HILARY MANTEL

WOLF HALL

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Fourth Estate

Photograph by Giles Keyte © Company Pictures/Playground Entertainment 2014

Cover images © Shutterstock

Hilary Mantel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780008381691

Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007322749

Version: 2020-03-11

Dedication

To my singular friend Mary Robertson this be given.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Cast of Characters

Family Trees

Epigraph

Part One

Chapter I - Across the Narrow Sea. 1500

Chapter II - Paternity. 1527

Chapter III - At Austin Friars. 1527

Part Two

Chapter I - Visitation. 1529

Chapter II - An Occult History of Britain. 1521–1529

Chapter III - Make or Mar. All Hallows 1529

Part Three

Chapter I - Three-Card Trick. Winter 1529–Spring 1530

Chapter II - Entirely Beloved Cromwell. Spring–December 1530

Chapter III - The Dead Complain of Their Burial. Christmastide 1530

Part Four

Chapter I - Arrange Your Face. 1531

Chapter II - ‘Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?’ Spring 1532

Chapter III - Early Mass. November 1532

Part Five

Chapter I - Anna Regina. 1533

Chapter II - Devil's Spit. Autumn and winter 1533

Chapter III - A Painter's Eye. 1534

Part Six

Chapter I - Supremacy. 1534

Chapter II - The Map of Christendom. 1534–1535

Chapter III - To Wolf Hall. July 1535

Back Ads

Have You Seen…?

Author's Note

Acknowledgements

Excerpt from Bring Up the Bodies

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

CAST OF CHARACTERS

In Putney, 1500

Walter Cromwell, a blacksmith and brewer.

Thomas, his son.

Bet, his daughter.

Kat, his daughter.

Morgan Williams, Kat's husband.

At Austin Friars, from 1527

Thomas Cromwell, a lawyer.

Liz Wykys, his wife.

Gregory, their son.

Anne, their daughter.

Grace, their daughter.

Henry Wykys, Liz's father, a wool trader.

Mercy, his wife.

Johane Williamson, Liz's sister.

John Williamson, her husband.

Johane (Jo), their daughter.

Alice Wellyfed, Cromwell's niece, daughter of Bet Cromwell.

Richard Williams, later called Cromwell, son of Kat and Morgan.

Rafe Sadler, Cromwell's chief clerk, brought up at Austin Friars.

Thomas Avery, the household accountant.

Helen Barre, a poor woman taken in by the household.

Thurston, the cook.

Christophe, a servant.

Dick Purser, keeper of the guard dogs.

At Westminster

Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York, cardinal, papal legate, Lord Chancellor: Thomas Cromwell's patron.

George Cavendish, Wolsey's gentleman usher and later biographer.

Stephen Gardiner, Master of Trinity Hall, the cardinal's secretary, later Master Secretary to Henry VIII: Cromwell's most devoted enemy.

Thomas Wriothesley, Clerk of the Signet, diplomat, protégé of both Cromwell and Gardiner.

Richard Riche, lawyer, later Solicitor General.

Thomas Audley, lawyer, Speaker of the House of Commons, Lord Chancellor after Thomas More's resignation.

At Chelsea

Thomas More, lawyer and scholar, Lord Chancellor after Wolsey's fall. Alice, his wife.

Sir John More, his aged father.

Margaret Roper, his eldest daughter, married to Will Roper.

Anne Cresacre, his daughter-in-law.

Henry Pattinson, a servant.

In the city

Humphrey Monmouth, merchant, imprisoned for sheltering William Tyndale, translator of the Bible into English.

John Petyt, merchant, imprisoned on suspicion of heresy.

Lucy, his wife.

John Parnell, merchant, embroiled in long-running legal dispute with Thomas More.

Little Bilney, scholar burned for heresy.

John Frith, scholar burned for heresy.

Antonio Bonvisi, merchant, from Lucca.

Stephen Vaughan, merchant at Antwerp, friend of Cromwell.

