Wolf Hall (48 page)

“We have had all the best advice,” he says easily. “Dr. Cranmer at my recommendation sent to Venice, to a learned body of rabbis, to take opinions on the meaning of the ancient texts.”

“So it is not incest? Unless you have actually been married to one sister?”

“The divines say not.”

“How much did that cost?”

“Dr. Cranmer wouldn't know. The priests and the scholars go to the negotiating table, then some less godly sort of man comes after them, with a bag of money. They don't have to meet each other, coming in or going out.”

“It hardly helps your case,” she says bluntly.

“There is no help in my case.”

“She wants to talk to you. Johane.”

“What's there to say? We all know—” We all know it can go nowhere. Even though her husband, John Williamson, is still coughing: one is always half listening for it, here and at Stepney, the annunciatory wheezing on a stairway or in the next room; one thing about John Williamson, he'll never take you by surprise. Dr. Butts has recommended him country air, and keeping away from fumes and smoke. “It was a moment of weakness,” he says. Then . . . what? Another moment. “God sees all. So they tell me.”

“You must listen to her.” Mercy's face, when she turns back, is incandescent. “You owe her that.”

“The way it seems to me, it seems like part of the past.” Johane's voice is unsteady; with a little twitch of her fingers she settles her half-moon hood and drifts her veil, a cloud of silk, over one shoulder. “For a long time, I didn't think Liz was really gone. I expected to see her walk in one day.”

It has been a constant temptation to him, to have Johane beautifully dressed, and he has dealt with it by, as Mercy says, throwing money at the London goldsmiths and mercers, so the women of Austin Friars are bywords among the city wives, who say behind their hands (but with a worshipful murmur, almost a genuflection), dear God, Thomas Cromwell, the money must be flowing in like the grace of God.

“So now I think,” she says, “that what we did because she was dead, when we were shocked, when we were sorry, we have to leave off that now. I mean, we are still sorry. We will always be sorry.”

He understands her. Liz died in another age, when the cardinal was still in his pomp, and he was the cardinal's man. “If,” she says, “you would like to marry, Mercy has her list. But then, you probably have your own list. With nobody on it we know.

“If, of course,” she says, “if John Williamson had—God forgive me but every winter I think it is his last—then of course I, without question, I mean, at once, Thomas, as soon as decent, not clasping hands over his coffin . . . but then the church wouldn't allow it. The law wouldn't.”

“You never know,” he says.

She throws out her hands, words flood out of her. “They say you intend to, what you intend, to break the bishops and make the king head of the church and take away his revenues from the Holy Father and give them to Henry, then Henry can declare the law if he likes and put off his wife as he likes and marry Lady Anne and he will say what is a sin and what not and who can be married. And the Princess Mary, God defend her, will be a bastard and after Henry the next king will be whatever child that lady gives him.”

“Johane . . . when Parliament meets again, would you like to come down and tell them what you've just said? Because it would save a lot of time.”

“You can't,” she says, aghast. “The Commons will not vote it. The Lords will not. Bishop Fisher will not allow it. Archbishop Warham. The Duke of Norfolk. Thomas More.”

“Fisher is ill. Warham is old. Norfolk, he said to me only the other day, ‘I am tired'—if you will permit his expression—‘of fighting under the banner of Katherine's stained bedsheet, and if Arthur could enjoy her, or if he couldn't, who gives a—who cares anymore?' ” He is rapidly altering the duke's words, which were coarse in the extreme. “ ‘Let my niece Anne come in,' he said, ‘and do her worst.' ”

“What is her worst?” Johane's mouth is ajar; the duke's words will be rolling down Gracechurch Street, rolling to the river and across the bridge, till the painted ladies in Southwark are passing them mouth to mouth like ulcers; but that's the Howards for you, that's the Boleyns; with or without him, news of Anne's character will reach London and the world.

“She provokes the king's temper,” he says. “He complains Katherine never in her life spoke to him as Anne does. Norfolk says she uses language to him you wouldn't use to a dog.”

“Jesu! I wonder he doesn't whip her.”

“Perhaps he will, when they're married. Look, if Katherine were to withdraw her suit from Rome, if she were to submit to judgment of her case in England, or if the Pope were to concede to the king's wishes, then all this—everything you've said, it won't happen, it will be just—” His hand makes a smooth, withdrawing motion, like the rolling up of a parchment. “If Clement were to come to his desk one morning, not quite awake, and sign with his left hand some piece of paper he's not read, well, who could blame him? And then I leave him, we leave him, undisturbed, in possession of his revenues, in possession of his authority, because now Henry only wants one thing, and that is Anne in his bed; but time marches on and he is beginning to think, believe me, of other things he might want.”

“Yes. Like his own way.”

“He's a king. He's used to it.”

“And if the Pope is still stubborn?”

“He'll go begging for his revenue.”

“Will the king take the money of Christian people? The king is rich.”

“There you are wrong. The king is poor.”

“Oh. Does he know it?”

“I'm not sure he knows where his money comes from, or where it goes. While my lord cardinal was alive, he never wanted for a jewel in his hat or a horse or a handsome house. Henry Norris keeps his privy purse, but besides that he has too much of a hand in the revenue for my liking. Henry Norris,” he tells her before she can ask, “is the bane of my life.” He is always, he does not add, with Anne when I need to see her alone.

