His bargemaster says, ‘We saw the duke’s barge, and we said, by the Mass, pity my lord – Norfolk and Gardiner, both?’
He says, ‘I feel to my master the king as I do to Christ, hanging between two thieves.’
He takes off his glove, slides a hand inside his garments. When his hand appears again, his knife is in it. ‘Christophe?’ he says. ‘This is yours now. Try not to use it.’
Christophe turns the knife over in his hands. ‘I shall stand taller for owning it. Why do you part with it now?’
‘Because I almost stuck it in Norfolk.’ From his crew, a subdued cheer. ‘You can tell Mr Sadler I have surrendered it.’ Rafe wanted me to grow up, he thinks, before I grow old.
Bastings asks, ‘Did you make it yourself, sir? When you did that sort of work?’
‘No. That one I made … I lost it. This was given me by a young lady in Rome. I have had it for some years.’
‘And put it to some use, I warrant,’ Bastings says admiringly. ‘Sir, a thing you should know. That little lass of the duke’s, I hear she is spoiled. There is one in the old duchess’s household boasts he has had his fingers in her cunt. He says he has felt it in the dark and he would know it among a hundred.’
‘Where did you hear that, from the watermen?’ He wraps his cloak around himself. Even if it is true, he thinks, what can I do with it? If the king is in love he will trample anyone who gets between him and his sport. He says, ‘Bastings – consort with men with cleaner minds.’
I shall forget I ever heard it, he thinks. He is rowed across the Thames, furiously forgetting it. One among a hundred?
I kissed her sweet, and she kissed me;
I danced the darling on my knee.
My fancy fairly on her I set:
So merrily singeth the nightingale.
Mr Wriothesley is waiting for him. He tells him, ‘You can write to the ambassadors that Winchester and I have dined. That we now understand each other perfectly.’
Wriothesley says, ‘Shall I add some such phrase as “all past displeasures be now forgot”?’
‘At your discretion, Mr Wriothesley.’
Sometimes it seems to him we have not made any advance since Epiphany. The Romans and Britons are still fighting through his dreams. They advance, retreat, press forward again. They slash, they stab, they feint, they duck; they raise their armoured limbs slowly and chop, chop, chop.
In Calais, a new commission is sitting to find out heretics. Norfolk started it, when he passed through: setting a fire there, then stepping on a boat and sailing away. He says to the king, ‘Why don’t we find out traitors instead? Forty Frenchmen under arms could take Calais in an hour. The rot is within, and I do not mean the townsfolk, I mean those who have charge of all.’
The king says, pained, ‘Lord Lisle is very dear to me.’
‘I won’t trouble Lord Lisle,’ he says. Not yet: I will start with his friends. ‘I want certain papers. Wyatt has told me what to look for. He knows all about Calais.’
‘Oh, Wyatt,’ the king says. ‘What he says he does not mean, and what he means he does not say.’
It is Bishop Sampson who is his immediate target. Putting him under house arrest, he impounds his papers and scours them for any hint of dealings with Pole; any hints that others, among his friends, might have dealt with Pole. When the king says, well, Cromwell, what proof, he says, sir, it is intricate work. It is like putting together one of the pavements at the abbey. You have triangles and circles, rectangles and squares. You have limestone and porphyry, serpentine and glass. You must work with the eye of faith: the onlookers will not see the pattern, till suddenly they do.
Now the season changes. Each brightening day is made up of other days he has known. He sees a flock of chaffinches rise like flying roses from a still pool. His hawks watch dust motes as they flitter against a wall, as if the sunlight is a living thing, their prey.
Henry calls him in. ‘I must put a matter to you. It is a matter of some gravity. Come with me here into my closet and close the door.’
A window is open. Someone is singing outside. He thinks, is this where all my broken nights have led me, my unquiet dreams?
In slumbers oft for fear I quake.
For heat and cold I burn and shake.
For lack of sleep my head doth ache
What means this?
He follows the king. What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?
He goes home to a disturbed household. Call-Me meets him, a document in his hand. ‘Sir, you had better see this at once.’
It is a transcript – a copy, let’s be blunt – of a letter from Ambassador Marillac to François. ‘Marillac says the king is about to arrest Cranmer. He is to go to the Tower, with Barnes.’
Call-Me has put a man in the ambassador’s train. ‘Well done for this,’ he says. The paper feels hot.
‘There is worse, sir. Marillac says the king means to take the Privy Seal from us and give it to Fitzwilliam. And that he will cast you down from your office as Vicegerent, and raise up Bishop Tunstall.’
He says, ‘I have just been with the king. I know he is swift to reverse his policies, but he has not had time to do this in half an hour. I have come straight from him and I bring news. It is good news for you, and I hope you will think so.’
He is about to say, go and get Rafe, but Rafe is already coming in, his eyes on Marillac’s letter. ‘Can I see the text, sir? Call-Me will not part with it.’
‘Ignore it,’ he says. ‘The ambassador sits in his lodgings concocting these fantastical tales – they only need Sexton in an ass’s head and Will Somer as a Spanish harlot.’
Rafe and Call-Me look at each other. Rafe says, ‘The original letter will be on the Dover road by now. Do you want the rider to have an accident?’
‘He could lose his missive in a puddle,’ Wriothesley suggests.
The suggestion is so mild it makes him laugh. ‘Let it go,’ he says. ‘If France gets his hopes up, so much the sweeter. He would like to see me dismissed, and the king served by boys and fools.’
‘Which are we?’ Wriothesley says.
‘Neither, you are the chosen ones. Be quiet and hear my news, you will be better for it. You know ever since I have been Master Secretary I have tried to be with the king’s person – but I am always wanted at Westminster – so you know what my life has been.’
Those days that roll from dawn to dawn. For lack of sleep my head doth ache … ‘With the king’s permission, I am going to divide my duties. I have broached it with him before, but the time is now.’
Mr Wriothesley offers to interrupt, but he continues. ‘You will divide the task. Each of you will be Master Secretary. You will split your time so that one of you is in Westminster, the other with the king. I will make machinery, so that your work passes perfectly from hand to hand.’
‘A prodigy of nature,’ Rafe says. He is astonished. ‘Two bodies with one head.’
‘One awake and one asleep,’ Wriothesley says.
‘You will both be knights. You will both be raised to the council. When Parliament meets, you will sit in the Commons, and I in the Lords.’ He slaps his hands on their shoulders. ‘You know what I have made this office, by God’s grace and the king’s. Nothing eludes it. Nothing lies beyond it. Everything starts with you. And with you, everything stops.’
He sits down. ‘Now, also –’
‘There is more?’
He holds up a hand. Sudden pleasure afflicts like sudden pain, and leaves you dizzy, numb. At such times in your life, if ever you see such times – if fortune favours you, as fortune favours the brave – you lose for a moment a sense of the firm boundaries of yourself, and become light as air. ‘I am to have Oxford’s post, Chief of the Household, Lord Great Chamberlain. His son keeps his peerage, as is natural, but as poor Essex had no heir direct, I am to have his title.’