At court

Henry VIII.

Katherine of Aragon, his first wife, later known as Dowager Princess of Wales.

Mary, their daughter.

Anne Boleyn, his second wife.

Mary, her sister, widow of William Carey and Henry's ex-mistress.

Thomas Boleyn, her father, later Earl of Wiltshire and Lord Privy Seal: likes to be known as ‘Monseigneur’.

George, her brother, later Lord Rochford.

Jane Rochford, George's wife.

Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, Anne's uncle.

Mary Howard, his daughter.

Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, old friend of Henry, married to his sister Mary.

Mark Smeaton, a musician.

Henry Wyatt, a courtier.

Thomas Wyatt, his son.

Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king's illegitimate son.

Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland.

The clergy

William Warham, aged Archbishop of Canterbury.

Cardinal Campeggio, papal envoy.

John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, legal adviser to Katherine of Aragon.

Thomas Cranmer, Cambridge scholar, reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding Warham.

Hugh Latimer, reforming priest, later Bishop of Worcester.

Rowland Lee, friend of Cromwell, later Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield.

In Calais

Lord Berners, the Governor, a scholar and translator.

Lord Lisle, the incoming Governor.

Honor, his wife.

William Stafford, attached to the garrison.

At Hatfield

Lady Bryan, mother of Francis, in charge of the infant princess, Elizabeth.

Lady Anne Shelton, Anne Boleyn's aunt, in charge of the former princess, Mary.

The ambassadors

Eustache Chapuys, career diplomat from Savoy, London ambassador of Emperor Charles V.

Jean de Dinteville, an ambassador from Francis I.

The Yorkist claimants to the throne

Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, descended from a daughter of Edward IV.

Gertrude, his wife.

Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, niece of Edward IV.

Lord Montague, her son.

Geoffrey Pole, her son.

Reginald Pole, her son.

The Seymour family at Wolf Hall

Old Sir John, who has an affair with the wife of his eldest son Edward.

Edward Seymour, his son.

Thomas Seymour, his son.

Jane, his daughter: at court.

Lizzie, his daughter, married to the Governor of Jersey.

William Butts, a physician.

Nikolaus Kratzer, an astronomer.

Hans Holbein, an artist.

Sexton, Wolsey's fool.

Elizabeth Barton, a prophetess.

Family Trees

Epigraph

‘There are three kinds of scenes, one called the tragic, second the comic, third the satyric. Their decorations are different and unalike each other in scheme. Tragic scenes are delineated with columns, pediments, statues and other objects suited to kings; comic scenes exhibit private dwellings, with balconies and views representing rows of windows, after the manner of ordinary dwellings; satyric scenes are decorated with trees, caverns, mountains and other rustic objects delineated in landscape style.’

VITRUVIUS, De Architectura, on the theatre, c.27BC

These be the names of the players:

PART ONE

I Across the Narrow Sea Putney, 1500

‘So now get up.’

Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

Blood from the gash on his head – which was his father's first effort – is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see that the stitching of his father's boot is unravelling. The twine has sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his eyebrow and opened another cut.

‘So now get up!’ Walter is roaring down at him, working out where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and moves forward, on his belly, trying to do it without exposing his hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. ‘What are you, an eel?’ his parent asks. He trots backwards, gathers pace, and aims another kick.

It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last. His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an outhouse. I'll miss my dog, he thinks. The yard smells of beer and blood. Someone is shouting, down on the riverbank. Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out. But the cold strikes him, just in one place: just through his cheekbone as it rests on the cobbles.

‘Look now, look now,’ Walter bellows. He hops on one foot, as if he's dancing. ‘Look what I've done. Burst my boot, kicking your head.’

Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you an eel or a worm or a snake. Head down, don't provoke him. His nose is clotted with blood and he has to open his mouth to breathe. His father's momentary distraction at the loss of his good boot allows him the leisure to vomit. ‘That's right,’ Walter yells. ‘Spew everywhere.’ Spew everywhere, on my good cobbles. ‘Come on, boy, get up. Let's see you get up. By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet.’

