Wolf Hall (61 page)

These two potent monarchs will see each other for the first time since the meeting called the Field of the Cloth of Gold, which the cardinal arranged. The king says the trip must cost less than that occasion, but when he is questioned on specifics he wants more of that and two of those—everything bigger, plusher, more lavish, and with more gilding. He is taking his own cooks and his own bed, his ministers and musicians, his horses, dogs and falcons, and his new marquess, whom Europe calls his concubine. He is taking the possible claimants to the throne, including the Yorkist Lord Montague, and the Lancastrian Nevilles, to show how tame they are and how secure are the Tudors. He is taking his gold plate, his linen, his pastry chefs and poultry-pickers and poison-taster, and he is even taking his own wine: which you might think is superfluous, but what do you know?

Rafe, helping him pack his papers: “I understand that King Francis will speak to Rome for the king's cause. But I am not sure what he gets out of this treaty.”

“Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say.”

It is the processions that matter, the exchange of gifts, the royal games of bowls, the tilts, jousts and masques: these are not preliminaries to the process, they are the process itself. Anne, accustomed to the French court and French etiquette, sets out the difficulties in store. “If the Pope were to visit him, then France could advance toward him, perhaps meeting him in a courtyard. But two monarchs meeting, once they are in sight, should take the same number of steps toward each other. And this works, unless one monarch—
hélas
—were to take very small steps, forcing the other to cover the ground.”

“By God,” Charles Brandon bursts out, “such a man would be a knave. Would Francis do that?”

Anne looks at him, lids half-lowered. “My lord Suffolk, is your lady wife ready for the journey?”

Suffolk reddens. “My wife is a former Queen of France.”

“I am aware of it. François will be pleased to see her again. He thought her very beautiful. Though of course, she was young then.”

“My sister is beautiful still,” Henry says, pacific. But a tempest is boiling up inside Charles Brandon, and it breaks with a yell like a crack of thunder: “You expect her to wait on you? On Boleyn's daughter? Pass you your gloves, madam, and serve you first at dinner? Make your mind up to it—that day will never come.”

Anne turns to Henry, her hand fastening on his arm. “Before your face he humiliates me.”

“Charles,” Henry says, “leave us now and come back when you are master of yourself. Not a moment before.” He sighs, makes a sign: Cromwell, go after him.

The Duke of Suffolk is seething and steaming. “Fresh air, my lord,” he suggests.

Autumn has come already; there is a raw wind from the river. It lifts a flurry of sodden leaves, which flap in their path like the flags of some miniature army. “I always think Windsor is a cold place. Don't you, my lord? I mean the situation, not just the castle?” His voice runs on, soothing, low. “If I were the king, I would spend more time at the palace in Woking. You know it never snows there? At least, not once in twenty years.”

“If you were king?” Brandon stumps downhill. “If Anne Boleyn can be queen, why not?”

“I take that back. I should have used a more humble expression.”

Brandon grunts. “She will never appear, my wife, in the train of that harlot.”

“My lord, you had better think her chaste. We all do.”

“Her lady mother trained her up, and she was a great whore, let me tell you. Liz Boleyn, Liz Howard as was—she was the first to take Henry to bed. I know these things, I am his oldest friend. Seventeen, and he didn't know where to put it. His father kept him like a nun.”

“But none of us believe that story now. About Monseigneur's wife.”

“
Monseigneur!
Christ in Heaven.”

“He likes to be called that. It is no harm.”

“Her sister Mary trained her up, and Mary was trained in a brothel. Do you know what they do, in France? My lady wife told me. Well, not told me, but she wrote it down for me, in Latin. The man has a cock-stand, and she takes it in her mouth! Can you imagine such a thing? A woman who can do such a filthy proceeding, can you call that a virgin?”

“My lord . . . if your wife will not go to France, if you cannot persuade her . . . shall we say that she is ill? It would be something you could do for the king, whom you know is your friend. It would save him from—” He almost says, from the lady's harsh tongue. But he backs out of that sentence, and says something else. “It would save face.”

