Wolf Hall (58 page)

“You came here looking for peace and ease?” He shakes his head. “Too late.”

“I was just going over London Bridge and I saw someone had attacked the Madonna's statue. Knocked off the baby's head.”

“That was done a while back. It would be that devil Cranmer. You know what he is when he's taken a drink.”

Hans grins. “You miss him. Who would have thought you would be friends?”

“Old Warham is not well. If he dies this summer, Lady Anne will ask for Canterbury for my friend.”

Hans is surprised. “Not Gardiner?”

“He's spoiled his chance with the king.”

“He is his own worst enemy.”

“I wouldn't say that.”

Hans laughs. “It would be a great promotion for Dr. Cranmer. He will not want it. Not he. So much pomp. He likes his books.”

“He will take it. It will be his duty. The best of us are forced against the grain.”

“What, you?”

“It is against the grain to have your old patron come and threaten me in my own house, and take it quietly. As I do. Have you been to Chelsea?”

“Yes. They are a sad household.”

“It was given out that he was resigning on grounds of ill health. So as not to embarrass anybody.”

“He says he has a pain here,” Hans rubs his chest, “and it comes on him when he starts to write. But the others look well enough. The family on the wall.”

“You need not go to Chelsea for commissions now. The king has me at work at the Tower, we are restoring the fortifications. He has builders and painters and gilders in, we are stripping out the old royal apartments and making something finer, and I am going to build a new lodging for the queen. In this country, you see, the kings and queens lie at the Tower the night before they are crowned. When Anne's day comes there will be plenty of work for you. There will be pageants to design, banquets, and the city will be ordering gold and silver plate to present to the king. Talk to the Hanse merchants, they will want to make a show. Get them planning. Secure yourself the work before half the craftsmen in Europe are here.”

“Is she to have new jewels?”

“She is to have Katherine's. He has not lost all sense.”

“I would like to paint her. Anna Bolena.”

“I don't know. She may not want to be studied.”

“They say she is not beautiful.”

“No, perhaps she is not. You would not choose her as a model for a Primavera. Or a statue of the Virgin. Or a figure of Peace.”

“What then, Eve? Medusa?” Hans laughs. “Don't answer.”

“She has great presence, esprit . . . You may not be able to put it in a painting.”

“I see you think I am limited.”

“Some subjects resist you, I feel sure.”

Richard comes in. “Francis Bryan is here.”

“Lady Anne's cousin.” He stands up.

“You must go to Whitehall. Lady Anne is breaking up the furniture and smashing the mirrors.”

He swears under his breath. “Take Master Holbein in to dinner.”

Francis Bryan is laughing so hard that his horse twitches under him, uneasy, and skitters sideways, to the danger of passersby. By the time they get to Whitehall he has pieced this story together: Anne has just heard that Harry Percy's wife, Mary Talbot, is preparing to petition Parliament for a divorce. For two years, she says, her husband has not shared her bed, and when finally she asked him why, he said he could not carry on a pretense any longer; they were not really married, and never had been, since he was married to Anne Boleyn.

“My lady is enraged,” Bryan says. His eyepatch, sewn with jewels, winks as he giggles. “She says Harry Percy will spoil everything for her. She cannot decide between striking him dead with one blow of a sword or teasing him apart over forty days of public torture, like they do in Italy.”

“Those stories are much exaggerated.”

He has never witnessed, or quite believed in, Lady Anne's uncontrolled outbursts of temper. When he is admitted she is pacing, her hands clasped, and she looks small and tense, as if someone has knitted her and drawn the stitches too tight. Three ladies—Jane Rochford, Mary Shelton, Mary Boleyn—are following her with their eyes. A small carpet, which perhaps ought to be on the wall, is crumpled on the floor. Jane Rochford says, “We have swept up the broken glass.” Sir Thomas Boleyn, Monseigneur, sits at a table, a heap of papers before him. George sits by him on a stool. George has his head in his hands. His sleeves are only medium-puffed. The Duke of Norfolk is staring into the hearth, where a fire is laid but not lit, perhaps attempting through the power of his gaze to make the kindling spark.

“Shut the door, Francis,” George says, “and don't let anybody else in.”

He is the only person in the room who is not a Howard.

“I suggest we pack Anne's bags and send her down to Kent,” Jane Rochford says. “The king's anger, once roused—”

George: “Say no more, or I may strike you.”

“It is my honest advice.” Jane Rochford, God protect her, is one of those women who doesn't know when to stop. “Master Cromwell, the king has indicated there must be an inquiry. It must come before the council. It cannot be fudged this time. Harry Percy will give testimony unimpeded. The king cannot do all he has done, and all he means to do, for a woman who is concealing a secret marriage.”

“I wish I could divorce you,” George says. “I wish you had a pre-contract, but Jesus, no chance of that, the fields were black with men running in the other direction.”

Monseigneur holds up a hand. “Please.”

Mary Boleyn says, “What is the use of calling in Master Cromwell, and not telling him what has already occurred? The king has already spoken to my lady sister.”

“I deny everything,” Anne says. It is as if the king is standing before her.

“Good,” he says. “Good.”

“That the earl spoke to me of love, I allow. He wrote me verse, and I being then a young girl, and thinking no harm of it—”

He almost laughs. “Verse? Harry Percy? Do you still have it?”

“No. Of course not. Nothing written.”

“That makes it easier,” he says gently. “And of course there was no promise, or contract, or even talk of them.”

“And,” Mary says, “no consummation of any kind. There could not be. My sister is a notorious virgin.”

“And how was the king, was he—”

“He walked out of the room,” Mary says, “and left her standing.”

