Bring Up the Bodies (37 page)

He thinks of lawsuits he has never thought of in years. Whether the judgement was good. Whether he would have given it against himself.

He wonders if he will ever sleep, and what he will dream. It is only in his dreams that he is private. Thomas More used to say you should build yourself a retreat, a hermitage, within your own house. But that was More: able to slam the door in everyone's face. In truth you cannot separate them, your public being and your private self. More thought you could, but in the end he had men he called heretics dragged to his house in Chelsea, so he could persecute them conveniently in the bosom of his family. You can insist on separation, if you must: go to your cabinet and say, ‘Leave me alone to read.' But outside the room, you can hear breathing and scuffling, as a seething discontent builds up, a rumble of expectation: he is a public man, he belongs to us, when will he come forth? You cannot blank it out, the shuffle of the feet of the body politic.

He turns over in bed and says a prayer. In the depth of the night, he hears screaming. It is more like the wail of a child's nightmare than a man's scream of pain, and he thinks, half-asleep, shouldn't some woman be doing something about that? Then he thinks, it must be Mark. What are they doing to him? I said do nothing yet.

But he does not stir. He does not think his household would go against his orders. He wonders if they are asleep in Greenwich. The armoury is too near the palace itself, and the hours before a joust are often alive with the tap of hammers. The beating, the shaping, the welding, the polishing in the polishing mill, these operations are complete; there is just some last-minute riveting, an oiling and easing, final adjustments to please the anxious combatants.

He wonders, why did I leave Mark that space to boast, to undo himself? I could have condensed the process; I could have told him what I wanted, and threatened him. But I encouraged him; I did it so that he would be complicit. If he told the truth about Anne, he is guilty. If he lied about Anne, he is hardly innocent. I was prepared, if necessary, to put him under duress. In France, torture is usual, as necessary as salt to meat; in Italy, it is a sport for the piazza. In England, the law does not countenance it. But it can be used, at a nod from the king: on a warrant. It is true there is a rack at the Tower. No one withstands it. No one. For most men, since the way it works is so obvious, a glimpse of it is enough.

He thinks, I will tell Mark that. It will make him feel better about himself.

He gathers the sheet about him. Next moment, Christophe comes in to wake him. His eyes seem to flinch from the light. He sits up. ‘Oh, Jesus. I have not slept all night. Why was Mark screaming?'

The boy laughs. ‘We locked him in with Christmas. I thought of it, myself. You remember when I first saw the star in its sleeves? I said, master, what is that machine that is all over points? I thought it was an engine for torture. Well, it is dark in Christmas. He fell against the star and it impaled him. Then the peacock wings came out of their shroud and brushed his face with fingers. And he thought a phantom was shut up with him in the dark.'

He says, ‘You must do without me for an hour.'

‘You are not ill, God forbid?'

‘No, just wretched with lack of sleep.'

‘Pull the covers over your head, and lie as one dead,' Christophe advises. ‘I shall come back in an hour with bread and ale.'

 

When Mark tumbles out of the room he is grey with shock. Feathers adhere to his clothes, not peacock feathers but fluff from the wings of parish seraphs, and smudged gilding from the Three Kings' robes. Names run out of his mouth so fluently that he has to check him; the boy's legs threaten to give way and Richard has to hold him up. He has never had this problem before, the problem of having frightened someone too much. ‘Norris' is somewhere in the babble, ‘Weston' is there, so far so likely: and then Mark names courtiers so fast that their names merge and fly, he hears Brereton and says, ‘Write that down,' he swears he hears Carew, also Fitzwilliam, and Anne's almoner and the Archbishop of Canterbury; he is in there himself of course, and at one point the child alleges Anne has committed adultery with her own husband. ‘Thomas Wyatt…' Mark pipes…

‘No, not Wyatt.'

Christophe leans forward and flicks his knuckles against the side of the boy's head. Mark stops. He looks around, wonderingly, for the source of the pain. Then once again he is confessing and confessing. He has worked through the privy chamber from gentlemen to grooms and he is naming persons unknown, probably cooks and kitchen boys he knew in his former less exalted life.

‘Put him back with the ghost,' he says, and Mark gives one scream, and is silent.

‘You have had to do with the queen how many times?' he asks.