Creeping Christ? he thinks. What does he mean? His head turns sideways, his hair rests in his own vomit, the dog barks, Walter roars, and bells peal out across the water. He feels a sensation of movement, as if the filthy ground has become the Thames. It gives and sways beneath him; he lets out his breath, one great final gasp. You've done it this time, a voice tells Walter. But he closes his ears, or God closes them for him. He is pulled downstream, on a deep black tide.

The next thing he knows, it is almost noon, and he is propped in the doorway of Pegasus the Flying Horse. His sister Kat is coming from the kitchen with a rack of hot pies in her hands. When she sees him she almost drops them. Her mouth opens in astonishment. ‘Look at you!’

‘Kat, don't shout, it hurts me.’

She bawls for her husband: ‘Morgan Williams!’ She rotates on the spot, eyes wild, face flushed from the oven's heat. ‘Take this tray, body of God, where are you all?’

He is shivering from head to foot, exactly like Bella did when she fell off the boat that time.

A girl runs in. ‘The master's gone to town.’

‘I know that, fool.’ The sight of her brother had panicked the knowledge out of her. She thrusts the tray at the girl. ‘If you leave them where the cats can get at them, I'll box your ears till you see stars.’ Her hands empty, she clasps them for a moment in violent prayer. ‘Fighting again, or was it your father?’

Yes, he says, vigorously nodding, making his nose drop gouts of blood: yes, he indicates himself, as if to say, Walter was here. Kat calls for a basin, for water, for water in a basin, for a cloth, for the devil to rise up, right now, and take away Walter his servant. ‘Sit down before you fall down.’ He tries to explain that he has just got up. Out of the yard. It could be an hour ago, it could even be a day, and for all he knows, today might be tomorrow; except that if he had lain there for a day, surely either Walter would have come and killed him, for being in the way, or his wounds would have clotted a bit, and by now he would be hurting all over and almost too stiff to move; from deep experience of Walter's fists and boots, he knows that the second day can be worse than the first. ‘Sit. Don't talk,’ Kat says.

When the basin comes, she stands over him and works away, dabbing at his closed eye, working in small circles round and round at his hairline. Her breathing is ragged and her free hand rests on his shoulder. She swears under her breath, and sometimes she cries, and rubs the back of his neck, whispering, ‘There, hush, there,’ as if it were he who were crying, though he isn't. He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to mess her up, get blood all down the front of her.

When Morgan Williams comes in, he is wearing his good town coat. He looks Welsh and pugnacious; it's clear he's heard the news. He stands by Kat, staring down, temporarily out of words; till he says, ‘See!’ He makes a fist, and jerks it three times in the air. ‘That!’ he says. ‘That's what he'd get. Walter. That's what he'd get. From me.’

‘Just stand back,’ Kat advises. ‘You don't want bits of Thomas on your London jacket.’

No more does he. He backs off. ‘I wouldn't care, but look at you, boy. You could cripple the brute in a fair fight.’

‘It never is a fair fight,’ Kat says. ‘He comes up behind you, right, Thomas? With something in his hand.’

‘Looks like a glass bottle, in this case,’ Morgan Williams says. ‘Was it a bottle?’

He shakes his head. His nose bleeds again.

‘Don't do that, brother,’ Kat says. It's all over her hand; she wipes the blood clots down herself. What a mess, on her apron; he might as well have put his head there after all.

‘I don't suppose you saw?’ Morgan says. ‘What he was wielding, exactly?’

‘That's the value,’ says Kat, ‘of an approach from behind – you sorry loss to the magistrates’ bench. Listen, Morgan, shall I tell you about my father? He'll pick up whatever's to hand. Which is sometimes a bottle, true. I've seen him do it to my mother. Even our little Bet, I've seen him hit her over the head. Also I've not seen him do it, which was worse, and that was because it was me about to be felled.'

