Wolf Hall (75 page)

Audley brings Richard Riche with him to their second session, to take notes for them, and put any points that occur to him. He is Sir Richard now, knighted and promoted to Solicitor General. In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverence to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty? Riche turns out to have a talent for drafting legislation which is second only to his own. His features, beneath his soft fair hair, are pinched with concentration; the boys call him Sir Purse. You'd never think, to see him precisely laying out his papers, that he was once the great disgrace of the Inner Temple. He says so, in an undertone, teasing him, while they wait for the girl to be brought in. Well, Master Cromwell! Riche says; what about you and that abbess in Halifax?

He knows better than to deny it: or any of those stories the cardinal told about him. “Oh, that,” he says. “It was nothing—they expect it in Yorkshire.”

He is afraid the girl may have caught the tail end of the exchange, because today, as she takes the chair they have placed for her, she gives him a particularly hard stare. She arranges her skirts, folds her arms and waits for them to entertain her. His niece Alice Wellyfed sits on a stool by the door: just there in case of fainting, or other upset. Though a glance at the Maid tells you she is no more likely to faint than Audley is.

“Shall I?” Riche says. “Start?”

“Oh, why not?” Audley says. “You are young and hearty.”

“These prophecies of yours—you are always changing the timing of the disaster you foresee, but I understood you said that the king would not reign one month after he married Lady Anne. Well, the months have passed, Lady Anne is crowned queen, and has given the king a fine daughter. So what do you say now?”

“I say in the eyes of the world he seems to be king. But in the eyes of God,” she shrugs, “not anymore. He is no more the real king than he,” she nods toward Cranmer, “is really archbishop.”

Riche is not to be sidetracked. “So it would be justified to raise rebellion against him? To depose him? To assassinate him? To put another in his place?”

“Well, what do you think?”

“And among the claimants your choice has fallen on the Courtenay family, not the Poles. Henry, Marquis of Exeter. Not Henry, Lord Montague.”

“Or,” he says sympathetically, “do you get them mixed up?”

“Of course not.” She flushes. “I have met both those gentlemen.”

Riche makes a note.

Audley says, “Now Courtenay, that is Lord Exeter, descends from a daughter of King Edward. Lord Montague descends from King Edward's brother, the Duke of Clarence. How do you weigh their claims? Because if we are talking of true kings and false kings, some say Edward was a bastard his mother got by an archer. I wonder if you can cast any light?”

“Why would she?” Riche says.

Audley rolls his eyes. “Because she talks to the saints on high. They'd know.”

He looks at Riche and it is as if he can read his thoughts: Niccolò's book says, the wise prince exterminates the envious, and if I, Riche, were king, those claimants and their families would be dead. The girl is braced for the next question: how is it she has seen two queens in her vision? “I suppose it will sort itself out,” he says, “in the fighting? It's good to have a few kings and queens in reserve, if you're going to start a war in a country.”

“It is not necessary to have a war,” the nun says. Oh? Sir Purse sits up: this is new. “God is sending a plague on England instead. Henry will be dead in six months. So will she, Thomas Boleyn's daughter.”

“And me?”

“You too.”

“And all in this room? Except you, of course? All including Alice Wellyfed, who never did you harm?”

“All the women of your house are heretics, and the plague will rot them body and soul.”

“And what about the princess Elizabeth?”

She turns in her seat, to aim her words at Cranmer. “They say when you christened her you warmed the water to spare her a shock. You should have poured it boiling.”

Oh, Christ in Heaven, Riche says. He throws his pen down. He is a tender young father, with a daughter in the cradle.

He drops a consoling hand on his, the Solicitor General's. You would think Alice would need consoling; but when the Maid condemned her to death, he had looked down the room at his niece to note that her face was the perfect picture of derision. He says to Riche, “She didn't think it up herself, the boiling water. It is a thing they are saying on the streets.”

Cranmer huddles into himself; the Maid has bruised him, she has scored a point. He, Cromwell, says, “I saw the princess yesterday. She is thriving, in spite of her ill-wishers.” His voice suggests calm: we must get the archbishop back in the saddle. He turns to the Maid: “Tell me: did you locate the cardinal?”

“What?” Audley says.

“Dame Elizabeth said she would look out for my old master, on one of her excursions to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, and I offered to pay her traveling expenses on the occasion. I gave her people a down payment—I hope we see some progress?”

“Wolsey would have had another fifteen years of life,” the girl says. He nods: he has said the same himself. “But then God cut him off, as an example. I have seen devils disputing for his soul.”

“You know the result?” he asks.

“There is no result. I searched for him all over. I thought God had extinguished him. Then one night I saw him.” A long, tactical hesitation. “I saw his soul seated among the unborn.”

There is a silence. Cranmer shrinks in his seat. Riche gently nibbles the end of his pen. Audley twists a button on his sleeve, round and round till the thread tightens.

“If you like I can pray for him,” the Maid says. “God usually answers my requests.”

“Formerly, when you had your advisers about you, Father Bocking and Father Gold and Father Risby and the rest, you would start bargaining at this point. I would propose a further sum for your goodwill, and your spiritual directors would drive it up.”

“Wait.” Cranmer lays a hand over his rib cage. “Can we go back? Lord Chancellor?”

“We can go in any direction you choose, my lord archbishop. Three times round the mulberry bush . . .”

“You see devils?”

She nods.

