In his chamber the air is sharply scented: juniper, cinnamon. He takes off his orange coat. In the dimness of the room, shuttered against the afternoon, it blazes as if he handled fire. There were certain miserable divines, in darker days than these, who said that if God had meant us to wear coloured clothes He would have made coloured sheep. Instead, His providence has given us dyers, and the materials for their craft. Here in the city, amid dun and slate, donkey’s back and mouse, gold quickens the heart; on those days of grey swilling rain that afflict London in every season, we are reminded of Heaven by a flash of celestial blue. Just as the soldier looks up to the flutter of bright banners, so the workman on his daily trudge rejoices to see his betters shimmer above him imperial purple, in silver and flame and halcyon against the wash of the English sky.
Richard has followed him. He closes the door behind them. The sounds of the house recede. He puts a hand to his chest – that habitual motion – and from a pocket inside his jacket, he takes out a knife.
‘Still?’ Richard says. ‘Even now?’
‘Especially now.’ Without the weight next to his heart, he would hardly know himself.
‘Carry it on the street, yes,’ Richard says. ‘But at court, sir? I cannot imagine the circumstance in which you could use it.’
Nor can I, he thinks. It is because I cannot imagine the circumstance, that I need it. He tests the blade against his thumb. He made his first knife for himself, when he was a boy. That was a good blade, and he misses it every day.
‘Go and get Chapuys,’ he says to Richard. ‘My compliments to him, and may I give him supper? If he says no, tell him I feel a lust for diplomacy – say I must have a treaty before sunset, and if he won’t come I’ll fetch in the French ambassador instead.’
‘Right you are.’ Richard goes out. And he, lighter by the orange coat, lighter by the knife, runs downstairs into the fresh air of an inner courtyard, and crosses to the kitchens to see Thurston.
He can hear Thurston before he sees him: some underling wishes he had never been born. ‘Told you once,’ Thurston roars, ‘told you twice, and next time, boy, that you use that mortar for garlic, I will personally knock out your brain, place it in the said mortar, pestle it to a fine paste and give it to Dick Purser for feeding the dogs.’
He passes the cold room where two peacocks hang on a rack, their throats cut, weights on their heels. He rounds the corner, meets the face of the chastened boy: ‘Mathew? Mathew, from Wolf Hall?’
Thurston snorts. ‘Comes from Wolf Hall! He comes from the pit!’
He is astonished to see the boy. ‘I brought you here to clerk for me, not for kitchen work.’
‘Yes, sir, I told them so.’ A pale, modest young man, Mathew had brought his letters courteously each morning, last year when the king had visited the Seymours. He had thought him too personable and deft to be left in the country; the boy’s face lit up when he’d asked, would you like to come away and see the world?
‘This boy is out of his right place,’ he says to Thurston. ‘There has been a mistake.’
‘Good. Take him. Take him away before I do him some mischief.’
‘Off with this.’ He indicates the boy’s spattered smock.
‘In truth, sir?’
‘Your day has come.’ He helps the boy free himself and emerge thinner, in shirt and hose. ‘How’s your friend Rob? Do you hear from him?’
‘Yes, sir. And he does as you bade him, he keeps an eye out, who visits Wolf Hall, and he faithfully writes down their names. Only I could not come at you, to give his news.’
‘I am sorry for your rough treatment. Cross the court and ask for Thomas Avery – say I have sent you to learn the household accounts. Perhaps when you have mastered that, you might go into some other family for a while.’
The boy is hurt. ‘I like it here.’
‘Despite this churl?’ He indicates Thurston. ‘If I sent you away, you would still be in my service.’
‘Would I go under another name?’ The boy hitches an imaginary coat on his shoulders. ‘I understand you, sir.’
Thurston says, ‘I’m glad somebody does.’
Around them, two dozen boys are dragging panniers across a stone floor, sharpening their paring knives, counting eggs, pricking off an inventory and plucking fowl. The house goes on without him, its arrangements complete. In here the blood puddings are stirred, the fish gutted; across the court, the bright-eyed clerks perch on their stools, hungry to incise. Here the chafing dish and the latten pan, there the penknife and the sealing wax, the ribbon and silk tags, the black words that creep across the parchment, the quills. He remembers the day in Florence, when the call came for him in his turn. ‘Englishman, they want you in the counting house.’ And how, leisurely, he had untied his apron, and hung it on a peg, and left behind him the copper pans and basins, and the row of lipped jars for oil and wine that stood together in an alcove, each as high as a child of seven. He had run up the stairs two at a time, and as he passed the sala he heard the drops of water falling from the wall fountain into its marble basin, a tiny erratic drum-beat, pit-pat … pit … pat-pit. The boy scrubbing the steps got out of his way. He sang: Scaramella’s off to war …
He says to Thurston, ‘Chapuys to supper. It will be just the two of us.’
‘Of course it will,’ Thurston says. He sieves his flour, allowing little puffs and billows to rise between them. ‘Somebody said to me, that Spanish fellow, that one who is always at your house – he and your master plotted it all between them to kill the queen, for she was in the way of their friendship.’
‘Chapuys is not a Spaniard. You know that.’
Thurston gives him a look that says, it is demeaning and futile to differentiate between foreigners. ‘I know that the Emperor is the King of Spain and lord of half the world. No wonder you want to be in bed with him.’
‘I have to be,’ he says. ‘I clasp him to my bosom.’
‘When’s the king coming again to dine?’ Thurston asks. ‘Mind, I expect he’s lost his appetite. Wouldn’t you, if your bollocks were insulted in open court?’
‘Would I? I don’t know. It’s never happened to me.’
‘The whole of London listening,’ Thurston says with relish. ‘Of course, we don’t know for sure what George said, it being in French. We speculate it was along the lines of, the king can get it up, he can get it in, but he doesn’t last long enough to please a lady.’
‘See,’ he says, ‘now you wish you’d learned French.’
‘But that was the gist of it,’ Thurston says comfortably. ‘If you can’t please a lady, she don’t get a child, or if she does, it’s some puny object that never lives to be christened. You remember the Spanish queen. When she was young she dropped them by the dozen. But they none of them lived, except for that little lass Mary, and she’s the size of a mouse.’
At his feet, eels are swimming in a pail, twisting and gliding; interlacing in their futile efforts, as they wait to be killed and sauced. He asks Thurston, ‘What are they saying on the street? About Anne?’
Thurston scowls. ‘She never had friends. Not even among the women. They say, if she went to it with her brother, that would explain why no child she got would stick in there. A brother’s child, or a child got on a Friday, or one got when you shove it in from the back – it’s against nature. They shed themselves, poor sinful creatures. For what’s the point of them being born only to die?’