‘I wonder what I've married into,’ Morgan Williams says.

But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder. The boy doesn't listen to him; he thinks, if my father did that to my mother, so long dead, then maybe he killed her? No, surely he'd have been taken up for it; Putney's lawless, but you don't get away with murder. Kat's what he's got for a mother: crying for him, rubbing the back of his neck.

He shuts his eyes, to make the left eye equal with the right; he tries to open both. ‘Kat,’ he says, ‘I have got an eye under there, have I? Because it can't see anything.’ Yes, yes, yes, she says, while Morgan Williams continues his interrogation of the facts; settles on a hard, moderately heavy, sharp object, but possibly not a broken bottle, otherwise Thomas would have seen its jagged edge, prior to Walter splitting his eyebrow open and aiming to blind him. He hears Morgan forming up this theory and would like to speak about the boot, the knot, the knot in the twine, but the effort of moving his mouth seems disproportionate to the reward. By and large he agrees with Morgan's conclusion; he tries to shrug, but it hurts so much, and he feels so crushed and disjointed, that he wonders if his neck is broken.

‘Anyway,’ Kat says, ‘what were you doing, Tom, to set him off? He usually won't start up till after dark, if it's for no cause at all.’

‘Yes,’ Morgan Williams says, ‘was there a cause?’

‘Yesterday. I was fighting.’

‘You were fighting yesterday? Who in the holy name were you fighting?’

‘I don't know.’ The name, along with the reason, has dropped out of his head; but it feels as if, in exiting, it has removed a jagged splinter of bone from his skull. He touches his scalp, carefully. Bottle? Possible.

‘Oh,’ Kat says, ‘they're always fighting. Boys. Down by the river.’

‘So let me be sure I have this right,’ Morgan says. ‘He comes home yesterday with his clothes torn and his knuckles skinned, and the old man says, what's this, been fighting? He waits a day, then hits him with a bottle. Then he knocks him down in the yard, kicks him all over, beats up and down his length with a plank of wood that comes to hand …’

‘Did he do that?’

‘It's all over the parish! They were lining up on the wharf to tell me, they were shouting at me before the boat tied up. Morgan Williams, listen now, your wife's father has beaten Thomas and he's crawled dying to his sister's house, they've called the priest … Did you call the priest?’

‘Oh, you Williamses!’ Kat says. ‘You think you're such big people around here. People are lining up to tell you things. But why is that? It's because you believe anything.’

‘But it's right!’ Morgan yells. ‘As good as right! Eh? If you leave out the priest. And that he's not dead yet.’

‘You'll make that magistrates' bench for sure,’ Kat says, ‘with your close study of the difference between a corpse and my brother.’

‘When I'm a magistrate, I'll have your father in the stocks. Fine him? You can't fine him enough. What's the point of fining a person who will only go and rob or swindle monies to the same value out of some innocent who crosses his path?’

He moans: tries to do it without intruding.

‘There, there, there,’ Kat whispers.

‘I'd say the magistrates have had their bellyful,’ Morgan says. ‘If he's not watering his ale, he's running illegal beasts on the common, if he's not despoiling the common he's assaulting an officer of the peace, if he's not drunk he's dead drunk, and if he's not dead before his time there's no justice in this world.’

‘Finished?’ Kat says. She turns back to him. ‘Tom, you'd better stay with us now. Morgan Williams, what do you say? He'll be good to do the heavy work, when he's healed up. He can do the figures for you, he can add and … what's the other thing? All right, don't laugh at me, how much time do you think I had for learning figures, with a father like that? If I can write my name, it's because Tom here taught me.’

‘He won't,’ he says. ‘Like it.’ He can only manage like this: short, simple, declarative sentences.

‘Like? He should be ashamed,’ Morgan says.

Kat says, ‘Shame was left out when God made my dad.’

He says, ‘Because. Just a mile away. He can easily.’

