Wolf Hall (47 page)

“You did well, Lucy.”

“When they walked upstairs John was ready for him—oh, Lord Chancellor, welcome to my poor house—but the poor hapless man, he had cast his Testament under his desk, my eye went straight to it, I wonder their eyes didn't follow mine.”

An hour's search realized nothing; so are you sure, John, the Chancellor said, that you have none of these new books, because I was informed you had? (And Tyndale lying there, like a poison stain on the tiles.) I don't know who could have told you that, said John Petyt. I was proud of him, Lucy says, holding out her cup for more wine, I was proud that he spoke up. More said, it is true I have found nothing today, but you must go with these men. Mr. Lieutenant, will you take him?

John Petyt is not a young man. At More's direction he sleeps on a pad of straw laid on the flagstones; visitors have been admitted only so that they can take back to his neighbors the news of how ill he looks. “We have sent food and warm clothes,” Lucy says, “and been turned away on the Lord Chancellor's orders.”

“There's a tariff for bribes. You pay the jailers. You need ready money?”

“If I do I shall come to you.” She puts the cup down on his desk. “He cannot lock us all up.”

“He has prisons enough.”

“For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.” Her cheeks glow. She glances down to the drawings on his desk. “What are these, Master Cromwell?”

“The plans for my garden. I am hoping to buy some of the houses at the back of here, I want the land.”

She smiles. “A garden . . . It is the first pleasant thing I have heard of in a while.”

“I hope you and John will come and enjoy it.”

“And this . . . You are going to build a tennis court?”

“If I get the ground. And here, you see, I mean to plant an orchard.”

Tears well into her eyes. “Speak to the king. We count on you.”

He hears a footstep: Johane's. Lucy's hand flies to her mouth. “God forgive me . . . For a moment I took you for your sister.”

“The mistake is made,” Johane says. “And sometimes persists. Mistress Petyt, I am very sorry to hear your husband is in the Tower. But you have brought this on yourselves. You people were the first to throw calumnies at the late cardinal. But now I suppose you wish you had him back.”

Lucy goes out without a further word, only one long look over her shoulder. Outside he hears Mercy greet her; she will get a more sisterly word there. Johane walks to the fire and warms her hands. “What does she think you can do for her?”

“Go to the king. Or to Lady Anne.”

“And will you? Do not,” she says, “do not do it.” She scrubs away a tear with her knuckle; Lucy has upset her. “More will not rack him. Word will get out, and the city would not have it. But he may die anyway.” She glances up at him. “She is quite old, you know, Lucy Petyt. She ought not to wear gray. Do you see how her cheeks have fallen in? She won't have any more children.”

“I get the point,” he says.

Her hand clenches on her skirt. “But what if he does? What if he does rack him? And he gives names?”

“What's that to me?” He turns away. “He already knows my name.”

He speaks to Lady Anne. What can I do? she asks, and he says, you know how to please the king, I suppose; she laughs and says, what, my maidenhead for a grocer?

He speaks to the king when he is able, but the king gives him a blank stare and says the Lord Chancellor knows his business. Anne says, I have tried, I myself as you know have put Tyndale's books into his hand, his royal hand; could Tyndale, do you think, come back into this kingdom? In winter they negotiated, letters crossing the Channel. In spring, Stephen Vaughan, his man in Antwerp, set up a meeting: evening, the concealing dusk, a field outside the city walls. Cromwell's letter put into his hand, Tyndale wept: I want to come home, he said, I am sick of this, hunted city to city and house to house. I want to come home and if the king would just say yes, if he would say yes to the scriptures in our mother tongue, he can choose his translator, I will never write more. He can do with me what he pleases, torture me or kill me, but only let the people of England hear the gospel.

Henry has not said no. He had not said, never. Though Tyndale's translation and any other translation is banned, he may, one day, permit a translation to be made by a scholar he approves. How can he say less? He wants to please Anne.

But summer comes, and he, Cromwell, knows he has gone to the brink and must feel his way back. Henry is too timid, Tyndale too intransigent. His letters to Stephen sound a note of panic: abandon ship. He does not mean to sacrifice himself to Tyndale's truculence; dear God, he says, More, Tyndale, they deserve each other, these mules that pass for men. Tyndale will not come out in favor of Henry's divorce; nor, for that matter, will the monk Luther. You'd think they'd sacrifice a fine point of principle, to make a friend of the King of England: but no.

And when Henry demands, “Who is Tyndale to judge me?” Tyndale snaps a message back, quick as word can fly: one Christian man may judge another.

“A cat may look at a king,” he says. He is cradling Marlinspike in his arms, and talking to Thomas Avery, the boy he's teaching his trade. Avery has been with Stephen Vaughan, so he can learn the practice among the merchants over there, but any boat may bring him to Austin Friars with his little bag, inside it a woolen jerkin, a few shirts. When he comes clattering in he shouts out for Mercy, for Johane, for the little girls, for whom he brings comfits and novelties from street traders. On Richard, on Rafe, on Gregory if he's about, he lands a few punches by way of saying I'm back, but always he keeps his bag tucked under his arm.

The boy follows him into his office. “Did you never feel homesick, master, when you were on your travels?”

He shrugs: I suppose if I'd had a home. He puts the cat down, opens the bag. He fishes up on his finger a string of rosary beads; for show, says Avery, and he says, good boy. Marlinspike leaps onto his desk; he peers into the bag, dabbing with a paw. “The only mice in there are sugar ones.” The boy pulls the cat's ears, tussles with him. “We don't have any little pets in Master Vaughan's house.”