Monseigneur looks up. He clears his throat. “In this exigency, there are a variety, and number of approaches, it seems to me, that one might—”

Norfolk explodes. He pounds up and down on the floor, like Satan in a Corpus Christi play. “Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus! While you are selecting an approach, my lord, while you are taking a view, your lady daughter is slandered up and down the country, the king's mind is poisoned, and this family's fortune is unmaking before your eyes.”

“Harry Percy,” George says; he holds up his hands. “Listen, will you let me speak? As I understand it, Harry Percy was persuaded once to forget his claims, so if he was fixed once—”

“Yes,” Anne says, “but the cardinal fixed him, and most unfortunately the cardinal is dead.”

There is a silence: a silence sweet as music. He looks, smiling, at Anne, at Monseigneur, at Norfolk. If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it. To prolong the moment, he crosses the room and picks up the fallen hanging. Narrow loom. Indigo ground. Asymmetrical knot. Isfahan? Small animals march stiffly across it, weaving through knots of flowers. “Look,” he says. “Do you know what these are? Peacocks.”

Mary Shelton comes to peer over his shoulder. “What are those snake things with legs?”

“Scorpions.”

“Mother Mary, do they not bite?”

“Sting.” He says, “Lady Anne, if the Pope cannot stop you becoming queen, and I do not think he can, Harry Percy should not be in your way.”

“So shift him out of it,” Norfolk says.

“I can see why it would not be a good idea for you, as a family—”

“Do it,” Norfolk says. “Beat his skull in.”

“Figuratively,” he says. “My lord.”

Anne sits down. Her face is turned away from the women. Her little hands are drawn into fists. Monseigneur shuffles his papers. George, lost in thought, takes off his cap and plays with its jeweled pin, testing the point against the pad of his forefinger.

He has rolled the hanging up, and he presents it gently to Mary Shelton. “Thank you,” she whispers, blushing as if he had proposed something intimate. George squeaks; he has succeeded in pricking himself. Uncle Norfolk says bitterly, “You fool of a boy.”

Francis Bryan follows him out.

“Please feel you can leave me now, Sir Francis.”

“I thought I would go with you. I want to learn what you do.”

He checks his stride, slaps his hand flat into Bryan's chest, spins him sideways and hears the thud of his skull against the wall. “In a hurry,” he says.

Someone calls his name. Master Wriothesley rounds a corner. “Sign of Mark and the Lion. Five minutes' walk.”

Call-Me has had men following Harry Percy since he came to London. His concern has been that Anne's ill-wishers at court—the Duke of Suffolk and his wife, and those dreamers who believe Katherine will come back—have been meeting with the earl and encouraging him in a view of the past that would be useful, from their point of view. But seemingly no meetings have occurred: unless they are held in bathhouses on the Surrey bank.

Call-Me turns sharply down an alley, and they emerge into a dirty inn yard. He looks around; two hours with a broom and a willing heart, and you could make it respectable. Mr. Wriothesley's handsome red-gold head shines like a beacon. St. Mark, creaking above his head, is tonsured like a monk. The lion is small and blue and has a smiling face. Call-Me touches his arm: “In there.” They are about to duck into a side door, when from above there is a shrill whistle. Two women lean out of a window, and with a whoop and a giggle flop their bare breasts over the sill. “Jesu,” he says. “More Howard ladies.”

Inside Mark and the Lion, various men in Percy livery are slumped over tables and lying under them. The Earl of Northumberland is drinking in a private room. It would be private, except there is a serving hatch through which faces keep leering. The earl sees him. “Oh. I was half expecting you.” Tense, he runs his hands through his cropped hair, and it stands up in bristles all over his head.

He, Cromwell, goes to the hatch, holds up one finger to the spectators, and slams it in their face. But he is soft-voiced as ever when he sits down with the boy and says, “Now, my lord, what is to be done here? How can I help you? You say you can't live with your wife. But she is as lovely a lady as any in this kingdom, if she has faults I never heard of them, so why can you not agree?”

But Harry Percy is not here to be handled like a timid falcon. He is here to shout and weep. “If I could not agree with her on our wedding day, how can I agree now? She hates me because she knows we are not properly married. Why has only the king a conscience in the matter, why not I, if he doubts his marriage he shouts about it to the whole of Christendom, but when I doubt mine he sends the lowest man in his employ to sweet-talk me and tell me to go back home and make the best of it. Mary Talbot knows I was pledged to Anne, she knows where my heart lies and always will. I told the truth before, I said we had made a compact before witnesses and therefore neither of us was free. I swore it and the cardinal bullied me out of it; my father said he would strike me out of his line, but my father is dead and I am not afraid to speak the truth anymore. Henry may be king but he is stealing another man's wife; Anne Boleyn is rightfully my wife, and how will he stand on the day of judgment, when he comes before God naked and stripped of his retinue?”

He hears him out. The slide and tumble into incoherence . . . true love . . . pledges . . . swore she would give her body to me, allowed me such freedom as only a betrothed woman would allow . . .

“My lord,” he says. “You have said what you have to say. Now listen to me. You are a man whose money is almost spent. I am a man who knows how you have spent it. You are a man who has borrowed all over Europe. I am a man who knows your creditors. One word from me, and your debts will be called in.”

“Oh, and what can they do?” Percy says. “Bankers have no armies.”

“Neither have you armies, my lord, if your coffers are empty. Look at me now. Understand this. You hold your earldom from the king. Your task is to secure the north. Percys and Howards between them defend us against Scotland. Now suppose Percy cannot do it. Your men will not fight for a kind word—”

“They are my tenants, it is their duty to fight.”

“But my lord, they need supply, they need provision, they need arms, they need walls and forts in good repair. If you cannot ensure these things you are worse than useless. The king will take your title away, and your land, and your castles, and give them to someone who will do the job you cannot.”