Wolf Hall (91 page)

Jane Rochford, in departing, slams the door.

“Let her go,” Jane Seymour murmurs. “Forget her.”

“Good riddance!” Mary snaps. “I must be glad she didn't pick my things over, and offer me a price.” In the silence, her words go crash, flap, rattling around the room like trapped birds who panic and shit down the walls: he has told Norris what she offers him. By night, her ingenious proceedings. He is rephrasing it: as, surely, one must? I'll bet Norris is all ears. Christ alive, these people! The boy Mark is standing, gapey-faced, behind the door. “Mark, if you stand there like a landed fish I shall have you filleted and fried.” The boy flees.

When Mistress Seymour has tied the bundles they look like birds with broken wings. He takes them from her and reties them, not with silk tags but serviceable string. “Do you always carry string, Master Secretary?”

Mary says, “Oh, my book of love poems! Shelton has it.” She pitches from the room.

“She'll need that,” he says. “No poems down in Kent.”

“Lady Rochford would tell her that sonnets don't keep you warm. Not,” Jane says, “that I've ever had a sonnet. So I wouldn't really know.”

Liz, he thinks, take your dead hand off me. Do you grudge me this one little girl, so small, so thin, so plain? He turns. “Jane—”

“Master Secretary?” She dips her knees and rolls sideways onto the mattress; she sits up, drags her skirts from under her, finds her footing: gripping the bedpost, she scrambles up, reaches above her head, and begins to unhook the hangings.

“Come down! I'll do that. I'll send a wagon after Mistress Stafford. She can't carry all she owns.”

“I can do it. Master Secretary doesn't deal with bed hangings.”

“Master Secretary deals with everything. I'm surprised I don't make the king's shirts.”

Jane sways gently above him. Her feet sink into the feathers. “Queen Katherine does. Still.”

“The Dowager Katherine. Come down.”

She hops down to the rushes, giving her skirts a shake. “Even now after all that has passed between them. She sent a new parcel last week.”

“I thought the king had forbidden her.”

“Anne says they should be torn up and used for, well, you know what for, in a jakes. He was angry. Possibly because he doesn't like the word
jakes
.”

“No more does he.” The king deprecates coarse language, and not a few courtiers have been frozen out for telling some dirty story. “Is it true what Mary says? That the queen is afraid?”

“For now he is sighing over Mistress Shelton. Well, you know that. You have observed.”

“But surely that is harmless? A king is obliged to be gallant, till he reaches the age when he puts on his long gown and sits by the fire with his chaplains.”

“Explain it to Anne, she doesn't see it. She wanted to send Shelton away. But her father and her brother would not have it. Because the Sheltons are their cousins, so if Henry is going to look elsewhere, they want it to be close to home. Incest is so popular these days! Uncle Norfolk said—I mean, His Grace—”

“It's all right,” he says, distracted, “I call him that too.”

Jane puts a hand over her mouth. It is a child's hand, with tiny gleaming nails. “I shall think of that when I am in the country and have nothing to amuse me. And then does he say, dear nephew Cromwell?”

“You are leaving court?” No doubt she has a husband in view: some country husband.

“I hope that when I have served another season I might be released.”

Mary rips into the room, snarling. She juggles two embroidered cushions above the bulk of her child, a bulk which now seems evident; she has a hand free for her gilt basin, in which is her poetry book. She throws down the cushions, opens her fist and scatters a handful of silver buttons, which rattle into the basin like dice. “Shelton had these. Curse her for a magpie.”

“It is not as if the queen likes me,” Jane says. “And it is a long time since I saw Wolf Hall.”

For the king's New Year's gift he has commissioned from Hans a miniature on vellum, which shows Solomon on his throne receiving Sheba. It is to be an allegory, he explains, of the king receiving the fruits of the church and the homage of his people. Hans gives him a withering look. “I grasp the point.”

Hans prepares sketches. Solomon is seated in majesty. Sheba stands before him, unseen face raised, her back to the onlooker. “In your own mind,” he says, “can you see her face, even though it's hidden?”

“You pay for the back of her head, that's what you get!” Hans rubs his forehead. He relents. “Not true. I can see her.”

“See her like a woman you meet in the street?”

“Not quite like that. More like someone you remember. Like some woman you used to know when you were a child.”

They are seated in front of the tapestry the king gave him. The painter's eyes stray to it. “This woman on the wall. Wolsey had her, Henry had her, now you.”

“I assure you, she has no counterpart in real life.” Well, not unless Westminster has some very discreet and versatile whore.

“I know who she is.” Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase it. “They talk about it in Antwerp. Why don't you go over and claim her?”

“She is married.” He is taken aback, to think that his private business is common talk.

“You think she would not come away with you?”

“It's years. I have changed.”

“
Ja
. Now you are rich.”

“But what would be said of me, if I enticed away a woman from her husband?”

Hans shrugs. They are so matter-of-fact, the Germans. More says the Lutherans fornicate in church. “Besides,” Hans says, “there is the matter of the—”

“The what?”

