Wolf Hall (10 page)

Wolsey sees, immediately, that the king wouldn't send Norris to take him into custody. “Now, Sir Henry, get your breath back. What can be so urgent?”

Norris says, beg pardon, my lord, my lord cardinal, sweeps off his feathered cap, wipes his face with his arm, smiles in his most engaging fashion. He speaks to the cardinal gracefully: the king has commanded him to ride after His Grace and overtake him, and speak words of comfort to him and give him this ring, which he knows well—a ring which he holds out, in the palm of his glove.

The cardinal scrambles from his mule and falls to the ground. He takes the ring and presses it to his lips. He's praying. Praying, thanking Norris, calling for blessings on his sovereign. “I have nothing to send him. Nothing of value to send to the king.” He looks around him, as if his eye might light on something he can send; a tree? Norris tries to get him on his feet, ends up kneeling beside him, kneeling—this neat and charming man—in the Putney mud. The message he's giving the cardinal, it seems, is that the king only appears displeased, but is not really displeased; that he knows the cardinal has enemies; that he himself, Henricus Rex, is not one of them; that this show of force is only to satisfy those enemies; that he is able to recompense the cardinal with twice as much as has been taken from him.

The cardinal begins to cry. It's starting to rain, and the wind blows the rain across their faces. The cardinal speaks to Norris fast, in a low voice, and then he takes a chain from around his neck and tries to hang it around Norris's neck, and it gets tangled up in the fastenings of his riding cape and several people rush forward to help and fail, and Norris gets up and begins to brush himself down with one glove while clutching the chain in the other. “Wear it,” the cardinal begs him, “and when you look at it think of me, and commend me to the king.”

Cavendish jolts up, riding knee-to-knee. “His reliquary!” George is upset, astonished. “To part with it like this! It is a piece of the true Cross!”

“We'll get him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten for five florins and a round dozen for cash up front. And you get a certificate with St. Peter's thumbprint, to say they're genuine.”

“For shame!” Cavendish says, and twitches his horse away.

Now Norris is backing away too, his message delivered, and they are trying to get the cardinal back on his mule. This time, four big men step forward, as if it were routine. The play has turned into some kind of low comic interlude; that, he thinks, is why Patch is here. He rides over and says, looking down from the saddle, “Norris, can we have all this in writing?”

Norris smiles, says, “Hardly, Master Cromwell; it's a confidential message to my lord cardinal. My master's words were meant only for him.”

“So what about this recompense you mention?”

Norris laughs—as he always does, to disarm hostility—and whispers, “I think it might be figurative.”

“I think it might be, too.” Double the cardinal's worth? Not on Henry's income. “Give us back what's been taken. We don't ask double.”

Norris's hand goes to the chain, now slung about his neck. “But it all proceeds from the king. You can't call it theft.”

“I didn't call it theft.”

Norris nods, thoughtful. “No more did you.”

“They shouldn't have taken the vestments. They belong to my lord as churchman. What will they have next? His benefices?”

“Esher—which is where you are going, are you not?—is of course one of the houses which my lord cardinal holds as Bishop of Winchester.”

“And?”

“He remains for the while in that estate and title, but . . . shall we say . . . it must come under the king's consideration? You know my lord cardinal is indicted under the statutes of praemunire, for asserting a foreign jurisdiction in the land.”

“Don't teach me the law.”

Norris inclines his head.

He thinks, since last spring, when things began to go wrong, I should have persuaded my lord cardinal to let me manage his revenues, and put some money away abroad where they can't get it; but then he would never admit that anything was wrong. Why did I let him rest so cheerful?

Norris's hand is on his horse's bridle. “I was ever a person who admired your master,” he says, “and I hope that in his adversity he will remember that.”

“I thought he wasn't in adversity? According to you.”

How simple it would be, if he were allowed to reach down and shake some straight answers out of Norris. But it's not simple; this is what the world and the cardinal conspire to teach him. Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook; somehow he thinks that's what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, the cardinal in the mud, the humiliating tussle to get him back in the saddle, the talking, talking on the barge, and worse, the talking, talking on his knees, as if Wolsey's unraveling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a scarlet labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.

“Master Cromwell?” Norris says.

He can hardly say what he's thinking; so he looks down at Norris, his expression softened, and says, “Thanks for this much comfort.”

“Well, take my lord cardinal out of the rain. I'll tell the king how I found him.”

“Tell him how you knelt in the mud together. He might be amused.”

“Yes.” Norris looks sad. “You never know what will do it.”

It is at this point that Patch starts screaming. The cardinal, it seems—casting around for a gift—has given him to the king. Patch, he has often said, is worth a thousand pounds. He is to go with Norris, no time like the present; and it takes four more of the cardinal's men to subdue him to the purpose. He fights. He bites. He lashes out with fists and feet. Till he is thrown onto a baggage mule, stripped of its baggage; till he begins to cry, hiccupping, his ribs heaving, his stupid feet dangling, his coat torn and the feather in his hat broken off to a stub.

“But Patch,” the cardinal says, “my dear fellow. You shall see me often, once the king and I understand each other again. My dear Patch, I will write you a letter, a letter of your own. I shall write it tonight,” he promises, “and put my big seal on it. The king will cherish you; he is the kindest soul in Christendom.”

Patch wails on a single thin note, like someone taken by the Turks and impaled.

