‘A pity he did not have better success, and bring back a bride. And Bishop Gardiner is the king’s man in Hampshire – it will offend him, to have a rival.’
He nods: that’s the idea.
‘And young Gregory to sit – do you think he is ready? Forgive me, but your ill-wishers are bound to raise the point.’
‘The business is great. The hours are long. I do not see it as an occupation for old men.’
Riche offers papers. ‘Would you cast an eye? It is the pension list for the surrender at Shaftesbury. You always said the abbess would fight till the last ditch. But we have found a sum to buy her off.’
We should not begrudge. It is a rich house. He runs a dry quill down the list. There is the name he is looking for: Dorothea Clancey. ‘Do you know if the ladies have decided their future?’
‘Not our business, sir.’ But then Riche softens. ‘I look back fondly on our ride to Shaftesbury. I always think it a pleasure to be in your company for a day, my lord – and a privilege too. I relish to see how your lordship transacts business among all sorts and conditions of people. I am the better instructed, and I profit by it.’
Pleasure and profit. What could be more fitting for Richard Riche? The door is flung open. Christophe erupts into the room. ‘Look who!’
‘Call-Me!’ He opens his arms wide. The traveller, muddy from the Dover road, falls into them.
‘We lost sight of you!’ He hugs him. ‘Chapuys wrote to me from Calais – I think it was to say you were on the seas, but his words were all washed by salt water.’
‘As mine,’ Call-Me says. With his glove of red Spanish leather, he knocks a tear from his cheek; plucks off his hat, with its sweeping ostrich plume, and throws it down on the desk. ‘Sir, I cannot tell you how glad I am to see your face. Twice or thrice I made sure I was dead. I did not know what to wish for – that the king would fall in love with Chapuys and hold him till my escape, or that he would boot him into a boat, so I might start for home.’
‘It was the time between that we feared.’ Rafe is standing in the doorway. ‘When you were dissolved – neither here, nor there, nor in Heaven nor on earth.’ He crosses the room, and kisses the hero’s cheek. ‘Welcome home, Call-Me.’
Riche is looking at them puzzled: as if they were a tribe of Indians, at some feast of theirs.
‘Oh, and the knave Phillips!’ Call-Me exclaims: as if he must get it over. ‘Sir, you could not reproach me more than I reproach myself.’
‘Be at ease,’ he says. ‘A man like Phillips is an affront to God and reason. If I had been on embassy at your age, I am sure I should have been deceived, if only out of zeal for my country’s good.’
Riche says peevishly, ‘My lord would rather have Wyatt safe home than you. Wyatt has things to tell him.’
‘Oh?’ Wriothesley says.
‘Schemes for how we might set Italy in a roar,’ Riche says. ‘In Toledo he has the envoys of all nations in and out of his lodging and he spins them like a whipping top. Venice goes out of the back door, Ferrara comes in the front, while Mantua hides under the table and a Florentine up the chimney. He hears so many intrigues he says his skull is splitting. But he will not spill the facts except in secret to my lord.’
‘Oh,’ Wriothesley says. Richard Cromwell comes bounding in, hallooing like a houndmaster, and pounds him with his fist. Call-Me pounds him back, till Rafe says, ‘Wriothesley, go home to your wife!’
‘I should.’ Call-Me blushes. He glows. He picks up the ostrich-feather hat and sweeps the air, and catches a candle in its arc.
It is Richard Riche who steps forward and pinches out the damage. ‘Digits of iron,’ he says diffidently.
The papers from Shaftesbury lie unattended. When the boys have gone, he stands over them, moving his forefinger over the name of the cardinal’s daughter. The air smells of burning plumes. He picks up his pen and signs her off.
Within a week he hears that Mr Wriothesley has bribed or frightened one of the cipher clerks, and got the key to Wyatt’s letters. It is Rafe who tells him: sheepish, ashamed of what Call-Me has done. He himself is more amused than angry. Good luck to him, if he can disentangle the Italian schemes. Wyatt says, start fires in the Pope’s backyard. Use your money and your expertise to fan the sparks of conflict between states, then keep Rome busy quenching the blaze. It might work, he thinks. It might just as easily blow back in our faces.
He says to Rafe, ‘In the cardinal’s day, when I was his man of business and Stephen Gardiner was his secretary, I would have opened Stephen’s letters if I could.’
And where I could, I did. And I would still. And I do.
He calls in Hans: ‘Paint the Lady Mary. I need to send her likeness to the Duke of Cleves.’
‘You want this match?’ Hans says.
‘Certainly.’
‘Listen, I do not flatter.’
‘Not in my case, certainly. But you made Thomas More look congenial.’
‘I do not flatter because I dare not. The king relies on me. But if I paint our little shrew faithfully, Wilhelm will take fright. Therefore I cannot see the advantage for me in this commission, or how it could end well.’
‘You would not refuse to paint the king’s daughter, surely? You will find a way, Hans.’
‘People say, when all offers for Mary have failed, she will turn to Cromwell.’
‘That is nonsense.’ He thinks, she hates me: can Hans not see this? ‘You speak as if she is an ancient lady. She is, what, twenty-two, twenty-three?’
‘She looks more. Her prospects oppress her.’ Hans laughs.
It is true it would not be easy for a stranger to guess Mary’s age. Sometimes she looks like a pallid child, sometimes like an old woman. There will be a sweet moment, he thinks, half an hour on some ordinary afternoon, when she looks like herself.
At Greenwich this Easter he watches Mary; he knows the court is watching him, watching her. She has recently bought a hundred pearls, and has spent three hundred pounds on clothes for the feast. In yellow damask and purple taffeta, she plays with the little prince. She takes a hand at cards, plays the virginals, gossips with her ladies, and rides out into the fresh air as the winter relaxes its grip.
When the Courtenays and Poles were arrested, the king had his daughter’s household questioned. She was asked to hand over her letters from Chapuys, and was able to supply a bundle, empty in content; the ambassador had written them specially, at a hint from him, and lent them various dates. If Mary had claimed to have received no letters, the king would have suspected she had burned them. Which he is quite sure she has.
Mary can play such a game as this, needing no explanations. But the week of the beheadings, the king had to send her Dr Butts, who found her so faint she could hardly stand.
She will miss Chapuys, no doubt. But it is spring, and at court her father makes a fuss of her. He, Lord Cromwell, escorts her to watch the tennis play. He says, looking sideways at her, ‘I hear Duke Wilhelm is very handsome.’
‘That does not weigh,’ she says equably.
‘No, but better than the other thing. By the way, do not let people tell you he is a Lutheran.’
The balls whistle across the court. ‘My lord Cromwell,’ she says, ‘I don’t let anybody tell me anything.’
The king’s Easter pieties are as fervent as any papist could wish. Good Friday saw him shuffling to the crucifix on his knees. The German envoys are aghast. If this is what he does at Easter, what will he do on Ascension Day? As Christ rises bodily to Heaven, will your king have himself hoisted on a rope and pulley? Will he bask among the goddesses on his ceiling, till at Whitsuntide he descends in the form of a dove?
He, Lord Cromwell, is planning his own Ascension Day. He has devised a new order of precedence for the realm, to be enacted by Parliament. From now on, it is not your noble and ancient blood that will place you in the hierarchy. It is what job you do for the king. The king’s Vicegerent – that’s him – outranks the bench of bishops. The king’s Secretary, once created a baron, outranks all barons. If the Lord Privy Seal was born a commoner, he can still sit higher than a duke. Christophe says, ‘If all your offices were counted, you should have a ladder on a chair, and a ladder on that, and a throne perched up in the clouds, to look down on Norferk and the foes, and spit on them.’