‘What do you think?’ he says to Dick Purser. ‘Are you man enough?’
Dick grows taller inside his jerkin. Gregory says, ‘With respect to you, my lord father, you always say that to people, when you want them to do something that can in no case be to their advantage.’
‘Aye,’ Thurston says. ‘What he means is, Dick Purser, are you fool enough?’
Dick says, ‘If I was to keep this beast, and be over the dogs as well, I’d need a boy, to train up.’
‘You can have a boy.’
‘It would eat a side of beef a day.’
‘You can indent for it. We’ll work you out a budget.’
‘On one proviso.’ Dick glares around him. ‘I am its sole keeper. Nobody to poke it with a stick. In fact nobody to come at it unless I say so. I don’t want it stirred up once I get it quiet. Nobody to walk by it with greyhounds, taunting it.’
Gregory says, ‘I marvel that God could create it.’
‘That He could even dream it,’ he says. Think of the faith of the men who carried it! Not these carters, but those who have guarded it, every stage of its journey, and wedged food into its cage, thrust water at it. You cannot complain it is in poor condition, when you think that at any time they could have put a spear in its throat, and then sold its hide for a great sum.
The animal so far has made no sound. It does not now, but still it stares: it stares at Lord Cromwell, Lord Cromwell of Wimbledon, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. It is thinking how to skin him from his furs, with one scalping flick of its paw. He must, in its starved computation, equal two sides of beef at least. Gregory says, ‘Suppose it wants its prey live? Dick Purser will have to run down a stag.’
Dick moves forward, as if to make it a speech of welcome. Still the beast gazes at him. As if it saw space behind him. As if it did not see the bars.
He goes back to his desk. He is looking over the pensions list for St Albans. Before his papers flit patches of dark and light, the broken pattern of the beast’s fur.
On mature consideration, he revises his picture of the turbaned potentate. Perhaps it was sent by some petty lord across the Narrow Sea, who had come by the creature and thought, this will ingratiate me with Thomas Cremuel, they say the man has an insensate yearning for what’s expensive, and will keep it to show off to his peers.
When he sees William Fitzwilliam he tells him all about it, as they are going into the council chamber. Fitz groans in sympathy. ‘Some fool sent me a seal. Three pails of fish every hour, and yet she had not dined. In the end I gave my wife directions, and she was made into pies.’
In Fitzwilliam’s train to Calais go Thomas Seymour, brother of the late queen, along with that old Calais hand Francis Bryan, and others who are no strangers to that shore: the least of them is William Stafford, Mary Boleyn’s husband. Some of the party are seasick, but not me, Gregory writes. He, Cromwell, smiles, reading out the letter to Mr Wriothesley. Inheritance is a strange thing. No one knows what traces our fathers leave. ‘If I have passed on a strong stomach,’ he says, ‘good enough. My father must have had one too, or he would never have kept down his own ale.’
‘Sometimes I think –’ Call-Me breaks off.
‘What?’
‘I agree with Uncle Norfolk. The higher you rise in the king’s service, the more you mention the low place you come from.’
‘The more others mention it, you mean. I am not ashamed of it, Call-Me. I never say my father taught me nothing. He taught me to bend metal.’
He is a busy man. He has not time to read every curt note life sends him. But he reads this one: ‘You do right to draw it to my attention. I will amend.’
While the welcome party are on the sea, the Abbot of Colchester is in the air. Colchester had signed up to the king’s supremacy, he had taken the oath. Then he gave backword, in whispers behind the hand: More and Fisher were martyrs, how he pitied them! When he was called upon to surrender his abbey, he said the king had no right to it – which is to say, his will and laws are null. He is head neither of the spiritual realm nor the temporal; in effect he is no king, and Parliament can make no law. According to the abbot.
It is the last of the hangings, he is sure. They were infecting each other, Colchester, Glastonbury and Reading. But now resistance to the king’s will is broken. All other houses can be closed by negotiation: no more blood, no more ropes and chains. No more examples are needed; the traitors’ banner is trampled, that portrayed the Five Wounds. Superstitious men in the north claim that in addition to his principal wounds, Christ suffered 5,470 more. They say that every day fresh ones are incised, as he is cut and flayed by Cromwell.
It is not written that great men shall be happy men. It is nowhere recorded that the rewards of public office include a quiet mind. He sits in Whitehall, the year folding around him, aware of the shadow of his hand as it moves across the paper, his own inconcealable fist; and in the quiet of the house, he can hear the soft whispering of his quill, as if his writing is talking back to him.
Can you make a new England? You can write a new story. You can write new texts and destroy the old ones, set the torn leaves of Duns Scotus sailing about the quadrangles, and place the gospels in every church. You can write on England, but what was written before keeps showing through, inscribed on the rocks and carried on floodwater, surfacing from deep cold wells. It’s not just the saints and martyrs who claim the country, it’s those who came before them: the dwarves dug into ditches, the sprites who sing in the breeze, the demons bricked into culverts and buried under bridges; the bones under your floor. You cannot tax them or count them. They have lasted ten thousand years and ten thousand before that. They are not easily dispossessed by farmers with fresh leases and law clerks who adduce proof of title. They bubble out of the ground, wear away the shoreline, sow weeds among the crops and erode the workings of mines.
On 11 December Anna arrives in Antwerp. The English merchants, led by Stephen Vaughan as their governor, meet her four miles outside the town with eight score of great torches held aloft, the flames licking and kissing the twilight. The whole city has turned out, Vaughan writes, more than would come out to see the Emperor. Anna is gentle in manner, he says: a smiling, sedate princess, encased in her strange glittering gowns. She brings a troop of ladies dressed in the same fashion, but not one of them fairer than she.
Vaughan does not mention Jenneke. Whether he has seen her. But then, the posts are not always secure.
Next day Anna is en route to Bruges. From Bruges she goes to Calais, where Fitzwilliam and his train ride outside the walls to meet her.
It is barely light. Her escort, their horses trapped in black velvet, seem to materialise from nowhere. As they approach the walls, guns are fired in salute, so the party proceeds, through smoke that obliterates their vision, to the Lantern Gate.
Once Henry has settled his own marriage, he turns his mind to Lady Mary. The Duke of Bavaria has come into the realm, with a modest entourage as the king advised: unmarried, a very proper man. He assures the king he will make no demands. He will take Mary purely for friendship’s sake, to strengthen the German league against Emperor and Rome.
He sends Mr Wriothesley up-country to prepare the lady for a meeting. Call-Me is his usual messenger now. Mary has warmed to him, and made him a satin cushion with his family coat of arms.
He, the Lord Privy Seal, is working with the Household officers on the final plans for the queen’s grand reception. He has included Lady Mary in a place of honour, but the king says, perhaps not, Crumb. They might take it ill in Cleves. That sort of thing, parading one’s bastards, we leave to the Scots.
He bows. Agrees it might be better if the two ladies meet privately: stepmother and stepdaughter, just a year apart in age. Let them sit down and get to know each other. Perhaps they will walk hand in hand together, as Mary did with Queen Jane.