‘Yes?’
‘He is granted land from Reading Abbey. From Boxley and Malling. And here in London, St Mary Overy, and the Crossed Friars, and St Saviour in Bermondsey.’
‘He has long coveted those properties.’
Riche smiles. ‘I believe he has more than he thought he would get.’
‘He will take it as a challenge. He will soon run through the income, believe me.’
Wriothesley leans forward. His face is flushed. ‘My lord, do you not ask yourself, why now? It is done by his Majesty’s direct command. He finds Wyatt deserves well.’
As he did at Anne Boleyn’s fall. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘what is unlucky for others is lucky for Thomas Wyatt. God smiles on him.’
Wriothesley mutters, ‘Again, ask yourself why.’
‘Is that a question?’
Wriothesley is mute.
He, Lord Cromwell, turns to Riche. ‘No man knows better than you that grants like these are not made by snapping the fingers. Wyatt’s grants were set in train months ago, when I recalled him from his embassy. They needed only the king’s signature.’
‘He could have withheld it,’ Wriothesley says, ‘if Wyatt did not please him. Clearly he did.’
Of course Wyatt would be questioned: how not? It seems he has given answers, helpful or at least not disagreeable to the king. But under what constraint, under what pressure? Perhaps Bess is having another phantom child?
‘Wyatt knows your secret dealings,’ Wriothesley says. ‘And, as he has often boasted, the thoughts of your heart.’
‘Not that they are anything to boast about,’ he says. ‘You strain my charity, Wriothesley. Still, when I am set at large, I will try not to hold these things against you.’
Once again that fluttering, behind his ribs, of the organ whose workings have cost Wyatt himself so much pain. Love slayeth my heart. Fortune is depriver of all my comfort … My pleasant days, they fleet away and pass, But daily yet the ill doth change into the worse.
He says – the words emerge suddenly, unguarded – ‘What will you do without me? When a man such as Wyatt goes to work, he works for those who appreciate him. Without me you will read the lines as written, but you will never read between them. Marillac will make fools of you, and Chapuys too, if he returns. Charles and François will scramble your brains like a basin of eggs. Within a year the king will be fighting the Scots, or the French, or likely both, and he will bankrupt us. None of you can manage matters as I can. And the king will quarrel with you all, and you with each other. A year from now, if you sacrifice me, you will have neither honest coin nor honest minister.’
The clerk says, ‘Lord Cromwell is ill. We should perhaps pause?’
He turns his eyes on the boy. ‘Bless you for your courage.’
He is sweating. Norfolk says, ‘Oh, I think he is fit enough. It is not as if he has endured any pains – which are spared him, at the king’s direction, even though he is not nobly born.’
So the day passes, and another. Treason can be construed from any scrap of paper, if the will is there. A syllable will do it. The power is in the hands of the reader, not the writer. The duke continues with his outbursts, and Riche with insinuations that seldom connect one line of questioning with another. Mostly he can answer them; sometimes he has to refer them to the papers they have impounded, or lost. The truth is, as he confesses, he has meddled in so much of the king’s business, that it is impossible even for a man of his capacity to recollect everything said and done. ‘It is hard to live under the law,’ he says. ‘A minister must, unwittingly, transgress at divers points. But if I am a traitor,’ he wipes his face, ‘then all the devils in Hell confound me and the vengeance of God light upon me.’
Left alone at the end of the afternoon, he sits unpicking the fabric of the recent past, and always the thread leads him back to May Day. Thomas Essex at Greenwich, coming and going from the tournament ground, clerks following him with the king’s business; the earl – that is, myself – throwing out a command here and there. Richard Cromwell in the arena, knocking down all comers. Our feasting of our friends and enemies, our style and courtesy, our sprezzatura, our lavish display: May Day undid us, for the envy and rancour it bred could no longer be suppressed. Richard has compounded with some Italians to paint a mural of his triumph in his house at Hinchingbrooke; they mean to decorate the whole room. The time may come when the scene is bitter in his eyes, but he should paint it anyway. He should not give backword to the Italians – it is how they get their living.
Within nine days of his arrest, they have put together enough matter against him to bring a bill of attainder into Parliament. They question him about religion, in order to add further charges. They ask about what he did in Calais, who he protected there. They delve further into their cache of forgeries, out of which they can adduce what they like. Norfolk says to him, ‘When Mr Wriothesley went through Antwerp on the king’s business, you gave him messages for heretics.’
‘I gave him a message for my daughter. My own blood.’
Norfolk says, ‘You think that makes it better?’
He says, once again, ‘Let me see the king.’
Norfolk says, ‘Never.’
He supposes that Henry, for an hour or two together, believes firmly in both his heresy and his treason. But surely he cannot sustain the delusion? For the rest of his hours, he does not care what is true. He cultivates his grudge and grievance. No councillor can ever placate him, assuage this sense of grievance, slake his thirst or satisfy his hunger.
Before he has been a week in prison, Rafe brings him word of how the Emperor received the news. Charles seemed dumbfounded, dispatches say. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Cremuel? Are you sure? In the Tower? And by the king’s command?’
One day the door opens; he expects Gardiner but it is Brandon again. Charles sits down, sighing heavy, on a little upholstered stool, so his knees rise absurdly under his chin. ‘Why doesn’t your lordship take this chair?’
But Charles sits like a penitent, puffing and sighing and looking around the room. His eyes search the painted walls, those scenes of paradises, verdant hills and brooks: ‘Is she behind there? The other one?’
‘Not in her own person, my lord. She lies in the chapel, at rest. As for the picture, I painted her out.’
‘What? Personally?’
‘No, my lord. I had a professional do it.’
He pictures himself, sneaking by night with a huge obliterating brush. ‘You’re a good fellow, Charles,’ he says. ‘I’d rob a house with you, if I had to.’
Brandon grins behind his big beard. ‘Have you robbed many houses?’
‘In my wild days, you know.’
‘We all had those,’ Charles says.
‘I wouldn’t rob a house with the king. You’d say to him, “Stand there and whistle if the watch comes,” and at the first footfall he’d scramble off and leave you to it, your leg over the sill.’
‘I don’t think he’d go robbing, in all conscience,’ Charles says. ‘He’d be breaching his own peace, wouldn’t he? And who would he rob? He can distrain our goods if he likes, and pauperise us all.’ He rubs his forehead. ‘I’m glad to hear you make a jest, Crumb. Look here …’ He levers himself to the vertical. ‘Look here, and this is my advice. Confess you are a heretic. Claim you have been misled. Ask Harry to see you face to face and reason with you, to bring you back to true religion. He’d like that, wouldn’t he? You remember how he enjoyed himself, at the trial of that fellow Lambert? Sitting above the court, all arrayed in white?’
‘Lambert was burned,’ he says.
Charles is deflated. ‘Well, that was my idea, and now I’ve delivered it, so I …’ He heads for the door, plunges back. ‘Your hand?’