Hans shrugs: nothing. “Nothing! You are going to hang me up by my hands till I confess?”

“I don't do that. I only threaten to do it.”

“I meant only,” Hans says soothingly, “there is the matter of all the other women who want to marry you. The wives of England, they all keep secret books of whom they are going to have next when they have poisoned their husbands. And you are the top of everyone's list.”

In his idle moments—in the week there are two or three—he has been picking through the records of the Rolls House. Though the Jews are forbidden the realm, you cannot know what human flotsam will be washed up by the tide of fortune, and only once, for a single month in these three hundred years, has the house been empty. He runs his eye over the accounts of the successive wardens, and he handles, curious, the receipts for their relief given by the dead inhabitants, written in Hebrew characters. Some of them spent fifty years within these walls, flinching from the Londoners outside. When he walks the crooked passages, he feels their footsteps under his.

He goes to see the two who remain. They are silent and vigilant women of indeterminate age, and the names they go by are Katherine Wheteley and Mary Cook.

“What do you do?” With your time, he means.

“We say our prayers.”

They watch him for evidence of his intentions, good or ill. Their faces say, we are two women with nothing left but our life stories. Why should we part with them to you?

He sends them presents of fowl but he wonders if they eat flesh from gentile hands. Toward Christmas, the prior of Christchurch in Canterbury sends him twelve Kentish apples, each one wrapped in gray linen, of a special kind that is good with wine. He takes these apples to the converts, with wine he has picked out. “In the year 1353,” he says, “there was only one person in the house. I am sorry to think she lived here without company. Her last domicile was the city of Exeter, but I wonder where before that? Her name was Claricia.”

“We know nothing of her,” says Katherine, or possibly Mary. “It would be surprising if we did.” Her fingertip tests the apples. Possibly she does not recognize their rarity, or that they are the best present the prior could find. If you don't like them, he says, or if you do, I have stewing pears. Somebody sent me five hundred.

“A man who meant to get himself noticed,” says Katherine or Mary, and the other says, “Five hundred pounds would have been better.”

The women laugh, but their laughter is cold. He sees he will never be on terms with them. He likes the name Claricia and he wishes he had suggested it for the jailer's daughter. It is a name for a woman you might dream of: one you could see straight through.

When the king's New Year's present is done Hans says, “It is the first time I have made his portrait.”

“You shall make another soon, I hope.”

Hans knows he has an English Bible, a translation almost ready. He puts a finger to his lips; too soon to talk about it, next year maybe. “If you were to dedicate it to Henry,” Hans says, “could he now refuse it? I will put him on the title page, displayed in glory, head of the church.” Hans paces, growls out a few figures. He is thinking of paper and printer's costs, estimating his profits. Lucas Cranach draws title pages for Luther. “Those pictures of Martin and his wife, he has sold prints by the basketful. And Cranach makes everybody look like a pig.”

True. Even those silvery nudes he paints have sweet pig-faces, and laborer's feet, and gristly ears. “But if I paint Henry, I must flatter, I suppose. Show him how he was five years ago. Or ten.”

“Stick to five. He will think you are mocking him.”

Hans draws his finger across his throat, buckles at the knees, thrusts out his tongue like a man hanged; it seems he envisages every method of execution.

“An easy majesty would be called for,” he says.

Hans beams. “I can do it by the yard.”

The end of the year brings cold and a green aqueous light, washing across the Thames and the city. Letters fall to his desk with a soft shuffle like great snowflakes: doctors of theology from Germany, ambassadors from France, Mary Boleyn from her exile in Kent.

He breaks the seal. “Listen to this,” he says to Richard. “Mary wants money. She says, she knows she should not have been so hasty. She says, love overcame reason.”

“Love, was it?”

He reads. She does not regret for a minute she has taken on William Stafford. She could have had, she says, other husbands, with titles and wealth. But
“if I were at liberty and might choose, I ensure you, Master Secretary, I have tried so much honesty to be in him, that I had rather beg my bread with him than to be the greatest Queen christened.”

She dare not write to her sister the queen. Or her father or her uncle or her brother. They are all so cruel. So she is writing to him . . . He wonders, did Stafford lean over her shoulder, while she was writing? Did she giggle and say, Thomas Cromwell, I once raised his hopes.

Richard says, “I hardly remember how Mary and I were to be married.”

“That was in other days than these.” And Richard is happy; see how it has worked out; we can thrive without the Boleyns. But Christendom was overturned for the Boleyn marriage, to put the ginger pig in the cradle; what if it is true, what if Henry is sated, what if the enterprise is cursed? “Get Wiltshire in.”

“Here to the Rolls?”

“He will come to the whistle.”

He will humiliate him—in his genial fashion—and make him give Mary an annuity. The girl worked for him, on her back, and now he must pension her. Richard will sit in the shadows and take notes. It will remind Boleyn of the old days: the old days now being approximately six, seven years back. Last week Chapuys said to him, in this kingdom now you are all the cardinal was, and more.