There, he says to Cavendish, he's more than one kind of fool. He shouldn't have drawn attention to himself, should he.

Esher: the cardinal dismounts under the shadow of old Bishop Wayne-flete's keep, surmounted by octagonal towers. The gateway is set into a defensive wall topped with a walkway; stern enough at first sight, but the whole thing is built of brick, ornamented and prettily inlaid. “You couldn't fortify it,” he says. Cavendish is silent. “George, you're supposed to say, ‘But the need could never arise.' ”

The cardinal's not used the place since he built Hampton Court. They've sent messages ahead, but has anything been done? Make my lord comfortable, he says, and goes straight down to the kitchens. At Hampton Court, the kitchens have running water; here, nothing's running but the cooks' noses. Cavendish is right. In fact it is worse than he thinks. The larders are impoverished and such supplies as they have show signs of ill-keeping and plunder. There are weevils in the flour. There are mouse droppings where the pastry should be rolled. It is nearly Martinmas, and they have not even thought of salting their beef. The
batterie de cuisine
is an insult, and the stockpot is mildewed. There are a number of small boys sitting by the hearth, and, for cash down, they can be induced into scouring and scrubbing; children take readily to novelty, and the idea of cleaning, it seems, is novel to them.

My lord, he says, needs to eat and drink now; and he needs to eat and drink for . . . how long we don't know. This kitchen must be put in order for the winter ahead. He finds someone who can write, and dictates his orders. His eyes are fixed on the kitchen clerk. On his left hand he counts off the items: you do this, then this, then thirdly this. With his right hand, he breaks eggs into a basin, each one with a hard professional tap, and between his fingers the white drips, sticky and slow, from the yolk. “How old is this egg? Change your supplier. I want a nutmeg. Nutmeg? Saffron?” They look at him as if he's speaking Greek. Patch's thin scream is still hurting his ears. Dusty angels look down on him as he pounds back to the hall.

It is late before they get the cardinal into any sort of bed worthy of the name. Where is his household steward? Where is his comptroller? By this time, he feels it is true that he and Cavendish are old survivors of a campaign. He stays up with Cavendish—not that there are beds, if they wanted them—working out what they need to keep the cardinal in reasonable comfort; they need plates, unless my lord's going to dine off dented pewter, they need bedsheets, table linen, firewood. “I will send some people,” he says, “to sort out the kitchens. They will be Italian. It will be violent at first, but then after three weeks it will work.”

Three weeks? He wants to set those children cleaning the copper. “Can we get lemons?” he asks, just as Cavendish says, “So who will be Chancellor now?”

I wonder, he thinks, are there rats down there? Cavendish says, “Recall His Grace of Canterbury?”

Recall him—fifteen years after the cardinal chivvied him out of that office? “No, Warham's too old.” And too stubborn, too unaccommodating to the king's wishes. “And not the Duke of Suffolk”—because in his view Charles Brandon is no brighter than Christopher the mule, though better at fighting and fashion and generally showing off—“not Suffolk, because the Duke of Norfolk won't have him.”

“And vice versa.” Cavendish nods. “Bishop Tunstall?”

“No. Thomas More.”

“But, a layman and a commoner? And when he's so opposed in the matter of the king's marriage suit?”

He nods, yes, yes, it will be More. The king is known for putting out his conscience to high bidders. Perhaps he hopes to be saved from himself.

“If the king offers it—and I see that, as a gesture, he might—surely Thomas More won't accept?”

“He will.”

“Bet?” says Cavendish.

They agree to the terms and shake hands on it. It takes their mind off the urgent problem, which is the rats, and the cold; which is the question of how they can pack a household staff of several hundred, retained at Westminster, into the much smaller space at Esher. The cardinal's staff, if you include his principal houses, and count them up from priests, law clerks, down to floor-sweepers and laundresses, is about six hundred souls. They expect three hundred following them immediately. “As things stand, we'll have to break up the household,” Cavendish says. “But we've no ready money for wages.”

“I'm damned if they're going unpaid,” he says, and Cavendish says, “I think you are anyway. After what you said about the relic.”

He catches George's eye. They start to laugh. At least they've got something worthwhile to drink; the cellars are full, which is lucky, Cavendish says, because we'll need a drink over the next weeks. “What do you think Norris meant?” George says. “How can the king be in two minds? How can my lord cardinal be dismissed if he doesn't want to dismiss him? How can the king give way to my lord's enemies? Isn't the king master over all the enemies?”

“You would think so.”

“Or is it
her
? It must be. He's frightened of her, you know. She's a witch.”

He says, don't be childish. George says, she is so a witch: the Duke of Norfolk says she is, and he's her uncle, he should know.

It's two o'clock, then it's three; sometimes it's freeing, to think you don't have to go to bed because there isn't a bed. He doesn't need to think of going home; there's no home to go to, he's got no family left. He'd rather be here drinking with Cavendish, huddled in a corner of the great chamber at Esher, cold and tired and frightened of the future, than think about his family and what he's lost. “Tomorrow,” he says, “I'll get my clerks down from London and we'll try and make sense of what my lord still has by way of assets, which won't be easy as they've taken all the paperwork. His creditors won't be inclined to pay up when they know what's happened. But the French king pays him a pension, and if I remember it's always in arrears . . . Maybe he'd like to send a bag of gold, pending my lord's return to favor. And you—you can go looting.”