Wolf Hall (83 page)

Fisher shakes his head; he retreats into bafflement. “I always wondered, you know, it has puzzled me many a year, if in the gospels Mary Magdalene was the same Mary who was Martha's sister. Elizabeth Barton told me for a certainty she was. In the whole matter, she didn't hesitate.”

He laughs. “Oh, she's familiar with these people. She's in and out of their houses. She's shared a bowl of pottage many a time with our Blessed Lady. Look now, my lord, holy simplicity was well enough in its day, but its day is over. We're at war. Just because the Emperor's soldiers aren't running down the street, don't deceive yourself—this is a war and you are in the enemy camp.”

The bishop is silent. He sways a little on his stool. Sniffs. “I see why Wolsey retained you. You are a ruffian and so was he. I have been a priest forty years, and I have never seen such ungodly men as those who flourish today. Such evil councillors.”

“Fall ill,” he says. “Take to your bed. That's what I recommend.”

The bill of attainder against the Maid and her allies is laid before the House of Lords on a Saturday morning, February 21. Fisher's name is in it and so, at Henry's command, is More's. He goes to the Tower to see the woman Barton, to see if she has anything else to get off her conscience before her death is scheduled.

She has survived the winter, trailed across country to her outdoor confessions, standing exposed on scaffolds in the cutting wind. He brings a candle in with him, and finds her slumped on her stool like a badly tied bundle of rags; the air is both cold and stale. She looks up and says, as if they were resuming a conversation, “Mary Magdalene told me I should die.”

Perhaps, he thinks, she has been talking to me in her head. “Did she give you a date?”

“You'd find that helpful?” she asks. He wonders if she knows that Parliament, indignant over More's inclusion, could delay the bill against her till spring. “I'm glad you've come, Master Cromwell. Nothing happens here.”

Not even his most prolonged, his most subtle interrogations had frightened her. To get Katherine pulled into it, he had tried every trick he knew: with no result. He says, “You are fed properly, are you?”

“Oh yes. And my laundry done. But I miss it, when I used to go to Lambeth, see the archbishop, I liked that. Seeing the river. All the people bustling along, and the boats unloading. Do you know if I shall be burned? Lord Audley said I would be burned.” She speaks as if Audley were an old friend.

“I hope you can be spared that. It is for the king to say.”

“I go to Hell these nights,” she says. “Master Lucifer shows me a chair. It is carved of human bones and padded with cushions of flame.”

“Is it for me?”

“Bless you, no. For the king.”

“Any sightings of Wolsey?”

“The cardinal's where I left him.” Seated among the unborn. She pauses; a long drifting pause. “They say it can take an hour for the body to burn. Mother Mary will exalt me. I shall bathe in the flames, as one bathes in a fountain. To me, they will be cool.” She looks into his face but at his expression she turns away. “Sometimes they pack gunpowder in the wood, don't they? Makes it quick then. How many will be going with me?”

Six. He names them. “It could have been sixty. Do you know that? Your vanity brought them here.”

As he says it he thinks, it is also true that their vanity brought her: and he sees that she would have preferred sixty to die, to see Exeter and the Pole family pulled down to disgrace; it would have sealed her fame. That being so, why would she not name Katherine as party to the plot? What a triumph that would be for a prophet, to ruin a queen. There, he thinks, I shouldn't have been so subtle after all; I should have played on her greed to be infamous. “Shall I not see you again?” she says. “Or will you be there, when I suffer?”

“This throne,” he says. “This chair of bones. It would be as well to keep it to yourself. Not to let the king hear of it.”

“I think he ought. He should have warning of what is waiting for him after death. And what can he do to me, worse than he already plans?”

“You don't want to plead your belly?”

She blushes. “I'm not with child. You're laughing at me.”

“I would advise anyone to get a few more weeks of life, by any means they can. Say you have been ill-used on the road. Say your guards have dishonored you.”

“But then I would have to say who did it, and they would be taken before a judge.”

He shakes his head, pitying her. “When a guard despoils a prisoner, he doesn't leave her his name.”

Anyway, she doesn't like his idea, that's plain. He leaves her. The Tower is like a small town and its morning routine clatters on around him, the guards and the men from the Mint greet him, and the keeper of the king's beasts trots up to say it's dinnertime—they eat early, the beasts—and does he want to see them fed? I take it very kindly, he says, waiving the pleasure; unbreakfasted himself, slightly nauseous, he can smell stale blood and from the direction of their cages hear their truffling grunts and smothered roars. High up on the walls above the river, out of sight, a man is whistling an old tune, and at the refrain breaks into song; he is a jolly forester, he sings. Which is most certainly untrue.

He looks around for his boatmen. He wonders whether the Maid is ill, and whether she will live to be killed. She was never harmed in his custody, only harassed; kept awake a night or two, but no longer than the king's business keeps him awake, and you don't, he thinks, find me confessing to anything. It's nine o'clock; by ten o'clock dinner, he has to be with Norfolk and Audley, who he hopes will not scream and smell, like the beasts. There is a tentative, icy sun; loops of vapor coil across the river, a scribble of mist.

At Westminster, the duke chases out the servants. “If I want a drink I'll get it for myself. Go on, out, out you go. And shut the door! Any lurking at the keyhole, I'll skin you alive and salt you!” He turns, swearing under his breath, and takes his chair with a grunt. “What if I begged him?” he says. “What if I went down on my knees, said, Henry for the Lord's sake, take Thomas More out of the attainder?”