Brandon nods. They are still heading toward the river, and he tries to check their pace because soon Anne will expect him back with news of an apology. When the duke turns to him, his face is a picture of misery. “It's true, anyway. She is ill. Her beautiful little”—he makes a gesture, his hands cupping the air—“all fallen away. I love her anyway. She's as thin as a wafer. I say to her, Mary, I will wake up one day, and I won't be able to find you, I'll take you for a thread in the bed linen.”

“I am so sorry,” he says.

He rubs his face. “Ah, God. Go back to Harry, will you? Tell him we can't do this.”

“He will expect you to come to Calais, if your lady wife cannot.”

“I don't like to leave her, you see?”

“Anne is unforgiving,” he says. “Hard to please, easy to offend. My lord, be guided by me.”

Brandon grunts. “We all are. We must be. You do everything, Cromwell. You are everything now. We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves.” The duke sniffs. “We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer.”

The steaming blood of Christ. It's an oath worthy of Thomas Howard, the senior duke. When did he become the interpreter of dukes, their explainers? He asks himself but he has no bloody answer. When he returns to the king and the queen-to-be, they are looking lovingly into each other's faces. “The Duke of Suffolk begs pardon,” he says. Yes, yes, the king says. I'll see you tomorrow, but not too early. You would think they were already man and wife, a languorous night before them, filled with marital delights. You would think so, except he has Mary Boleyn's word for it that the marquisate has bought Henry only the right to caress her sister's inner thigh. Mary tells him this, and doesn't even put it in Latin. Whenever she spends time alone with the king, Anne reports back to her relations, no detail spared. You have to admire her; her measured exactness, her restraint. She uses her body like a soldier, conserving its resources; like one of the masters in the anatomy school at Padua, she divides it up and names every part, this my thigh, this my breast, this my tongue.

“Perhaps in Calais,” he says. “Perhaps he will get what he wants then.”

“She will have to be sure.” Mary walks away. She stops and turns back, her face troubled. “Anne says, Cromwell is my man. I don't like her to say that.”

In ensuing days, other questions emerge to torment the English party. Which royal lady will be hostess to Anne when they meet the French? Queen Eleanor will not—you cannot expect it, as she is the Emperor's sister, and family feeling is touched by His Disgrace's abandonment of Katherine. Francis's sister, the Queen of Navarre, pleads illness rather than receive the King of England's mistress. “Is it the same illness that afflicts the poor Duchess of Suffolk?” Anne asks. Perhaps, Francis suggests, it would be appropriate if the new marquess were to be met by the Duchess of Vendôme, his own
maîtresse en titre
?

Henry is so angry that it gives him a toothache. Dr. Butts comes with his chest of specifics. A narcotic seems kindest, but when the king wakes he is still so mortified that for a few hours there seems no solution but to call the expedition off. Can they not comprehend, can they not grasp, that Anne is no man's mistress, but a king's bride-to-be? But to comprehend that is not in Francis's nature. He would never wait more than a week for a woman he wanted. Pattern of chivalry, he? Most Christian king? All he understands, Henry bellows, is rutting like a stag. But I tell you, when his rut is done, the other harts will put him down. Ask any hunter!

It is suggested, finally, that the solution will be to leave the future queen behind in Calais, on English soil where she can suffer no insult, while the king meets Francis in Boulogne. Calais, a small city, should be more easily contained than London, even if people line up at the harborside to shout
“Putain!”
and “Great Whore of England.” If they sing obscene songs, we will simply refuse to understand them.

At Canterbury, with the royal party in addition to the pilgrims from all nations, every house is packed from cellars to eaves. He and Rafe are lodged in some comfort and near the king, but there are lords in flea-bitten inns and knights in the back rooms of brothels, pilgrims forced into stables and outhouses and sleeping out under the stars. Luckily, the weather is mild for October. Any year before this, the king would have gone to pray at Becket's shrine and leave a rich offering. But Becket was a rebel against the Crown, not the sort of archbishop we like to encourage at the moment. In the cathedral the incense is still hanging in the air from Warham's interment, and prayers for his soul are a constant drone like the buzz of a thousand hives. Letters have gone to Cranmer, lying somewhere in Germany at the Emperor's traveling court. Anne has begun to refer to him as the Archbishop-Elect. No one knows how long he'll take getting home. With his secret, Rafe says.

