prop him up to ease him. I want him to have every opportunity to live to rethink his position, show loyalty to our king, and go home. And now, bid you both good afternoon.’
More looks up. ‘I want to write a letter.’
‘Of course. You shall have ink and paper.’
‘I want to write to Meg.’
‘Then send her a human word.’
More's letters are beyond the human. They may be addressed to his daughter, but they are written for his friends in Europe to read.
‘Cromwell …?’ More's voice calls him back. ‘How is the queen?’
More is always correct, not like those who slip up and say ‘Queen Katherine’. How is Anne? he means. But what could he tell him? He is on his way. He is out of the door. In the narrow window a blue dusk has replaced the grey.
He had heard her voice, from the next room: low, relentless. Henry yelping in indignation. ‘Not me! Not me.’
In the antechamber, Thomas Boleyn, Monseigneur, his narrow face rigid. Some Boleyn hangers-on, exchanging glances: Francis Weston, Francis Bryan. In a corner, trying to make himself inconspicuous, the lutenist Mark Smeaton; what's he doing here? Not quite a family conclave: George Boleyn is in Paris, holding talks. An idea has been floated that the infant Elizabeth should marry a son of France; the Boleyns really think this is going to happen.
‘Whatever can have occurred,’ he says, ‘to upset the queen?’ His tone is astonished: as if she were the most placid of women.
Weston says, ‘It's Lady Carey, she is – that is to say she finds herself –’
Bryan snorts. ‘With a bellyful of bastard.’
‘Ah. Didn't you know?’ The shock around him is gratifying. He shrugs. ‘I thought it a family matter.’
Bryan's eyepatch winks at him, today a jaundiced yellow. ‘You must watch her very closely, Cromwell.’
‘A matter in which I have failed,’ Boleyn says. ‘Evidently. She claims the child's father is William Stafford, and she has married him. You know this Stafford, do you?’
‘Just about. Well,’ he says cheerfully, ‘shall we go in? Mark, we are not setting this affair to music, so take yourself off to where you can be useful.’
Only Henry Norris is attending the king: Jane Rochford, the queen. Henry's big face is white. ‘You blame me, madam, for what I did before I even knew you.’
They have crowded in behind him. Henry says, ‘My lord Wiltshire, can you not control either of your daughters?’
‘Cromwell knew,’ Bryan says. He snorts with laughter.
Monseigneur begins to talk, stumbling – he, Thomas Boleyn, diplomat famed for his silver-tongued finesse. Anne cuts him off: ‘Why should she get a child by Stafford? I don't believe it's his. Why would he agree to marry her, unless for ambition – well, he has made a false move there, for he will never come to court again, nor will she. She can crawl on her knees to me. I care not. She can starve.’
If Anne were my wife, he thinks, I'd go out for the afternoon. She looks haggard, and she cannot stay still; you wouldn't trust her near a sharp knife. ‘What to do?’ Norris whispers. Jane Rochford is standing back against the tapestries, where nymphs entwine themselves in trees; the hem of her skirt is dipped in some fabulous stream, and her veil brushes a cloud, from which a goddess peeps. She lifts her face; her look is one of sober triumph.
I could have the archbishop fetched, he thinks. Anne wouldn't rage and stamp under his eyes. Now she has Norris by the sleeve; what is she doing? ‘My sister has done this to spite me. She thinks she will sail about the court with her great belly, and pity me and laugh at me, because I have lost my own child.’
‘I feel sure that, if the matter were to be viewed –’ her father begins.
‘Get out!’ she says. ‘Leave me, and tell her – Mistress Stafford – that she has forfeited any claim on my family. I don't know her. She is no longer a Boleyn.’
‘Wiltshire, go.’ Henry adds, in the tone in which a schoolboy is promised a whipping, ‘I shall speak to you later.’
He says to the king, innocent, ‘Majesty, shall we do no business today?’ Henry laughs.
Lady Rochford runs beside him. He does not slow his pace so she has to pick up her skirts. ‘Did you really know, Master Secretary? Or did you say that just to see their faces?’
‘You are too good for me. You see through all my ploys.’
‘Lucky I see through Lady Carey's.’
‘It was you who detected her?’ Who else, he thinks? With her husband George away she has no one to spy on.
Mary's bed is strewn with silks – flame, orange, carnation – as if a fire has broken out in the mattress. Across stools and a window seat trail lawn smocks, entangled ribbons and unpaired gloves. Are those the same green stockings she once revealed to the knee, running full-tilt towards him on the day she proposed marriage?
He stands in the doorway. ‘William Stafford, eh?’
She straightens up, her cheeks flushed, a velvet slipper in her hand. Now the secret is out, she has loosened her bodice. Her eyes slide past him. ‘Good girl, Jane, bring that here.’
‘Excuse me, Master.’ It is Jane Seymour, tiptoeing past him with an armful of folded laundry. Then a boy after her, bumping a yellow leather chest. ‘Just here, Mark.’
‘Behold me, Master Secretary,’ Smeaton says. ‘I'm making myself useful.’
Jane kneels before the chest and swings it opens. ‘Cambric to line it?’
‘Never mind cambric. Where's my other shoe?’
‘Best be gone,’ Lady Rochford warns. ‘If Uncle Norfolk sees you he'll take a stick to you. Your royal sister thinks the king has fathered your child. She says, why would it be William Stafford?’
Mary snorts. ‘So much does she know. What would Anne know of taking a man for himself? You can tell her he loves me. You can tell her he cares for me and no one else does. No one else in this world.’
He leans down and whispers, ‘Mistress Seymour, I did not think you were a friend of Lady Carey.’
‘No one else will help her.’ She keeps her head down; the nape of her neck flushes pink.
‘Those bed hangings are mine,’ Mary says. ‘Pull them down.’ Embroidered on them, he sees, are the arms of her husband Will Carey, dead what – seven years now? ‘I can unpick the badges.’ Of course: what use are a dead man and his devices? ‘Where's my gilt basin, Rochford, have you got it?’ She gives the yellow chest a kick; it is stamped all over with Anne's falcon badge. ‘If they see me with this, they'll take it off me and tip my stuff in the road.’
‘If you can wait an hour,’ he says, ‘I'll send someone with a chest for you.’
‘Will