“He's all business, Stephen. And very stern, these days.”

“He says, Thomas Avery, what time did you get in last night? Have you written to your master? Been to Mass? As if he cares for the Mass! It's all but, how's your bowels?”

“Next spring you can come home.”

As they speak he is unrolling the jerkin. With a shake he turns it inside out, and with a small pair of scissors begins to slit open a seam. “Neat stitching . . . Who did this?”

The boy hesitates; he colors. “Jenneke.”

He draws out from the lining the thin, folded paper. Unwraps it: “She must have good eyes.”

“She does.”

“And lovely eyes too?” He glances up, smiling. The boy looks him in the face. For a moment he seems startled, and as if he will speak; then he drops his gaze and turns away.

“Just tormenting you, Tom, don't take it to heart.” He is reading Tyndale's letter. “If she is a good girl, and in Stephen's household, what harm?”

“What does Tyndale say?”

“You carried it without reading it?”

“I would rather not know. In case.”

In case you found yourself Thomas More's guest. He holds the letter in his left hand; his right hand curls loosely into a fist. “Let him come near my people. I'll drag him out of his court at Westminster and beat his head on the cobbles till I knock into him some sense of the love of God and what it means.”

The boy grins and flops down on a stool. He, Cromwell, glances again at the letter. “Tyndale says, he thinks he can never come back, even if my lady Anne were queen . . . a project he does nothing to aid, I must say. He says he would not trust a safe conduct, even if the king himself were to sign it, while Thomas More is alive and in office, because More says you need not keep a promise you have made to a heretic. Here. You may as well read. Our Lord Chancellor respects neither ignorance nor innocence.”

The boy flinches, but he takes the paper. What a world is this, where promises are not kept. He says gently, “Tell me who is Jenneke. Do you want me to write to her father for you?”

“No.” Avery looks up, startled; he is frowning. “No, she's an orphan. Master Vaughan keeps her at his own charge. We are all teaching her English.”

“No money to bring you, then?”

The boy looks confused. “I suppose Stephen will give her a dowry.”

The day is too mild for a fire. The hour is too early for a candle. In lieu of burning, he tears up Tyndale's message. Marlinspike, his ears pricked, chews a fragment of it. “Brother cat,” he says. “He ever loved the scriptures.”

Scriptura sola
. Only the gospel will guide and console you. No use praying to a carved post or lighting a candle to a painted face. Tyndale says “gospel” means good news, it means singing, it means dancing: within limits, of course. Thomas Avery says, “Can I truly come home next spring?”

John Petyt at the Tower is to be allowed to sleep in a bed: no chance, though, that he will go home to Lion's Quay.

Cranmer said to him, when they were talking late one night, St. Augustine says we need not ask where our home is, because in the end we all come home to God.

Lent saps the spirits, as of course it is designed to do. Going in again to Anne, he finds the boy Mark, crouched over his lute and picking at something doleful; he flicks a finger against his head as he breezes past, and says, “Cheer it up, can't you?”

Mark almost falls off his stool. It seems to him they are in a daze, these people, vulnerable to being startled, to being ambushed. Anne, waking out of her dream, says, “What did you just do?”

“Hit Mark. Only,” he demonstrates, “with one finger.”

Anne says, “Mark? Who? Oh. Is that his name?”

This spring, 1531, he makes it his business to be cheerful. The cardinal was a great grumbler, but he always grumbled in some entertaining way. The more he complained, the more cheerful his man Cromwell became; that was the arrangement.

The king is a complainer too. He has a headache. The Duke of Suffolk is stupid. The weather is too warm for the time of year. The country is going to the dogs. He's anxious too; afraid of spells, and of people thinking bad thoughts about him in any specific or unspecific way. The more anxious the king becomes, the more tranquil becomes his new servant, the more hopeful, the more staunch. And the more the king snips and carps, the more do his petitioners seek out the company of Cromwell, so unfailing in his amiable courtesy.

At home, Jo comes to him looking perplexed. She is a young lady now, with a womanly frown, a soft crinkle of flesh on her forehead, which Johane, her mother, has too. “Sir, how shall we paint our eggs at Easter?”

“How did you paint them last year?”

“Every year before this we gave them hats like the cardinal's.” She watches his face, to read back the effect of her words; it is his own habit exactly, and he thinks, not only your children are your children. “Was it wrong?”

“Not at all. I wish I'd known. I would have taken him one. He would have liked it.”

Jo puts her soft little hand into his. It is still a child's hand, the skin scuffed over the knuckles, the nails bitten. “I am of the king's council now,” he says. “You can paint crowns if you like.”

This piece of folly with her mother, this ongoing folly, it has to stop. Johane knows it too. She used to make excuses, to be where he was. But now, if he's at Austin Friars, she's at the house in Stepney.

“Mercy knows,” she murmurs in passing.

The surprise is it took her so long, but there is a lesson here; you think people are always watching you, but that is guilt, making you jump at shadows. But finally, Mercy finds she has eyes in her head, and a tongue to speak, and picks a time when they can be alone. “They tell me that the king has found a way around at least one of his stumbling blocks. I mean, the difficulty of how he can marry Lady Anne, when her sister Mary has been in his bed.”