Mark says, ‘A thousand.'

Christophe gives him a little slap.

‘Three times or four.'

‘Thank you.'

Mark says, ‘What will happen to me?'

‘That rests with the court who will try you.'

‘What will happen to the queen?'

‘That rests with the king.'

‘Nothing good,' Wriothesley says: and laughs.

He turns. ‘Call-Me. You're early today?'

‘I could not sleep. A word, sir?'

So today the positions are reversed, it is Call-Me-Risley who is taking him aside, frowning. ‘You will have to bring in Wyatt, sir. You take it too much to heart, this charge his father laid on you. If it comes to it, you cannot protect him. The court has talked for years about what he may have done with Anne. He stands first in suspicion.'

He nods. It is not easy to explain to a young man like Wriothesley why he values Wyatt. He wants to say, because, good fellows though you are, he is not like you or Richard Riche. He does not talk simply to hear his own voice, or pick arguments just to win them. He is not like George Boleyn: he does not write verses to six women in the hope of bundling one of them into a dark corner where he can slip his cock into her. He writes to warn and to chastise, and not to confess his need but to conceal it. He understands honour but does not boast of his own. He is perfectly equipped as a courtier, but he knows the small value of that. He has studied the world without despising it. He understands the world without rejecting it. He has no illusions but he has hopes. He does not sleepwalk through his life. His eyes are open, and his ears for sounds others miss.

But he decides to give Wriothesley an explanation he can follow. ‘It is not Wyatt,' he says, ‘who stands in my way with the king. It is not Wyatt who turns me out of the privy chamber when I need the king's signature. It is not he who is continually dropping slander against me like poison into Henry's ear.'

Mr Wriothesley looks at him speculatively. ‘I see. It is not so much, who is guilty, as whose guilt is of service to you.' He smiles. ‘I admire you, sir. You are deft in these matters, and without false compunction.'

He is not sure he wants Wriothesley to admire him. Not on those grounds. He says, ‘It may be that any of these gentlemen who are named could disarm suspicion. Or if suspicion remained, they could by some appeal stay the king's hand. Call-Me, we are not priests. We don't want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use.'

Wriothesley nods. ‘But still I say, bring in Thomas Wyatt. If you don't arrest him your new friends will. And I have been wondering, sir, forgive me if I am persistent, but what will happen afterwards with your new friends? If the Boleyns go down, and it seems they must, the supporters of the Princess Mary will take the credit. They will not thank you for the part you have played. They may speak you fair now, but they will never forgive you for Fisher and More. They will turn you out of office, and they may destroy you completely. Carew, the Courtenays, those people, they will have all to rule.'

‘No. The king will have all to rule.'

‘But they will persuade him and entice him. I mean Margaret Pole's children, the old noble houses – they take it as natural they should have sway and they mean to have it. They will undo all the good you have done these last five years. And also they say that Edward Seymour's sister, if he marries her, she will take him back to Rome.'

He grins. ‘Well, Call-Me, who will you back in a fight, Thomas Cromwell or Mistress Seymour?'

But of course Call-Me is right. His new allies hold him cheap. They take their triumph as natural, and for a mere promise of forgiveness he is to follow them and work for them and repent everything he has done. He says, ‘I do not claim I can tell the future, but I do know one or two things such folk are ignorant of.'

One can never be sure what Wriothesley is reporting to Gardiner. Hopefully, matter that will cause Gardiner to scratch his head in puzzlement, and quiver in alarm. He says, ‘What do you hear from France? I understand there is much talk of the book that Winchester wrote, justifying the king's supremacy. The French believe he wrote it under duress. Does he allow people to think that?'

‘I am sure –' Wriothesley begins.

He cuts him off. ‘No matter. I find I like the picture it puts in my head, Gardiner whining how he is crushed.'

He thinks, let's see if that gets back. It is his contention that Call-Me forgets for weeks at a time that he is the bishop's servant. He is an edgy young man, tense, and Gardiner's bellowing makes him ill; Cromwell is a congenial master, and easy day-to-day. He has said to Rafe, I quite like Call-Me, you know. I am interested in his career. I like watching him. If I ever broke with him, Gardiner would send another spy, who might be worse.