“They appear how?”

“Birds.”

“A relief,” Audley says drily.

“No, sir. Lucifer stinks. His claws are deformed. He comes as a cockerel smeared in blood and shit.”

He looks up at Alice. He is ready to send her out. He thinks, what has been done to this woman?

Cranmer says, “That must be disagreeable for you. But it is a characteristic of devils, I understand, to show themselves in more than one way.”

“Yes. They do it to deceive you. He comes as a young man.”

“Indeed?”

“Once he brought a woman. To my cell at night.” She pauses. “Pawing her.”

Riche: “He is known to have no shame.”

“No more than you.”

“And what then, Dame Elizabeth? After the pawing?”

“Pulled up her skirts.”

“And she didn't resist?” Riche says. “You surprise me.”

Audley says, “Prince Lucifer, I don't doubt he has a way with him.”

“Before my eyes, he had to do with her, on my bed.”

Riche makes a note. “This woman, did you know her?” No answer. “And the devil did not try the same with you? You can speak freely. It will not be held against you.”

“He came to sweet-talk me. Swaggering in his blue silk coat, it's the best he has. And new hose with diamonds down his legs.”

“Diamonds down his legs,” he says. “Now that must have been a temptation?”

She shakes her head.

“But you are a fine young woman—good enough for any man, I'd say.”

She looks up; a flicker of a smile. “I am not for Master Lucifer.”

“What did he say when you refused him?”

“He asked me to marry him.” Audley puts his head in his hands. “I said I was vowed to chastity.”

“Was he not angry when you would not consent?”

“Oh yes. He spat in my face.”

“I would expect no better of him,” Riche says.

“I wiped his spit off with a napkin. It's black. It has the stench of Hell.”

“What is that like?”

“Like something rotting.”

“Where is it now, the napkin? I suppose you didn't send it to the laundry?”

“Dom Edward has it.”

“Does he show it to people? For money?”

“For offerings.”

“For money.”

Cranmer takes his face from his hands. “Shall we pause?”

“A quarter hour?” Riche says.

Audley: “I told you he was young and hearty.”

“Perhaps we will meet tomorrow,” Cranmer says. “I need to pray. And a quarter of an hour will not do it.”

“But tomorrow is Sunday,” the nun says. “There was a man who went out hunting on a Sunday and he fell down a bottomless pit into Hell. Imagine that.”

“How was it bottomless,” Riche asks, “if Hell was there to receive him?”

“I wish I were going hunting,” Audley says. “Christ knows, I'd take a chance on it.”

Alice rises from her stool and signals for her escort. The Maid gets to her feet. She is smiling broadly. She has made the archbishop flinch, and himself grow cold, and the Solicitor General all but weep with her talk of scalded babies. She thinks she is winning; but she is losing, losing, losing all the time. Alice puts a gentle hand on her arm, but the Maid shakes it off.

Outside, Richard Riche says, “We should burn her.”

Cranmer says, “Much as we may mislike her talk of the late cardinal appearing to her, and devils in her bedchamber, she speaks in this way because she has been taught to ape the claims of certain nuns who have gone before her, nuns whom Rome is pleased to recognize as saints. I cannot convict them of heresy, retrospectively. Nor have I evidence to try her for heresy.”

“Burned for treason, I meant.”

It is the woman's penalty; where a man is half-hanged and castrated, then slowly gutted by the executioner.

He says, “There is no overt action. She has only expressed an intent.”

“Intent to raise rebellion, to depose the king, should that not be treason? Words have been construed as treasons, there are precedents, you know them.”

“I should be astonished,” Audley says, “if they have escaped Cromwell's attention.”

It is as if they can smell the devil's spit; they are almost jostling each other to get into the air, which is mild, damp: a faint scent of leaves, a green-gold, rustling light. He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy toward the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

“I think new laws are needed,” Riche says.

“I have it in hand.”

“And I think this woman is too leniently kept. We are too soft. We are just playing with her.”

Cranmer walks away, shoulders stooped, his trailing habit brushing up the leaves. Audley turns to him, bright and resolute, a man keen to change the subject. “So, the princess, you say she was well?”

The princess, unswaddled, had been placed on cushions at Anne's feet: an ugly, purple, grizzling knot of womankind, with an upstanding ruff of pale hair and a habit of kicking up her gown as if to display her most unfortunate feature. It seems stories have been put about that Anne's child was born with teeth, has six fingers on each hand, and is furred all over like a monkey, so her father has shown her off naked to the ambassadors, and her mother is keeping her on display in the hope of countering the rumors. The king has chosen Hatfield for her seat, and Anne says, “It seems to me waste might be saved, and the proper order of things asserted, if Spanish Mary's household were broken up and she were to become a member of the household of the princess Elizabeth my daughter.”

“In the capacity of . . . ?” The child is quiet; only, he notes, because she has crammed a fist into her maw, and is cannibalizing herself.

“In the capacity of my daughter's servant. What else should she be? There can be no pretense at equality. Mary is a bastard.”

The brief respite is over; the princess sets up a screech that would bring out the dead. Anne's glance slides away sideways, and a sideways grin of infatuation takes over her whole face, and she leans down toward her daughter, but at once women swoop, flapping and bustling; the screaming creature is plucked up, wrapped up, swept away, and the queen's eyes follow pitifully as the fruit of her womb exits, in procession. He says gently, “I think she was hungry.”