‘I’ll tell him you said so, shall I?’
Down below, the arms of Cromwell snap in the breeze. For Richard, these are the greatest days of his life. More than his marriage, the birth of his sons, his grants of lands, his commissions under the king; more than his prosperity, his security, are these moments when muscles and bone and the conqueror’s eye are indefeasible; when the heart leaps and the sight dazzles and time seems to stretch on all sides and cushion you like a snowfield, like a feather bed. He thinks of Brother Frisby, tumbled in the snow at Launde, shining like a seraph.
Richard is a hard-headed man. He knows this way of knocking a man over is arcane, expensive, obsolete. But he wants to rise in this world, as Cromwells do. His grandsire was a Tudor archer. His father plied the law. Now he is a knight of the realm. Surrey’s expression, beneath his helm, can only be inferred.
Fitz says, ‘Did you ever don helm and harness, my lord?’
By Christ no, he thinks. We pikemen were too poor for mail. We went in boiled leather which we hardened by prayer. We wore other men’s boots.
Blowing in from the coast, Wyatt does not even sit down before he says, ‘Bonner is Bishop of London? You think that serves you?’
‘He is. I did. I doubt him now.’
Bonner is a plump pink man; he looks foolish, but his brain is as sharp as a sharpened nail. He is back from France, installed in his see, and already it seems he may be an ingrate, or double. He, Essex, is not easy to mislead, but these days men are friends at the gate and foes at the door. ‘I thought he was one of us. Perhaps he’s everybody’s. But still,’ he says, ‘Bonner knows things. About Gardiner, his practices in France.’
‘You should not promote a man because he hates Gardiner. That is no safe way.’ Wyatt walks about. ‘I hear you dined.’
‘I dined. Stephen looked as if he were swallowing tadpoles.’
‘You have had Suffolk here, your people say. Be warned. He will not stand with you if you need a friend.’
‘You and Brandon have been at odds for ten years. And I have forgotten why.’
‘So have I. So has he. It does not mean we can make peace.’
‘Go home to Bess Darrell,’ he says. ‘Go down to Allington and enjoy the summer. Bess has helped me. And I am now able to help you in your turn.’
‘You owe me nothing,’ Wyatt says. ‘The obligation is all the other way. I have been in agony, as to what you would think of me. I obeyed my instructions. Make a breach, you said, tear François and the Emperor apart. I have done it, but I fear I have not helped you.’
‘Their enmities were so old, so ingrained,’ he says, ‘that you should not give yourself all the credit. They only reverted to the pattern they knew. Anyway, you followed your instructions, what else could you do? Be assured, it is no detriment to me.’
‘Except you stand to lose your queen.’
So Wyatt knows everything. The waves of the Narrow Sea rustle like sheets, whispering through Europe the news of Henry’s incapacity. ‘It will be a poor game without her, it’s true.’
Wriothesley comes in. ‘Wyatt? I thought it was you.’ They embrace, comrades-in-arms. ‘You can explain to us what is happening here.’
‘But I have been out of the realm,’ Wyatt says.
‘That does not weigh. In it, out of it, we neither walk on the earth nor swim nor fly, we do not know which element we dwell in. Summer is coming, but the king rains and shines like April. Men change their religion as they change their coats. The council makes a resolution and next minute forgets it. We write letters and the words expunge. We are playing chess in the dark.’
‘On a board made of jelly,’ he says.
‘With chessmen of butter.’
Wyatt says, ‘Your images upheave me.’
‘Then make us better ones, dear heart,’ Wriothesley says.
When they embraced, he saw Call-Me’s eyes over Wyatt’s shoulder. They were like Walter’s eyes, one day when he had burned himself in the forge. He had walked away, silent, to plunge his arm in water: he uttered nothing, neither oath nor self-reproof, but sweat started out on his forehead, and his legs buckled.
This year, business tears him away from the feast. The Lord Deputy of Ireland must be replaced, and the need is urgent. It is four or five years since he backed Leonard Grey for the post: well, there again he was mistaken. There are councillors who say the only way forward is to depopulate the island and resettle it with Englishmen. But, he thinks, the Irish would shrink into the interior, and hide in holes where rats could not live.
He says to Audley, ‘There are rumours that Pole’s army has landed in Galway. Or else in Limerick. I doubt Reynold could tell them apart, or say if he was in Ireland or the Land of Nod. If his past wanderings are any guide, he will try to invade us by way of Madrid.’
Audley looks at him: how can you make a joke? He is solemnity personified, now he has been elected to the Garter, and has a chain and a new George shining on his breast.
When Lord Lisle got a permit to leave Calais for the Garter feast, he thought it a mark of favour. He is surprised to be ordered before the council, and questioned. It is an open secret that members of his household have quit their posts and made their way to Rome. The boy Mathew, among others, has brought home fat files of evidence. But the Lord Privy Seal has not got what he wants – one damning document, to link the Lord Deputy to Pole.
Rafe says, ‘At this point we usually arrest Francis Bryan, do we not? When we cannot make the answers fit the questions?’
He smiles. Bryan knows all about Calais, it is true. He could help bring Lisle down, maybe also the ambassador Valloppe. But who will believe Francis? The Vicar of Hell has drained too many cups. He has played too many hands, he has given too much offence: if you think in vino veritas, look at Francis. Yet he knows everybody’s secrets, and appears to be everybody’s cousin. He has friends in every treasury, watchmen at every port.
Rafe shrugs, as if trying to shift an ill-balanced load. We servants of the king must get used to games we cannot win but fight to an exhausted draw, their rules unexplained. Our instructions are full of snares and traps, which mean as we gain we lose. We do not know how to proceed from minute to minute, yet somehow we do, and another night falls on us in Greenwich, at Hampton Court, at Whitehall.
The king wonders aloud, what shall we do when knights of the Garter are found to be traitors – men like Nicholas Carew? Certainly their names should be stricken from the volumes that contain the history of the order. But will that not mar the beauty of the pages?
The decision is that the disgraced name should remain. But the words ‘VAH! PRODITUR’ should be written in the margin, so the man is branded for ever.
Vah! He thinks of Gardiner, trying to cough up his tadpoles: by now his evil mind has swollen them, he will have to spew them as frogs. ‘The man he needs is St Aelred,’ Gregory says. ‘When the saint met with a swollen man clutching his belly, Aelred at once stuffed his fingers down the patient’s throat; he vomited, with his frogs, seven pints of bile.’
He says to his son, ‘I have some news for you. It is a blow, I must confess.’
In making him earl, the king has granted twenty-four manors in Essex, besides holdings in other counties. But in return he wants the manor of Wimbledon, and the house at Mortlake.
Gregory blinks. ‘Why?’
‘You know he cannot ride so far now. He wants to join one great park to another, so he can move west of London and still be on his own ground. I will show you the map. You will see the sense in it.’
He does not open his account books to work out how much money he has spent on his Mortlake house. He thought it would be his for life.
Gregory says, ‘You won’t miss your old haunts, surely?’
Since he was a child Gregory has moved in the orbit of princes. Putney’s nothing to him, those fields that Walter scrabbled for, the sheep-runs for which he fought his neighbours.