“I suppose if Henry wants his supper, he can come here. Not this Henry Norris. I mean, Henry our pauper king.” She stands up; she sees herself in the glass; she ducks, as if shy of her own reflection, and arranges her face into an expression lighter, more curious and detached, less personal; he sees her do it, lift her eyebrows a fraction, curve up her lips at the corner. I could paint her, he thinks; if I had the skill. I have looked at her so long; but looking doesn't bring back the dead, the harder you look the faster and the farther they go. He had never supposed Liz Wykys was smiling down from Heaven on what he was doing with her sister. No, he thinks, what I've done is push Liz into the dark; and something comes back to him, that Walter once said, that his mother used to say her prayers to a little carved saint she'd had in her bundle when she came down as a young woman from the north, and she used to turn it away before she got into bed with him. Walter had said, dear God, Thomas, it was St. fucking Felicity if I'm not mistaken, and her face was to the wall for sure the night I got you.

Johane walks about the room. It is a large room and filled with light. “All these things,” she says, “these things we have now. The clock. That new chest you had Stephen send you from Flanders, the one with the carving of the birds and flowers, I heard with my own ears you say to Thomas Avery, oh, tell Stephen I want it, I don't care what it costs. All these painted pictures of people we don't know, all these, I don't know what, lutes and books of music, we never used to have them, when I was a girl I never used to look at myself in a mirror, but now I look at myself every day. And a comb, you gave me an ivory comb. I never had one of my own. Liz used to plait my hair and push it under my hood, and then I did hers, and if we didn't look how we ought to look, somebody soon told us.”

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of ourselves for having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice. Even Liz, once when they were young, when she'd seen him early in the morning putting Gregory's shirt to warm before the fire, even Liz had said sharply, don't do that, he'll expect it every day.

He says, “Liz—I mean, Johane . . .”

You've done that once too often, her face says.

“I want to be good to you. Tell me what I can give you.”

He waits for her to shout, as women do, do you think you can buy me, but she doesn't, she listens, and he thinks she is entranced, her face intent, her eyes on his, as she learns his theory about what money can buy. “There was a man in Florence, a friar, Fra Savonarola, he induced all the people to think beauty was a sin. Some people think he was a magician and they fell under his spell for a season, they made fires in the streets and they threw in everything they liked, everything they had made or worked to buy, bolts of silk, and linen their mothers had embroidered for their marriage beds, books of poems written in the poet's hand, bonds and wills, rent-rolls, title deeds, dogs and cats, the shirts from their backs, the rings from their fingers, women their veils, and do you know what was worst, Johane—they threw in their mirrors. So then they couldn't see their faces and know how they were different from the beasts in the field and the creatures screaming on the pyre. And when they had melted their mirrors they went home to their empty houses, and lay on the floor because they had burned their beds, and when they got up next day they were aching from the hard floor and there was no table for their breakfast because they'd used the table to feed the bonfire, and no stool to sit on because they'd chopped it into splinters, and there was no bread to eat because the bakers had thrown into the flames the basins and the yeast and the flour and the scales. And you know the worst of it? They were sober. Last night they took their wineskins . . .” He turns his arm, in a mime of a man lobbing something into a fire. “So they were sober and their heads were clear, but they looked around and they had nothing to eat, nothing to drink and nothing to sit on.”

“But that wasn't the worst. You said the mirrors were the worst. Not to be able to look at yourself.”

“Yes. Well, so I think. I hope I can always look myself in the face. And you, Johane, you should always have a fine glass to see yourself. As you're a woman worth looking at.”

You could write a sonnet, Thomas Wyatt could write her a sonnet, and not make this effect . . . She turns her head away, but through the thin film of her veil he can see her skin glow. Because women will coax: tell me, just tell me something, tell me your thoughts; and this he has done.

They part friends. They even manage without one last time for old time's sake. Not that they are parted, really, but now they are on different terms. Mercy says, “Thomas, when you're cold and under a stone, you'll talk yourself out of your grave.”

The household is quiet, calm. The turmoil of the city is locked outside the gate; he is having the locks renewed, the chains reinforced. Jo brings him an Easter egg. “Look, we have saved this one for you.” It is a white egg with no speckles. It is featureless, but a single curl, the color of onionskin, peeps out from under a lopsided crown. You pick your prince and you know what he is: or do you?

The child says, “My mother sends a message: tell your uncle, for a present, I'd like a drinking cup made of the shell of a griffin's egg. It's a lion with the head and wings of a bird; it's died out now, so you can't get them anymore.”

He says, “Ask her what color she wants.”

Jo plants a kiss on his cheek.

He looks into the glass and the whole bright room comes bouncing back to him: lutes, portraits, silk hangings. In Rome there was a banker called Agostino Chigi. In Siena, where he came from, they maintained he was the richest man in the world. When Agostino had the Pope around for dinner he fed him on gold plates. Then he looked at the aftermath—the sprawled, sated cardinals, the mess they left behind, the half-picked bones and fish skeletons, the oyster shells and the orange rinds—and he said, stuff it, let's save the washing-up.

The guests tossed their plates out of the open windows and straight into the Tiber. The soiled table linen flew after them, white napkins unfurling like greedy gulls diving for scraps. Peals of Roman laughter unfurled into the Roman night.

Chigi had netted the banks, and he had divers standing by for whatever escaped. Some sharp-eyed servant of his upper household stood by the bank when dawn came, and checked off the list, pricking with a pin each item retrieved as it came up from the deep.