Wolf Hall (27 page)

One night, just before Christmas, he arrives late at Esher and the cardinal is sitting alone, listening to a boy play the lute. He says, “Mark, thank you, go now.” The boy bows to the cardinal; he favors him, barely, with the nod suitable for a burgess in the Parliament. As he withdraws from the room the cardinal says, “Mark is very adept, and a pleasant boy—at York Place, he was one of my choristers. I think I shouldn't keep him here, but send him to the king. Or to Lady Anne, perhaps, as he is such a pretty young thing. Would she like him?”

The boy has lingered at the door to drink in his praises. A hard Cromwellian stare—the equivalent of a kick—sends him out. He wishes people would not ask him what the Lady Anne would and would not like.

The cardinal says, “Does Lord Chancellor More send me any message?”

He drops a sheaf of papers on the table. “You look ill, my lord.”

“Yes, I am ill. Thomas, what shall we do?”

“We shall bribe people,” he says. “We shall be liberal and openhanded with the assets Your Grace has left—for you still have benefices to dispose of, you still have land. Listen, my lord—even if the king takes all you have, people will be asking, can the king truly bestow what belongs to the cardinal? No one to whom he makes a grant will be sure in their title, unless you confirm it. So you still have, my lord, you still have cards in your hand.”

“And after all, if he meant to bring a treason . . .” his voice falters, “if . . .”

“If he meant to charge you with treason you would be in the Tower by now.”

“Indeed—and what use would I be to him, head in one place, body in another? This is how it is: the king thinks, by degrading me, to give a sharp lesson to the Pope. He thinks to indicate, I as King of England am master in my own house. Oh, but is he? Or is Lady Anne master, or Thomas Boleyn? A question not to be asked, not outside this room.”

The battle is, now, to get the king alone; to find out his intentions, if he knows them himself, and broker a deal. The cardinal urgently needs ready cash, that's the first skirmish. Day after day, he waits for an interview. The king extends a hand, takes from him what letters he proffers, glancing at the cardinal's seal. He does not look at him, saying merely an absent “Thanks.” One day he does look at him, and says, “Master Cromwell, yes . . . I cannot talk about the cardinal.” And as he opens his mouth to speak, the king says, “Don't you understand? I cannot talk about him.” His tone is gentle, puzzled. “Another day,” he says. “I will send for you. I promise.”

When the cardinal asks him, “How did the king look today?” he says, he looks as if he does not sleep.

The cardinal laughs. “If he does not sleep it is because he does not hunt. This icy ground is too hard for the hounds' pads, they cannot go out. It is lack of fresh air, Thomas. It is not his conscience.”

Later, he will remember that night toward the end of December when he found the cardinal listening to music. He will run it through his mind, twice and over again.

Because as he is leaving the cardinal, and contemplating again the road, the night, he hears a boy's voice, speaking behind a half-open door: it is Mark, the lute-player. “. . . so for my skill he says he will prefer me to Lady Anne. And I shall be glad, because what is the use of being here when any day the king may behead the old fellow? I think he ought, for the cardinal is so proud. Today is the first day he ever gave me a good word.”

A pause. Someone speaks, muffled; he cannot tell who. Then the boy: “Yes, for sure the lawyer will come down with him. I say ‘lawyer,' but who is he? Nobody knows. They say he has killed men with his own hands and never told it in confession. But those hard kinds of men, they always weep when they see the hangman.”

He is in no doubt that it is his own execution Mark looks forward to. Beyond the wall, the boy runs on: “So when I am with Lady Anne she is sure to notice me, and give me presents.” A giggle. “And look on me with favor. Don't you think? Who knows where she may turn while she is still refusing the king?”

A pause. Then Mark: “She is no maid. Not she.”

What an enchanting conversation: servants' talk. Again comes a muffled answer, and then Mark: “Could she be at the French court, do you think, and come home a maid? Any more than her sister could? And Mary was every man's hackney.”

But this is nothing. He is disappointed. I had hopes of particulars; this is just the
on dit
. But still he hesitates, and doesn't move away.

“Besides, Tom Wyatt has had her, and everybody knows it, down in Kent. I have been down to Penshurst with the cardinal, and you know that palace is near to Hever, where the lady's family is, and the Wyatts' house an easy ride away.”

Witnesses? Dates?

But then, from the unseen person, “Shh!” Again, a soft giggle.

One can do nothing with this. Except bear it in mind. The conversation is in Flemish: language of Mark's birthplace.

Christmas comes, and the king, with Queen Katherine, keeps it at Greenwich. Anne is at York Place; the king can come upriver to see her. Her company, the women say, is exacting; the king's visits are short, few and discreet.

At Esher the cardinal takes to his bed. Once he would never have done that, though he looks ill enough to justify it. He says, “Nothing will happen while the king and Lady Anne are exchanging their New Year kisses. We are safe from incursions till Twelfth Night.” He turns his head, against his pillows. Says, vehement, “Body of Christ, Cromwell. Go home.”

The house at the Austin Friars is decorated with wreaths of holly and ivy, of laurel and ribboned yew. The kitchen is busy, feeding the living, but they omit this year their usual songs and Christmas plays. No year has brought such devastation. His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woolen bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking. As the year ends two orphans are added to his house, Richard and the child Walter. Morgan Williams, he was a big talker, but he was shrewd in his own way, and he worked hard for his family. And Kat—well, latterly she understood her brother about as well as she understood the motions of the stars: “I can never add you up, Thomas,” she'd say, which was his failure entirely, because who had taught her, except him, to count on her fingers, and puzzle out a tradesman's bill?