‘Come after you? Just let him.’ Morgan demonstrates his fist again: his little nervy Welsh punch.

After Kat had finished swabbing him and Morgan Williams had ceased boasting and reconstructing the assault, he lay up for an hour or two, to recover from it. During this time, Walter came to the door, with some of his acquaintance, and there was a certain amount of shouting and kicking of doors, though it came to him in a muffled way and he thought he might have dreamed it. The question in his mind now is, what am I going to do, I can't stay in Putney. Partly this is because his memory is coming back, for the day before yesterday and the earlier fight, and he thinks there might have been a knife in it somewhere; and whoever it was stuck in, it wasn't him, so was it by him? All this is unclear in his mind. What is clear is his thought about Walter: I've had enough of this. If he gets after me again I'm going to kill him, and if I kill him they'll hang me, and if they're going to hang me I want a better reason.

Below, the rise and fall of their voices. He can't pick out every word. Morgan says he's burnt his boats. Kat is repenting of her first offer, a post as pot-boy, general factotum and chucker-out; because, Morgan's saying, ‘Walter will always be coming round here, won't he? And “Where's Tom, send him home, who paid the bloody priest to teach him to read and write, I did, and you're reaping the bloody benefit now, you leek-eating cunt.”’

He comes downstairs. Morgan says cheerily, ‘You're looking well, considering.’

The truth is about Morgan Williams – and he doesn't like him any the less for it – the truth is, this idea he has that one day he'll beat up his father-in-law, it's solely in his mind. In fact, he's frightened of Walter, like a good many people in Putney – and, for that matter, Mortlake and Wimbledon.

He says, ‘I'm on my way, then.’

Kat says, ‘You have to stay tonight. You know the second day is the worst.’

‘Who's he going to hit when I'm gone?’

‘Not our affair,’ Kat says. ‘Bet is married and got out of it, thank God.’

Morgan Williams says, ‘If Walter was my father, I tell you, I'd take to the road.’ He waits. ‘As it happens, we've gathered some ready money.’

A pause.

‘I'll pay you back.’

Morgan says, laughing, relieved, ‘And how will you do that, Tom?’

He doesn't know. Breathing is difficult, but that doesn't mean anything, it's only because of the clotting inside his nose. It doesn't seem to be broken; he touches it, speculatively, and Kat says, careful, this is a clean apron. She's smiling a pained smile, she doesn't want him to go, and yet she's not going to contradict Morgan Williams, is she? The Williamses are big people, in Putney, in Wimbledon. Morgan dotes on her; he reminds her she's got girls to do the baking and mind the brewing, why doesn't she sit upstairs sewing like a lady, and praying for his success when he goes off to London to do a few deals in his town coat? Twice a day she could sweep through the Pegasus in a good dress and set in order anything that's wrong: that's his idea. And though as far as he can see she works as hard as ever she did when she was a child, he can see how she might like it, that Morgan would exhort her to sit down and be a lady.

‘I'll pay you back,’ he says. ‘I might go and be a soldier. I could send you a fraction of my pay and I might get loot.’

Morgan says, ‘But there isn't a war.’

‘There'll be one somewhere,’ Kat says.

‘Or I could be a ship's boy. But, you know, Bella – do you think I should go back for her? She was screaming. He had her shut up.’

‘So she wouldn't nip his toes?’ Morgan says. He's satirical about Bella.

‘I'd like her to come away with me.’

‘I've heard of a ship's cat. Not of a ship's dog.’

‘She's very small.’

‘She'll not pass for a cat,’ Morgan laughs. ‘Anyway, you're too big all round for a ship's boy. They have to run up the rigging like little monkeys – have you ever seen a monkey, Tom? Soldier is more like it. Be honest, like father like son – you weren't last in line when God gave out fists.’

