most subtle interrogations had frightened her. To get Katherine pulled into it, he had tried every trick he knew: with no result. He says, ‘You are fed properly, are you?’
‘Oh yes. And my laundry done. But I miss it, when I used to go to Lambeth, see the archbishop, I liked that. Seeing the river. All the people bustling along, and the boats unloading. Do you know if I shall be burned? Lord Audley said I would be burned.’ She speaks as if Audley were an old friend.
‘I hope you can be spared that. It is for the king to say.’
‘I go to Hell these nights,’ she says. ‘Master Lucifer shows me a chair. It is carved of human bones and padded with cushions of flame.’
‘Is it for me?’
‘Bless you, no. For the king.’
‘Any sightings of Wolsey?’
‘The cardinal's where I left him.’ Seated among the unborn. She pauses; a long drifting pause. ‘They say it can take an hour for the body to burn. Mother Mary will exalt me. I shall bathe in the flames, as one bathes in a fountain. To me, they will be cool.’ She looks into his face but at his expression she turns away. ‘Sometimes they pack gunpowder in the wood, don't they? Makes it quick then. How many will be going with me?’
Six. He names them. ‘It could have been sixty. Do you know that? Your vanity brought them here.’
As he says it he thinks, it is also true that their vanity brought her: and he sees that she would have preferred sixty to die, to see Exeter and the Pole family pulled down to disgrace; it would have sealed her fame. That being so, why would she not name Katherine as party to the plot? What a triumph
