George Boleyn’s widow, Jane, is down in Kent, trying to pick up her affairs and face her future; she has written to him about her want of money. The Earl of Worcester’s wife, Beth, has gone off to the country carrying her big belly. Not his child, despite what the gossips say. If it is a boy, the earl may fuss about its provenance. If a girl, he may shrug and agree to own her. Women can be out in their reckoning. Their midwives can mislead them.
Once in Venice, he thinks, I saw a woman painted on a wall high above the canal, stars and moon at her back. ‘Hold up that torch,’ his friend Karl Heinz had said. ‘Tommaso, do you see her?’ And for an instant he did; from the wall of the German House, she looked down at Cremuello, come all the way from Putney. He was her pilgrim, she his shrine; naked, garlanded, she touched her burning heart.
When Anne died, four women attended her. They waded in her blood. Their faces were veiled and he does not believe they were the same women who had watched and waited with her through the final week, women he had planted around her to record all she said. He believes that the king, beseeched by God knows who, had allowed her to choose her own companions for her last walk over the rough ground, the wind pulling at her clothes, and her head turning, turning, for news that never came.
Lady Kingston, he thinks, would tell me who those women were. But must I know? They will have memories of the day. They might try to share them.
Leave me, he says to them, I need to sleep. Stay at the corners of the bed, under your draperies. Swaddle that gasping head in cloth and wrap it round and round. You know what Medusa does. You cannot look in her face. You must trap her image in polished steel. Gaze into the mirror of the future: the unspotted glass, specula sine macula. We will dress the city for Jane. At every corner a paradise, with a maiden seated in a rose arbour, the roses being striped, argent, vermilion; a serpent coiled about the apple tree, and singing birds, trapped by Adam, hanging in cages from the bough.
Tomorrow he will answer the letter from George Boleyn’s widow. Jane wants to get hold of her late husband’s plate and goods. She has nothing but a hundred marks a year, and it’s not enough for a gentlewoman who will never marry again: for who will take on a woman who trotted in to Thomas Cromwell and accused her own husband of sleeping with his sister and planning to murder the king?
We shall not escape these weeks. They recapitulate, always varied and always fresh, always doing and never done. When Anne was arrested, every hour had brought him letters from Kingston, the Constable of the Tower. Rafe scrutinised them, marking some, filing others. ‘Sir William says the queen still talks of how the king will send her to a nunnery. Then in the next breath, of how she will go to Heaven, because of the good deeds she has done. He says she keeps laughing. She makes jokes. Says she will be known hereafter as Anne the Headless.’
‘Poor woman,’ Wriothesley said. ‘I doubt she will be known at all.’
Rafe looked down at the letter. ‘I will give you Kingston’s phrase. “This lady has much joy and pleasure in death.”’
‘It sounds to me as if she is in terror,’ Richard Cromwell said.
‘If that is so,’ said Call-Me-Risley, ‘her chaplains should attend to it.’
‘And also,’ Rafe read, ‘she wishes Master Secretary to know that seven years after her death a great punishment – the nature of which she does not specify – will fall on the land.’
‘Good of her to hold back,’ he said.
‘Anne may find,’ Rafe said, ‘that God will not jump to her bidding, as men did.’ He had opened another letter, run his eyes over it: ‘George Boleyn wants to see you, sir. A matter that touches his conscience.’
‘He wants to confess?’ Wriothesley raised an eyebrow. ‘Why would he do it now, when the sentence is already passed, his proven offences so rank that the most merciful prince who ever reigned would not remit his punishment? For I should think that if he were to be excused the penalty, the common people would stone him in the street; or failing that, God would strike him down.’
‘And we should spare God the trouble,’ Richard said. ‘He has much to do.’
He had noted Wriothesley’s darting look. The boys are beginning to scrap over him, who controls access. ‘Lord Rochford leaves debts,’ he said, holding up the letter. ‘He wants me to put his affairs in order.’
‘I should not have thought George would care,’ Rafe said. ‘It seems I fail in charity. I’ll go for you, sir, shall I?’
He had shaken his head. What is he, George Boleyn, but a man who got up to glory because his two sisters worked for him, on their backs: first Mary in the king’s bed, then Anne. But when the dying ask for you, you must appear in person.
Later, leading him into the Martin Tower, Kingston said, ‘It seems only you will do, Master Secretary. You’d think he’d have a friend. But then,’ he glanced about him, ‘his friends are in like case, I suppose.’
George was reading a book of devotion. ‘Sir, I knew you would help me.’ Scrambling to his feet, his words tumbling out: ‘There are debts I owe, and sums owed to me –’
‘Wait, my lord.’ He held up a hand. ‘Should I send for a clerk?’
‘No, everything is here.’ A heap of papers on the table; George pawed through. ‘Also, I have a company of players. Can you give them employment? I would not like to see them put out on the road.’
He can. He means to divert the Londoners with certain spectacles. ‘Monks and their impostures,’ he says. ‘Farnese in his court at Rome, among his sycophants.’
George was eager. ‘We have everything needful. We have a pope’s hat, and croziers and stoles, we have bells, scrolls, and asses’ ears for the monks to sport. One of my company, he plays at Robin Goodfellow, he comes with broom and sweeps before the actors. Then comes again with candle, to signify the play is done. Here, sir.’ He thrust papers at him. ‘The king gets everything, my debts too – but these small people who owe me, I don’t want them harassed.’
He took the papers. ‘Never too late to consider your fellow man.’
George flushed. ‘I know you think me a great sinner. And so I am.’
George, he saw, was not well. The skin beneath his eyes was bruised, and he was ill-shaven, as if he could not sit still for the barber. He sank down into his chair; his hand gripped the chair arm, to control its shaking, and he looked down at it as if it were strange to him, and it was true it appeared shockingly naked. ‘I have given my rings into safekeeping.’ He held up his other hand. ‘But my wedding ring, I can’t …’
It will come off later, when your hands are cold. Who will wear George’s jewels? His wife will sell them. ‘Do you want anything, my lord? Kingston does all he should?’
‘I wish I could see my sister, but I suppose you would not permit it. Better she should settle her mind and frame herself to meet God. The truth is, Master Secretary’ – he gave a little laugh – ‘I cannot imagine meeting God. I am already dead by the law, but I do not seem to know it. I wonder how I am still breathing. I need to write myself a letter, perhaps, to explain it, or … can you explain it to me, Master Cromwell? How I am alive and dead at the same time?’
‘Read your gospel,’ he said. He thought, I should have sent Rafe after all. He would have been too proud to break down in front of Rafe.
‘I have read the gospel, but not followed it,’ George said. ‘I think I have hardly understood it. If I had done so, I would be a living man as you are. I should have lived quiet, away from the court. And disdained the world, its flatteries. I should have eschewed all vanities, and laid aside ambition.’