The knocking at the gate comes after midnight. His watchman rouses the household, and when he goes downstairs – wearing a savage expression and in all other respects fully dressed – he finds Johane in her nightgown, her hair down, asking ‘What is this about?’ Richard, Rafe, the men of the household steer her aside; standing in the hall at Austin Friars is William Brereton of the privy chamber, with an armed escort. They have come to arrest me, he thinks. He walks up to Brereton. ‘Good Christmas, William? Are you up early, or down late?’
Alice and Jo appear. He thinks of that night when Liz died, when his daughters stood forlorn and bewildered in their night-shifts, waiting for him to come home. Jo begins to cry. Mercy appears and sweeps the girls away. Gregory comes down, dressed to go out. ‘Here if you want me,’ he says diffidently.
‘The king is at Greenwich,’ Brereton says. ‘He wants you now.’ He has ordinary ways of showing his impatience: slapping his glove against his palm and tapping his foot.
‘Go back to bed,’ he tells his household. ‘The king wouldn't order me to Greenwich to arrest me; it doesn't happen that way.’ Though he hardly knows how it happens; he turns to Brereton. ‘What does he want me for?’
Brereton's eyes are roaming around, to see how these people live.
‘I really can't enlighten you.’
He looks at Richard, and sees how badly he wants to give this lordling a smack in the mouth. That would have been me, once, he thinks. But now I am as sweet as a May morning. They go out, Richard, Rafe, himself, his son, into the dark and the raw cold.
A party of link-men are waiting with lights. A barge is waiting at the nearest landing stairs. It is so far to the Palace of Placentia, the Thames so black, that they could be rowing along the River Styx. The boys sit opposite him, huddled, not talking, looking like one composite relative; though Rafe of course is not his relative. I'm getting like Dr Cranmer, he thinks: the Tamworths of Lincolnshire are among my connections, the Cliftons of Clifton, the Molyneux family, of whom you will have heard, or have you? He looks up at the stars but they seem dim and far away; which, he thinks, they probably are.
So what should he do? Should he try for some conversation with Brereton? The family's lands are in Staffordshire, Cheshire, on the Welsh borders. Sir Randal has died this year and his son has come into a fat inheritance, a thousand a year at least in Crown grants, another three hundred or so from local monasteries … He is adding up in his head. It is none too soon to inherit; the man must be his own age, or nearly that. His father Walter would have got on with the Breretons, a quarrelsome crew, great disturbers of the peace. He recalls a proceeding against them in Star Chamber, would be fifteen years back … It doesn't seem likely to furnish a topic. Nor does Brereton seem to want one.
Every journey ends; terminates, at some pier, some mist-shrouded wharf, where torches are waiting. They are to go at once to the king, deep into the palace, to his private rooms. Harry Norris is waiting for them; who else? ‘How is he now?’ Brereton says. Norris rolls his eyes.
‘Well, Master Cromwell,’ he says, ‘we do meet under the strangest circumstances. Are these your sons?’ He smiles, glancing around their faces. ‘No, clearly not. Unless they have divers mothers.’
He names them: Master Rafe Sadler, Master Richard Cromwell, Master Gregory Cromwell. He sees a flicker of dismay on his son's face, and clarifies: ‘This is my nephew. This, my son.’
‘You only to go in,’ Norris says. ‘Come now, he is waiting.’ Over his shoulder, he says, ‘The king is afraid he may take cold. Will you look out the russet nightgown, the one with the sables?’
Brereton grunts some reply. Poor work, shaking out the furs, when you could be up in Chester, waking the populace, beating a drum around the city walls.
It is a spacious chamber with a high carved bed; his eye flickers over it. In the candlelight, the bed hangings are ink-black. The bed is empty. Henry sits on a velvet stool. He seems to be alone, but there is a dry scent in the room, a cinnamon warmth, that makes him think that the cardinal must be in the shadows, holding the pithed orange, packed with spices, that he always carried when he was among a press of people. The dead, for sure, would want to ward off the scent of the living; but what he can see, across the room, is not the cardinal's shadowy bulk, but a pale drifting oval that is the face of Thomas Cranmer.
The king turns his head towards him as he enters. ‘Cromwell, my dead brother came to me in a dream.’
He does not answer. What is a sensible answer to this? He watches the king. He feels no temptation to laugh. The king says, ‘During the twelve days, between Christmas Day and Epiphany, God permits the dead to walk. This is well known.’
He says gently, ‘How did he look, your brother?’
‘He looked as I remember him … but he was pale, very thin. There was a white fire around him, a light. But you know, Arthur would have been in his forty-fifth year now. Is that your age, Master Cromwell?’
‘About,’ he says.
‘I am good at telling people's ages. I wonder who Arthur would have looked like, if he had lived. My father, probably. Now, I am like my grandfather.’
He thinks the king will say, who are you like? But no: he has established that he has no ancestors.
‘He died at Ludlow. In winter. The roads impenetrable. They had to take his coffin in an ox-cart. A prince of England, to go in a cart. I cannot think that was well done.’
Now Brereton comes in, with the russet velvet, sable-lined. Henry stands up and sheds one layer of velvet, gains another, plusher and denser. The sable lining creeps down over his hands, as if he were a monster-king, growing his own fur. ‘They buried him at Worcester,’ he says. ‘But it troubles me. I never saw him dead.’
Dr Cranmer says, from the shadows, ‘The dead do not come back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised about these matters.’
The king hugs his robe about him. ‘I never saw his face till now in my dream. And his body, shining white.’
‘But it is not his body,’ Cranmer says. ‘It is an image formed in Your Majesty's mind. Such images are quasi corpora, like bodies. Read Augustine.’
The king does not look as if he wants to send out for a book. ‘In my dream he stood and looked at me. He looked sad, so sad. He seemed to say I stood in his place. He seemed to say, you have taken my kingdom, and you have used my wife. He has come back to make me ashamed.’
Cranmer says, faintly impatient, ‘If Your Majesty's brother died before he could reign, that was God's will. As for your supposed marriage, we all know and believe that it was clean contrary to scripture. We know the man in Rome has no power to dispense from the law of God. That there was a sin, we acknowledge; but with God there is mercy enough.’
‘Not for me,’ Henry says. ‘When I come to judgment my brother will plead against me. He has come back to make me ashamed and I must bear it.’ The thought enrages him. ‘I, I alone.’
Cranmer is about to speak; he catches his eye, imperceptibly shakes his head. ‘Did your brother Arthur speak to you, in your dream?’
‘No.’
‘Did he make any sign?’
‘No.’