“What if we all begged him,” Audley says, “on our knees?”

“Oh, and Cranmer too,” he says. “We'll have him in. He's not to escape this delectable interlude.”

“The king swears,” Audley says, “that if the bill is opposed, he will come before Parliament himself, both houses if need be, and insist.”

“He may have a fall,” the duke says. “And in public. For God's sake, Cromwell, don't let him do it. He knew More was against him and he let him creep off to Chelsea to coddle his conscience. But it's my niece, I suppose, who wants him brought to book. She takes it personally. Women do.”

“I think the king takes it personally.”

“Which is weak,” Norfolk says, “in my view. Why should he care how More judges him?”

Audley smiles uncertainly. “You call the king weak?”

“Call the king weak?” The duke lurches forward and squawks into Audley's face, as if he were a talking magpie. “What's this, Lord Chancellor, speaking up for yourself? You do usually wait till Cromwell speaks, and then it's chirrup-chirrup, yes-sir-no-sir, whatever you say, Tom Cromwell.”

The door opens and Call-Me-Risley appears, in part. “By God,” says the duke, “if I had a crossbow, I'd shoot your very head off. I said nobody was to come in here.”

“Will Roper is here. He has letters from his father-in-law. More wants to know what you will do for him, sir, as you have admitted that in law he has no case to answer.”

“Tell Will we are just now rehearsing how to beg the king to take More's name out of the bill.”

The duke knocks back his drink, the one he has poured himself. He bounces his goblet back on the table. “Your cardinal used to say, Henry will give half his realm rather than be balked, he will not be cheated of any part of his will.”

“But I reason . . . do not you, Lord Chancellor . . .”

“Oh, he does,” the duke says. “Whatever you reason, Tom, he reasons. Squawk, squawk.”

Wriothesley looks startled. “Could I bring Will in?”

“So we are united? On our knees to beg?”

“I won't do it unless Cranmer will,” the duke says. “Why should a layman wear out his joints?”

“Shall we send for my lord Suffolk too?” Audley suggests.

“No. His boy is dying. His heir.” The duke scrubs his hand across his mouth. “He wants just a month of his eighteenth birthday.” His fingers fidget for his holy medals, his relics. “Brandon's got the one boy. So have I. So have you, Cromwell. And Thomas More. Just the one boy. God help Charles, he'll have to start breeding again with his new wife; that'll be a hardship to him, I'm sure.” He gives a bark of laughter. “If I could pension my lady wife off, I could get a juicy fifteen-year-old too. But she won't go.”

It is too much for Audley. His face flushes. “My lord, you have been married, and well married, these twenty years.”

“Do I not know it? It's like placing your person in a grizzled leather bag.” The duke's bony hand descends; he squeezes his shoulder. “Get me a divorce, Cromwell, will you? You and my lord archbishop, come up with some grounds. I promise there'll be no murder done over it.”

“Where is murder done?” Wriothesley says.

“We're preparing to murder Thomas More, aren't we? Old Fisher, we're whetting the knife for him, eh?”

“God forbid.” The Lord Chancellor rises, sweeping his gown around him. “These are not capital charges. More and the Bishop of Rochester, they are only accessories.”

“Which,” Wriothesley says, “in all conscience is grave enough.”

Norfolk shrugs. “Kill them now or later. More won't take your oath. Fisher won't.”

“I am quite sure they will,” Audley says. “We shall use efficacious persuasions. No reasonable man will refuse to swear to the succession, for the safety of this realm.”

“So is Katherine to be sworn,” the duke says, “to uphold the succession of my niece's infant? What about Mary—is she to be sworn? And if they will not, what do you propose? Draw them to Tyburn on a hurdle and hang them up kicking, for their relative the Emperor to see?”

He and Audley exchange a glance. Audley says, “My lord, you shouldn't drink so much wine before noon.”

“Oh,
tweet, tweet
,” the duke says.

A week ago he had been up to Hatfield, to see the two royal ladies: the princess Elizabeth, and Lady Mary the king's daughter. “Make sure you get the titles right,” he had said to Gregory as they rode.

Gregory had said, “Already you are wishing you had brought Richard.”

He had not wanted to leave London during such a busy Parliament, but the king persuaded him: two days and you can be back, I want your eye on things. The route out of the city was running with thaw water, and in copses shielded from the sun the standing pools were still iced. A weak sun blinked at them as they crossed into Hertfordshire, and here and there a ragged blackthorn blossomed, waving at him a petition against the length of winter.

“I used to come here years ago. It was Cardinal Morton's place, you know, and he would leave town when the law term was over and the weather was getting warm, and when I was nine or ten my uncle John used to pack me in a provisions cart with the best cheeses and the pies, in case anybody tried to steal them when we stopped.”

“Did you not have guards?”

“It was the guards he was afraid of.”

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

“Me, evidently.”

“What would you have done?”

“I don't know. Bitten them?”

The mellow brick frontage is smaller than he remembers, but that is what memory does. These pages and gentlemen running out, these grooms to lead away the horses, the warmed wine that awaits them, the noise and the fuss, it is a different sort of arrival from those of long ago. The portage of wood and water, the firing up the ranges, these tasks were beyond the strength or skill of a child, but he was unwilling to concede them, and worked alongside the men, grubby and hungry, till someone saw that he was about to fall over: or until he actually did.