monastic houses he has closed down. They don’t think of the good use to which the cardinal has put the assets; they don’t think of his colleges, the scholars he maintains, the libraries he is founding. They’re only interested in getting their own fingers in the spoils. And because they’ve been cut out of the business, they pretend to believe the monks have been left naked and lamenting in the road. They haven’t. They’ve been transferred elsewhere, to bigger houses better run. Some of the younger ones have been let go, boys who have no calling to the life. Questioning them, he usually finds they know nothing, which makes nonsense of the abbeys’ claims to be the light of learning. They can stumble through a Latin prayer, but when you say, ‘Go on then, tell me what it means,’ they say, ‘Means, master?’ as if they thought that words and their meanings were so loosely attached that the tether would snap at the first tug.
‘Don’t worry about what people say,’ he tells Johane. ‘I take responsibility for it, I do, alone.’
The cardinal has received the complaints with a supreme hauteur. He has grimly noted in his file the names of the complainers. Then he has taken out of his file the list, and handed it over to his man, with a tight smile. All he cares for are his new buildings, his banners flying, his coat of arms embossed on the brickwork, his Oxford scholars; he’s plundering Cambridge to get the brightest young doctors over to Cardinal College. There was trouble before Easter, when the dean found six of the new men in possession of a number of forbidden books. Lock them up by all means, Wolsey said, lock them up and reason with them. If the weather is not too hot, or not too wet, I might come up and reason with them myself.
No use trying to explain this to Johane. She only wants to know her husband’s not within arrow-shot of the slanders that are flying. ‘You know what you’re doing, I suppose.’ Her eyes dart upwards. ‘At least, Tom, you always look as if you do.’
Her voice, her footstep, her raised eyebrow, her pointed smile, everything reminds him of Liz. Sometimes he turns, thinking that Liz has come into the room.
The new arrangements confuse Grace. She knows her mother’s first husband was called Tom Williams; they name him in their household prayers. Is Uncle Williamson therefore his son? she asks.
Johane tries to explain it. ‘Save your breath,’ Anne says. She taps her head. Her bright little fingers bounce from the seed pearls of her cap. ‘Slow,’ she says.
Later, he says to her, ‘Grace isn’t slow, just young.’
‘I never remember I was as foolish as that.’
‘They’re all slow, except us? Is that right?’
Anne’s face says, more or less, that is right. ‘Why do people marry?’
‘So there can be children.’
‘Horses don’t marry. But there are foals.’
‘Most people,’ he says, ‘feel it increases their happiness.’
‘Oh, yes, that,’ Anne says. ‘May I choose my husband?’
‘Of course,’ he says; meaning, up to a point.
‘Then I choose Rafe.’
For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life might mend. Then he thinks, how could I ask Rafe to wait? He needs to set up his own household. Even five years from now, Anne would be a very young bride.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘And time goes by so slowly.’
It’s true; one always seems to be waiting for something. ‘You seem to have thought it through,’ he says. You don’t have to spell out to her, keep this to yourself, because she knows to do that; you don’t have to lead this female child through a conversation with the little shifts and demurs that most women demand. She’s not like a flower, a nightingale: she’s like … like a merchant adventurer, he thinks. A look in the eye to skewer your intentions, and a deal done with a slap of the palm.
She pulls off her cap; she twists the seed pearls in her fingers, and tugs at a strand of her dark hair, stretching it and pulling out its wave. She scoops up the rest of her hair, twists it and wraps it around her neck. ‘I could do that twice,’ she says, ‘if my neck were smaller.’ She sounds fretful. ‘Grace thinks I cannot marry Rafe because we are related. She thinks everybody who lives in a house must be cousins.’
‘You are not Rafe’s cousin.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I am sure. Anne … put your cap back on. What will your aunt say?’
She makes a face. It is a face imitative of her aunt Johane. ‘Oh, Thomas,’ she murmurs, ‘you are always so sure!’
He raises a hand to cover his smile. For a moment Johane seems less worrying. ‘Put your cap on,’ he says mildly.
She squashes it back on to her head. She is so little, he thinks; but still, she’d be better suited by a helmet. ‘How did Rafe come here?’ she says.
He came here from Essex, because that’s where his father happened to be at the time. His father Henry was a steward to Sir Edward Belknap, who was a cousin of the Grey family, and so related to the Marquis of Dorset, and the marquis was Wolsey’s patron, when the cardinal was a scholar at Oxford. So yes, cousins come into it; and the fact that, when he had only been back in England for a year or two, he was already somehow in the cardinal’s affinity, though he had never set eyes on the great man himself; already he, Cromwell, was a man useful to employ. He worked for the Dorset family on various of their tangled lawsuits. The old marchioness had him tracking down bed hangings and carpets for her. Send that. Be here. To her, all the world was a menial. If she wanted a lobster or a sturgeon, she ordered it up, and if she wanted good taste she ordered it in the same way. The marchioness would run her hand over Florentine silks, making little squeaks of pleasure. ‘You bought it, Master Cromwell,’ she would say. ‘And very beautiful it is. Your next task is to work out how we pay for it.’
Somewhere in this maze of obligations and duties, he met Henry Sadler, and agreed to take his son into his household. ‘Teach him all you know,’ Henry proposed, a little fearfully. He arranged to collect Rafe on his way back from business in his part of the country, but he picked a bad day for it: mud and drenching rain, clouds chasing in from the coast. It was not much after two when he splashed up to the door, but the light was already failing; Henry Sadler said, can’t you stay, you won’t make it to London before they close the gates. I ought to try to get home tonight, he said. I have to be in court, and then there’ll be my Lady Dorset’s debt collectors to see off, and you know how that is … Mistress Sadler glanced fearfully outside, and down at her child: from whom she must now part, trusting him, at the age of seven, to the weather and the roads.
This is not harsh, this is usual. But Rafe was so small that he almost thought it harsh. His baby curls had been cropped and his ginger hair stood up at the crown. His mother and father knelt down and patted him. Then they swaddled and pulled and knotted him into multiple layers of over-wrapped padding, so that his slight frame swelled into the likeness of a small barrel. He looked down at the child and out at the rain and thought, sometimes I should be warm and dry like other men; how do they contrive it while I never can? Mistress Sadler knelt and took her son’s face in her hands. ‘Remember everything we have told you,’ she whispered. ‘Say your prayers. Master Cromwell, please see he says his prayers.’
When she looked up he saw that her eyes were blurred with tears and he saw that the child could not