If he were to give himself a piece of advice for Christmas, he'd say, leave the cardinal now or you'll be out on the streets again with the three-card trick. But he only gives advice to those who are likely to take it.

They have a big gilded star at the Austin Friars, which they hang in their great hall on New Year's Eve. For a week it shines out, to welcome their guests at Epiphany. From summer onward, he and Liz would be thinking of costumes for the Three Kings, coveting and hoarding scraps of any strange cloth they saw, any new trimmings; then from October, Liz would be sewing in secrecy, improving on last year's robes by patching them over with new shining panels, quilting a shoulder and weighting a hem, and building each year some fantastical new crowns. His part was to think what the gifts would be, that the kings had in their boxes. Once a king had dropped his casket in shock when the gift began to sing.

This year no one has the heart to hang up the star; but he visits it, in its lightless storeroom. He slides off the canvas sleeves that protect its rays, and checks that they are unchipped and unfaded. There will be better years, when they will hang it up again; though he cannot imagine them. He eases back the sleeves, pleased at how ingeniously they have been made and how exactly they fit. The Three Kings' robes are packed into a chest, as also the sheepskins for the children who will be sheep. The shepherds' crooks lean in a corner; from a peg hang angel's wings. He touches them. His finger comes away dusty. He shifts his candle out of danger, then lifts them from the peg and gently shakes them. They make a soft sound of hissing, and a faint amber perfume washes into the air. He hangs them back on the peg; passes over them the palm of his hand, to soothe them and still their shiver. He picks up his candle. He backs out and closes the door. He pinches out the light, turns the lock and gives the key to Johane.

He says to her, “I wish we had a baby. It seems such a long time since there was a baby in the house.”

“Don't look at me,” Johane says.

He does, of course. He says, “Does John Williamson not do his duty by you these days?”

She says, “His duty is not my pleasure.”

As he walks away he thinks, that's a conversation I shouldn't have had.

On New Year's Day, when night falls, he is sitting at his writing table; he is writing letters for the cardinal, and sometimes he crosses the room to his counting board and pushes the counters about. It seems that in return for a formal guilty plea to the praemunire charges, the king will allow the cardinal his life, and a measure of liberty; but whatever money is left him, to maintain his state, will be a fraction of his former income. York Place has been taken already, Hampton Court is long gone, and the king is thinking of how to tax and rob the rich bishopric of Winchester.

Gregory comes in. “I brought you lights. My aunt Johane said, go in to your father.”

Gregory sits. He waits. He fidgets. He sighs. He gets up. He crosses to his father's writing table and hovers in front of him. Then, as if someone had said, “Make yourself useful,” he reaches out timidly and begins to tidy the papers.

He glances up at his son, while keeping his head down over his task. For the first time, perhaps, since Gregory was a baby, he notices his hands, and he is struck by what they have become: not childish paws, but the large, white untroubled hands of a gentleman's son. What is Gregory doing? He is putting the documents into a stack. On what principle is he doing it? He can't read them, they're the wrong way up. He's not filing them by subject. Is he filing them by date? For God's sake, what is he doing?

He needs to finish this sentence, with its many vital subclauses. He glances up again, and recognizes Gregory's design. It is a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the bottom, small ones on top.

“Father . . .” Gregory says. He sighs. He crosses to the counting board. With a forefinger he inches the counters about. Then he scoops them together, picks them up and clicks them into a tidy pile.

He looks up at last. “That was a calculation. It wasn't just where I dropped them.”

“Oh, sorry,” Gregory says politely. He sits down by the fire and tries not to disturb the air as he breathes.

The mildest eyes can be commanding; under his son's gaze, he asks, “What is it?”

“Do you think you can stop writing?”

“A minute,” he says, holding up a delaying hand; he signs the letter, his usual form: “Your assured friend, Thomas Cromwell.” If Gregory is going to tell him that someone else in the house is mortally ill, or that he, Gregory, has offered himself in marriage to the laundry girl, or that London Bridge has fallen down, he must be ready to take it like a man; but he must sand and seal this. He looks up. “Yes?”

Gregory turns his face away. Is he crying? It would not be surprising, would it, as he has cried himself, and in public? He crosses the room. He sits down opposite his son, by the hearth. He takes off his cap of velvet and runs his hands back through his hair.

For a long time no one speaks. He looks down at his own thick-fingered hands, scars and burn marks hidden in the palms. He thinks, gentleman? So you call yourself, but who do you hope to mislead? Only the people who have never seen you, or the people you keep distanced with courtesy, legal clients and your fellows in the Commons, colleagues at Gray's Inn, the household servants of courtiers, the courtiers themselves . . . His mind strays to the next letter he must write. Then Gregory says, his voice small as if he had receded into the past, “Do you remember that Christmas, when there was the giant in the pageant?”

“Here in the parish? I remember.”

“He said, ‘I am a giant, my name is Marlinspike.' They said he was as tall as the Cornhill maypole. What's the Cornhill maypole?”

“They took it down. The year of the riots. Evil May Day, they called it. You were only a baby then.”

“Where's the maypole now?”

“The city has it in store.”

“Shall we have our star again next year?”

“If our fortunes look up.”

“Shall we be poor now the cardinal is down?”

“No.”

The little flames leap and flare, and Gregory looks into them. “You remember the year I had my face dyed black, and I was wrapped in a black calfskin? When I was a devil in the Christmas play?”