Of course, he says, his secret, written down the side of the page.

Rafe visits the shrine. It is his first time. He comes back wide-eyed, saying it is covered in jewels the size of goose eggs.

“I know. Are they real, do you think?”

“They show you a skull, they say it's Becket's, it's smashed up by the knights but it's held together with a silver plate. For ready money, you can kiss it. They have a tray of his finger bones. They have his snotty handkerchief. And a bit of his boot. And a vial they shake up for you, they say it's his blood.”

“At Walsingham, they have a vial of the Virgin's milk.”

“Christ, I wonder what that is?” Rafe looks sick. “The blood, you can tell it's water with some red soil in it. It floats about in clumps.”

“Well, pick up that goose quill, plucked from the pinions of the angel Gabriel, and we will write to Stephen Vaughan. We may have to set him on the road, to bring Thomas Cranmer home.”

“It can't be soon enough,” Rafe says. “Just wait, master, till I wash Becket off my hands.”

Though he will not go to the shrine, the king wants to show himself to the people, Anne by his side. Leaving Mass, against all advice he walks out among the crowds, his guards standing back, his councillors around him. Anne's head darts, on the slender stem of her neck, turning to catch the comments that come her way. People stretch out their hands to touch the king.

Norfolk, at his elbow, stiff with apprehension, eyes everywhere: “I don't care for this proceeding, Master Cromwell.” He himself, having once been quick with a knife, is alert for movements below the eyeline. But the nearest thing to a weapon is an outsize cross, wielded by a bunch of Franciscan monks. The crowd gives way to them, to a huddle of lay priests in their vestments, a contingent of Benedictines from the abbey, and in the midst of them a young woman in the habit of a Benedictine nun.

“Majesty?”

Henry turns. “By God, this is the Holy Maid,” he says. The guards move in, but Henry holds up a hand. “Let me see her.” She is a big girl, and not so young, perhaps twenty-eight; plain face, dusky, excited, with an urgent flush. She pushes toward the king, and for a second he sees him through her eyes: a blur of red-gold and flushed skin, a ready, priapic body, a hand like a ham that stretches out to take her by her nunly elbow. “Madam, you have something to say to me?”

She tries to curtsy, but his grip won't let her. “I am advised by Heaven,” she says, “by the saints with whom I converse, that the heretics around you must be put into a great fire, and if you do not light that fire, then you yourself will burn.”

“Which heretics? Where are they? I do not keep heretics about my person.”

“Here is one.”

Anne shrinks against the king; against the scarlet and gold of his jacket she melts like wax.

“And if you enter into a form of marriage with this unworthy woman, you will not reign seven months.”

“Come, madam, seven months? Round it off, can you not? What sort of a prophet says ‘seven months'?”

“That is what Heaven tells me.”

“And when the seven months are up, who will replace me? Speak up, say who you would like to be king instead of me.”

The monks and priests are trying to draw her away; this was not part of their plan. “Lord Montague, he is of the blood. The Marquis of Exeter, he is blood royal.” She in turn tries to pull away from the king. “I see your lady mother,” she says, “surrounded by pale fires.”

Henry drops her as if her flesh were hot. “My mother? Where?”

“I have been looking for the Cardinal of York. I have searched Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, but the cardinal is not there.”

“Surely she is mad?” Anne says. “She is mad and must be whipped. If she is not, she must be hanged.”

One of the priests says, “Madam, she is a very holy person. Her speech is inspired.”

“Get her out of my way,” Anne says.

“Lightning will strike you,” the nun tells Henry. He laughs uncertainly.

Norfolk erupts into the group, teeth clenched, fist raised. “Drag her back to her whorehouse, before she feels this, by God!” In the mêlée, one monk hits another with the cross; the Maid is drawn backward, still prophesying; the noise from the crowd rises, and Henry grasps Anne by the arm and pulls her back the way they came. He himself follows the Maid, sticking close to the back of the group, till the crowd thins and he can tap one of the monks on the arm and ask to speak to her. “I was a servant of Wolsey,” he says. “I want to hear her message.”