‘Now,' he says, turning back to the company, ‘we had better get poor Mark to the Tower.' The boy has shrunk to his knees, and is begging not to be put back with Christmas. ‘Give him a rest,' he says to Richard, ‘in a room clear of phantoms. Offer him food. When he is coherent, take his formal statement, and have it well witnessed before he leaves here. If he proves difficult, leave him to Christophe and Master Wriothesley, it is business more fit for them than for you.' Cromwells do not exhaust themselves on menial work; if they once did, that day has passed. He says, ‘If Mark tries to renege once he is out of here, they will know what to do at the Tower. Once you have his confession secure, and all the names you need, go down to the king at Greenwich. He will be expecting you. Trust the message to no one. Drop the word in his ear yourself.'

Richard pulls Mark Smeaton to his feet, handling him as one might handle a puppet: and with no more ill-will than one would spare for a marionette. Through his mind darts, unprompted, the image of old Bishop Fisher tottering to the scaffold, skeletal and obstinate.

It is already nine in the morning. The dews of May Day have burned from the grass. All over England, green boughs are carried in from the woods. He is hungry. He could eat a cut of mutton: with samphire, if any has been sent up from Kent. He needs to sit down for his barber. He has not perfected the art of dictating letters while being shaved. Perhaps I'll grow my beard, he thinks. It would save time. Only then, Hans would insist on committing another portrait against me.

At Greenwich by this time, they will be sanding the arena for the jousts. Christophe says, ‘Will the king fight today? Will he fight the Lord Norris and slay him?'

No, he thinks, he will leave that to me. Past the workshops, the store rooms and the jetties, the natural haunt of men such as himself, the pages will be placing silk cushions for the ladies in the towers that overlook the tilt yard. Canvas and rope and tar give way to damask and fine linen. The oil and stench and din, the smell of the river, give way to the perfume of rosewater and the murmurings of the maids as they dress the queen for the day ahead. They sweep away the remnants of her small meal, the crumbs of white bread, the slices of sweet preserves. They bring her petticoats and kirtles and sleeves and she makes choice. She is laced and tied and trussed, she is polished and flounced and studded with gems.

The king – it would be three or four years back and to justify his first divorce – put out a book called
A Glass of the Truth
. Parts of it, they say, he wrote himself.

Now Anne Boleyn calls for her glass. She sees herself: her jaundiced skin, lean throat, collarbones like twin blades.

1 May 1536: this, surely, is the last day of knighthood. What happens after this – and such pageants will continue – will be no more than a dead parade with banners, a contest of corpses. The king will leave the field. The day will end, broken off, snapped like a shinbone, spat out like smashed teeth. George Boleyn, brother to the queen, will enter the silken pavilion to disarm, laying aside the favours and tokens, the scraps of ribbon the ladies have given him to carry. When he lifts off his helmet he will hand it to his squire, and see the world with misted eyes, falcons emblazoned, leopards couchant, claws, talons, teeth: he will feel his head on his shoulders wobbling as soft as jelly.

 

Whitehall: that night, knowing Norris is in custody, he goes to the king. A snatched word with Rafe in an outer room: how is he?

‘Well,' Rafe says, ‘you would expect him to be storming about like Edgar the Peaceable, looking for someone to stick with a javelin.' They exchange a smile, remembering the supper table at Wolf Hall. ‘But he is calm. Surprisingly so. As if he knew, long ago. In his heart. And by his express wish he is alone.'

Alone: but who would he be with? Useless to expect Gentle Norris whispering towards him. Norris was keeper of the king's private purse; now one imagines the king's money loose and rolling down the highway. The angels' harps are slashed, and discord is general; purse strings are cut, and the silk ties of garments snapped to spill flesh.

As he stands on his threshold, Henry turns his eyes: ‘Crumb,' he says heavily. ‘Come and sit.' He waves away the attentions of the groom who hovers by the door. He has wine and pours it himself. ‘Your nephew will have told you what passed at the tilting ground.' He says softly, ‘He is a good boy, Richard, is he not?' His gaze is distant, as if he would like to wander off the point. ‘I was among the spectators today, not an actor at all. She of course was as ever: at ease among her women, her countenance very haughty, but then smiling and stopping to converse with this gentleman or that.' He sniggers, a flat, incredulous sound. ‘Oh yes, she has had some conversation.'