He thinks, Norris was a gentleman, he would not say such a thing. But then, of course, like all those gentlemen about the late Anne, he was capable of more than we knew.
‘William Stafford was in the garden too,’ he says. ‘He that Mary married, afterwards. She must have liked his love-making. She had no experience of mine.’
‘If you say not. But what I heard was, you pulled out a dagger and held it to his throat, drove him off and then dragged your prey indoors.’
Part of this is true. Stafford came up behind him in the dark. He took him for a murderer. He remembers the man trying to squirm away from him, the stuff of his jacket bunched in his fist.
‘Well, however it may be,’ Rochford says, ‘that sweet creature is Mary’s girl. And the little chicken she has by the hand, that is Norris’s daughter, Mary.’
He glances at Mary Norris. He cannot see she is like her father. Her mother died young, he scarcely remembers her. He is uneasy. ‘Uncle Norfolk’s ward,’ he says, ‘is she not?’
‘Trust Uncle Norfolk,’ Rochford says, ‘to put his folk in. His ward Norris, and his niece Carey – and he has another niece, one of his brother Edmund’s batch.’
Edmund Howard, God rest him. He was a poor gentleman, one of Norfolk’s half-brothers: five children of his own, and five stepchildren at least. He once declared to the cardinal that if he were not a lord he would go out and earn an honest living by digging and delving, a labouring man; but rank condemned him to indigence.
‘Here Norfolk comes,’ Rochford says. The duke struts in with a tiny girl on his arm. ‘That is the one, Katherine Howard – she we sent back because she looked twelve. But they swear she is of sufficient age, and here she is again.’
He hears the girl say, ‘Uncle Norfolk …’ in a clear, childish voice. She is pulling at the old brute’s arm, trying to attract his attention to something.
‘He has a peach there,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘I could spend an hour, my lord, could not you?’
‘I don’t know I could,’ he says. ‘I think Uncle Norfolk’s shade might come and lie between us.’
The child’s flower face turns on its stem, her lips emit a stream of chatter. Norfolk’s face wears an expression of strained tolerance – he is alert in case the king comes in. The girl forgets her uncle, drops his arm and stares around. Her glance slips absently over the men, but rakes the women head to toe. Clearly she has never seen so many great ladies before; she is studying how they stand, how they move. ‘Sizing up her rivals,’ he says; she has no guile.
‘She has no mother, bless her. She was but an infant when she died.’
He casts a glance at Rochford. ‘A soft word from you, my lady.’
‘I am not a monster, my lord.’
Mary Norris and Catherine Carey are eyeing up their new companion. Rochford says, ‘Would you call her blonde? Or red?’
He would not call her anything. His gaze has moved elsewhere.
‘I wonder who paid for what’s on her back,’ Rochford says. ‘That cloth did not come out of the old dowager’s wardrobe. And those rubies – did they not belong to Anne Boleyn?’
‘If they did, they should be back in the king’s jewel house. How did they come into Norfolk’s hands?’
‘Ah, that got your attention!’ Jane Rochford says.
On 26 November, Anna leaves her home to travel towards Calais. She will have an escort of some 250 persons, and her ladies travelling with her, so there are times when they will not make more than five miles a day. Drums and trumpeters precede her, and she travels in a gilded chariot emblazoned with the swan emblem and the arms of Cleves-Mark-Jülich-Berg.
Gregory comes to Austin Friars for final instructions. ‘Now I will repeat them back to you,’ he says. ‘Write home the minute I see Anna. Make sure she knows who I am. Be kind. Be patient. Make sure she has the things she likes to eat. Give her a purse of ready money.’
‘And do not embark for home without checking that all her train’s debts are paid. It may be the weather delays you.’ He thinks of the king, six years back, penned in the fortress with Anne Boleyn. ‘Be aware that the longer you stay, the more the household will be tempted by French merchants. By the way, keep your own accounts.’
‘You know you are talking to me as if I am Wyatt?’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And you are flattered.’
Gregory smiles. There is a shout from below. ‘My lord, do you want to be disturbed?’
It seems from the noise that everybody is running outside. Gregory goes down. A moment later, he storms back up the stairs: ‘You have to come and see.’
In the courtyard is a wagon, guarded by four carters. On the wagon is a crate or cage, open at the front, barred. His first impression is that they are guarding an area of darkness, but then a movement betrays something within. He sees an expanse of spotted fur, and a pugged head that flinches from the light. It is a leopard. Its fur is crusted with its own shit and vomit, or so it seems from the smell.
He pulls his gown around him. His folk stop staring at the animal, and start staring at him. He has an impulse to cross himself. Such a distance it has come, perhaps from China: how can it be still alive?
‘Do you think it’s hungry?’ Thurston says. ‘I mean, do you think it’s hungry this very minute?’
The bars are stout, but the household keep their distance. The creature presses itself away from them. It can’t know it’s arrived at its destination; it thinks this is some way station, in its procession of cramped and stinking days.
The wagoners are staring around them while they wait to be paid. They are Englishmen, and they have fetched it as bidden from Dover, fearful that it would break out and terrify the population of Kent; and so, they hint, it is worth a sum on top of the usual. It’s not, one of them says, like fetching up a pile of logs.
‘So who did you pick it up from, at Dover?’
One of them says, mildly belligerent, ‘The usual man.’
‘Have you papers?’
‘No, sir.’ Another says, in a burst of inspiration, ‘We did have papers, but it ate them.’
Where it was before it crossed the sea, they don’t know or care. ‘Where would you find such a thing except among heathens?’ one of them asks. ‘Probably you ought to fetch a priest to it and have it blessed.’
‘It looks as if it would eat a priest,’ Thurston says. He chuckles appreciatively.
Well then: it appears the donor’s name has been detached from it, somewhere on the journey. He pictures some turbaned potentate, waiting for thanks. What he’ll do is, he’ll thank everybody. Thank you for the marvel, he’ll say.
Gregory says – it’s the first sense anyone has spoken – ‘Do you think it’s meant for the king?’
That could be: in which case it is just another item that crosses his desk. Dick Purser is at his elbow. ‘Dick,’ he says, ‘it will need a keeper, till we can get it to the Tower. It cannot go to the king in its present state. I think it can go no further.’
Credit to Dick, he does not say, no, not me, sir. He pulls off his cap and passes his hand over his stubble hair.
There is a shout. ‘Look, it stirs!’
Until now the beast was torpid. Now it stands up, and in the cramped fetid space it stretches itself. It takes a pace forward, and that pace brings it to the limits of its freedom, and it stares at him, at him; its eyes are sunk deeply into its folds of fur, so you cannot see its expression, whether awe, or fear, or rage.
There is quiet. Dick says uneasily, ‘It knows its master.’
As an arrow its target. He feels pierced by its scrutiny: thin as it is, a walking pelt. The first thing is to get it off the wagon. ‘Pay these men,’ he says. It will have to stay in its travelling gaol till one more capacious can be built, but the stench can be decreased by washing away its excrement. We’ll need to feed it so that it fills its skin.