When the summer plague comes back, he says to Mercy and Johane, shall we send the children out?In which direction, Johane says: not challenging him, just wanting to know.Mercy says, can anyone outrun it? They take comfort from a belief that since the infection killed so many last year, it won't be so violent this year; which he does not think is necessarily true, and he thinks they seem to be endowing this plague with a human or at least bestial intelligence: the wolf comes down on the sheepfold, but not on the nights when the men with dogs are waiting for him. Unless they think the plague is more than bestial or human – that it is God behind it – God, up to his old tricks. When he hears the bad news from Italy, about Clement's new treaty with the Emperor, Wolsey bows his head and says, ‘My Master is capricious.’ He doesn't mean the king.On the last day of July, Cardinal Campeggio adjourns the legatine court. It is, he says, the Roman holidays. News comes that the Duke of Suffolk, the king's great friend, has hammered the table before Wolsey, and threatened him to his face. They all know the court will never sit again. They all know the cardinal has failed.That evening with Wolsey he believes, for the first time, that the cardinal will come down. If he falls, he thinks, I come down with him. His reputation is black. It is as if the cardinal's joke has been incarnated: as if he wades through streams of blood, leaving in his wake a trail of smashed glass and fires, of widows and orphans. Cromwell, people say: that's a bad man. The cardinal will not talk about what is happening in Italy, or what has happened in the legate's court. He says, ‘They tell me the sweating sickness is back. What shall I do? Shall I die? I have fought four bouts with it. In the year … what year? … I think it was 1518 … now you will laugh, but it was so – when the sweat had finished with me, I looked like Bishop Fisher. My flesh was wasted. God picked me up and rattled my teeth.’‘Your Grace was wasted?’ he says, trying to raise a smile. ‘I wish you'd had your portrait made then.’Bishop Fisher has said in court – just before the Roman holidays set in – that no power, human or divine, could dissolve the marriage of the king and queen. If there's one thing he'd like to teach Fisher, it's not to make grand overstatements. He has an idea of what the law can do, and it's different from what Bishop Fisher thinks.Until now, every day till today, every evening till this, if you told Wolsey a thing was impossible, he'd just laugh. Tonight he says – when he can be brought to the point – my friend King François is beaten and I am beaten too. I don't know what to do. Plague or no plague, I think I may die.‘I must go home,’ he says. ‘But will you bless me?’He kneels before him. Wolsey raises his hand, and then, as if he has forgotten what he's doing, lets it hover in mid-air. He says, ‘Thomas, I am not ready to meet God.’He looks up, smiling. ‘Perhaps God is not ready to meet you.’‘I hope that you will be with me when I die.’‘But that will be at some distant date.’He shakes his head. ‘If you had seen how Suffolk set on me today. He, Norfolk, Thomas Boleyn, Thomas Lord Darcy, they have been waiting only for this, for my failure with this court, and now I hear they are devising a book of articles, they are drawing up a list of accusations, how I have reduced the nobility, and so forth – they are making a book called – what will they call it? – “Twenty Years of Insults”? They are brewing some stewpot into which they are pouring the dregs of every slight, as they conceive it, by which they mean every piece of truth I have told them …’ He takes a great rattling breath, and looks at the ceiling, which is embossed with the Tudor rose.‘There will be no such stewpots in Your Grace's kitchen,’ he says. He gets up. He looks at the cardinal, and all he can see is more work to be done.