latest bad books filleted, and any gossip from the Steelyard, where the German merchants live. He is happy to turn over a text or two, and enjoy an after-supper debate. But for the cardinal, any contentious point must be wrapped around and around again with a fine filament of words, fine as split hairs. Any dangerous opinion must be so plumped out with laughing apologies that it is as fat and harmless as the cushions you lean on. It is true that when he was told of the deaths underground, my lord was moved to tears. ‘How could I not have known?’ he said. ‘Those fine young men!’
He cries easily in recent months, though that does not mean his tears are less genuine; and indeed now he wipes away a tear, because he knows the story: Little Bilney at Gray’s Inn, the man who spoke Polish, the futile messengers, the dazed children, Elizabeth Cromwell’s face set in the fixed severity of death. He leans across his desk and says, ‘Thomas, please don’t despair. You still have your children. And in time you may wish to marry again.’
I am a child, he thinks, who cannot be consoled. The cardinal places his hand over his. The strange stones flicker in the light, showing their depths: a garnet like a blood bubble; a turquoise with a silver sheen; a diamond with a yellow-grey blink, like the eye of a cat.
He will never tell the cardinal about Mary Boleyn, though the impulse will arise. Wolsey might laugh, he might be scandalised. He has to smuggle him the content, without the context.
Autumn, 1528: he is at court on the cardinal’s business. Mary is running towards him, her skirts lifted, showing a fine pair of green silk stockings. Is her sister Anne chasing her? He waits to see.
She stops abruptly. ‘Ah, it’s you!’
He wouldn’t have thought Mary knew him. She puts one hand against the panelling, catching her breath, and the other against his shoulder, as if he were just part of the wall. Mary is still dazzlingly pretty; fair, soft-featured. ‘My uncle, this morning,’ she says. ‘My uncle Norfolk. He was roaring against you. I said to my sister, who is this terrible man, and she said –’
‘He’s the one who looks like a wall?’
Mary takes her hand away. She laughs, blushes, and with a little heave of her bosom tries to get her breath back.
‘What was my lord of Norfolk’s complaint?’
‘Oh …’ she flaps a hand to fan herself, ‘he said, cardinals, legates, it was never merry in England when we had cardinals among us. He says the Cardinal of York is despoiling the noble houses, he says he will have all to rule himself, and the lords to be like schoolboys creeping in for a whipping. Not that you should take any notice of what I say …’
She looks fragile, breathless still: but his eyes tell her to talk. She gives a little laugh and says, ‘My brother George roared too. He said that the Cardinal of York was born in a hospital for paupers and he employs a man was born in the gutter. My lord father said, come now, my dear boy, you lose nothing if you are exact: not quite a gutter, but a brewer’s yard, I believe, for he’s certainly no gentleman.’ Mary takes a step back. ‘You look a gentleman. I like your grey velvet, where did you find that?’
‘Italy.’
He has been promoted, from being the wall. Mary’s hand creeps back; absorbed, she strokes him. ‘Could you get me some? Though a bit sober for a woman, perhaps?’
Not for a widow, he thinks. The thought must show on his face because Mary says, ‘That’s it, you see. William Carey’s dead.’
He bows his head and is very correct; Mary alarms him. ‘The court misses him sadly. As you must yourself.’
A sigh. ‘He was kind. Given the circumstances.’
‘It must have been difficult for you.’
‘When the king turned his mind to Anne, he thought that, knowing how things are done in France, she might accept a … a certain position, in the court. And in his heart, as he put it. He said he would give up all other mistresses. The letters he has written, in his own hand …’
‘Really?’
The cardinal always says that you can never get the king to write a letter himself. Even to another king. Even to the Pope. Even when it might make a difference.
‘Yes, since last summer. He writes and then sometimes, where he would sign Henricus Rex …’ She takes his hand, turns up his palm, and with her forefinger traces a shape. ‘Where he should sign his name, instead he draws a heart – and he puts their initials in it. Oh, you mustn’t laugh …’ She can’t keep the smile off her face. ‘He says he is suffering.’
He wants to say, Mary, these letters, can you steal them for me?
‘My sister says, this is not France, and I am not a fool like you, Mary. She knows I was Henry’s mistress and she sees how I’m left. And she takes a lesson from it.’
He is almost holding his breath: but she’s reckless now, she will have her say.
‘I tell you, they will ride over Hell to marry. They have vowed it. Anne says she will have him and she cares not if Katherine and every Spaniard is in the sea and drowned. What Henry wants he will have, and what Anne wants she will have, and I can say that, because I know them both, who better?’ Her eyes are soft and welling with tears. ‘So that is why,’ she says, ‘why I miss William Carey, because now she is everything, and I am to be swept out after supper like the old rushes. Now I’m no one’s wife, they can say anything they like to me. My father says I’m a mouth to feed and my uncle Norfolk says I’m a whore.’
As if he didn’t make you one. ‘Are you short of money?’
‘Oh, yes!’ she says. ‘Yes, yes, yes, and no one has even thought about that! No one has even asked me that before. I have children. You know that. I need …’ She presses her fingers against her mouth, to stop it trembling. ‘If you saw my son … well, why do you think I called him Henry? The king would have owned him as his son, just as he has owned Richmond, but my sister forbade it. He does what she says. She means to give him a prince herself, so she doesn’t want mine in his nursery.’
Reports have been sent to the cardinal: Mary Boleyn’s child is a healthy boy with red-gold hair and lively appetites. She has a daughter, older, but in the context that’s not so interesting, a daughter. He says, ‘What age is your son now, Lady Carey?’
‘Three in March. My girl Catherine is five.’ Again she touches her lips, in consternation. ‘I’d forgotten … your wife died. How could I forget?’ How would you even know, he wonders, but she answers him at once. ‘Anne knows everything about people who work for the cardinal. She asks questions and writes the answers in a book.’ She looks up at him. ‘And you have children?’
‘Yes … do you know, no one ever asks me that either?’ He leans one shoulder against the panelling, and she moves an inch closer, and their faces soften, perhaps, from their habitual brave distress, and into the conspiracy of the bereft. ‘I have a big boy,’ he says, ‘he’s at Cambridge with a tutor. I have a little girl called Grace; she’s pretty and she has fair hair, though I don’t … My wife was not a beauty, and I am as you see. And I have Anne, Anne wants to learn Greek.’
‘Goodness,’ she says. ‘For a woman, you know …’
‘Yes, but she says, “Why should Thomas More’s daughter have the pre-eminence?” She has such good words. And she uses