‘Right,’ Kat said. ‘Shall we see if we understand this? One day my brother Tom goes out fighting. As punishment, his father creeps up behind and hits him with a whatever, but heavy, and probably sharp, and then, when he falls down, almost takes out his eye, exerts himself to kick in his ribs, beats him with a plank of wood that stands ready to hand, knocks in his face so that if I were not his own sister I'd barely recognise him: and my husband says, the answer to this, Thomas, is go for a soldier, go and find somebody you don't know, take out his eye and kick in his ribs, actually kill him, I suppose, and get paid for it.’

‘May as well,’ Morgan says, ‘as go fighting by the river, without profit to anybody. Look at him – if it were up to me, I'd have a war just to employ him.’

Morgan takes out his purse. He puts down coins: chink, chink, chink, with enticing slowness.

He touches his cheekbone. It is bruised, intact: but so cold.

‘Listen,’ Kat says, ‘we grew up here, there's probably people that would help Tom out –’

Morgan gives her a look: which says, eloquently, do you mean there are a lot of people would like to be on the wrong side of Walter Cromwell? Have him breaking their doors down? And she says, as if hearing his thought out loud, ‘No. Maybe. Maybe, Tom, it would be for the best, do you think?’

He stands up. She says, ‘Morgan, look at him, he shouldn't go tonight.’

‘I should. An hour from now he'll have had a skinful and he'll be back. He'd set the place on fire if he thought I were in it.’

Morgan says, ‘Have you got what you need for the road?’

He wants to turn to Kat and say, no.

But she's turned her face away and she's crying. She's not crying for him, because nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him, God didn't cut him out that way. She's crying for her idea of what life should be like: Sunday after church, all the sisters, sisters-in-law, wives kissing and patting, swatting at each other's children and at the same time loving them and rubbing their little round heads, women comparing and swapping babies, and all the men gathering and talking business, wool, yarn, lengths, shipping, bloody Flemings, fishing rights, brewing, annual turnover, nice timely information, favour-for-favour, little sweeteners, little retainers, my attorney says … That's what it should be like, married to Morgan Williams, with the Williamses being a big family in Putney … But somehow it's not been like that. Walter has spoiled it all.

Carefully, stiffly, he straightens up. Every part of him hurts now. Not as badly as it will hurt tomorrow; on the third day the bruises come out and you have to start answering people's questions about why you've got them. By then he will be far from here, and presumably no one will hold him to account, because no one will know him or care. They'll think it's usual for him to have his face beaten in.

He picks up the money. He says, ‘Hwyl, Morgan Williams. Diolch am yr arian.’ Thank you for the money. ‘Gofalwch am Katheryn. Gofalwch am eich busness. Wela I chi eto rhywbryd. Pobl lwc.’

Look after my sister. Look after your business. See you again sometime.

Morgan Williams stares.

He almost grins; would do, if it wouldn't split his face open. All those days he'd spent hanging around the Williamses' households: did they think he'd just come for his dinner?

‘Pobl lwc,’ Morgan says slowly. Good luck.

He says, ‘If I follow the river, is that as good as anything?’

‘Where are you trying to get?’

‘To the sea.’

For a moment, Morgan Williams looks sorry it has come to this. He says, ‘You'll be all right, Tom? I tell you, if Bella comes looking for you, I won't send her home hungry. Kat will give her a pie.’

He has to make the money last. He could work his way downriver; but he is afraid that if he is seen, Walter will catch him, through his contacts and his friends, those kind of men who will do anything for a drink. What he thinks of, first, is slipping on to one of the smugglers' ships that go out of Barking, Tilbury. But then he thinks, France is where they have wars. A few people he talks to – he talks to strangers very easily – are of the same belief. Dover then. He gets on the road.

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems. And then horses, he's always been around horses, frightened horses too, because when in the morning Walter wasn't sleeping off the effects of the strong brew he kept for himself and his friends, he would turn to his second trade, farrier and blacksmith; and whether it was his sour breath, or his loud voice, or his general way of going on, even horses that were good to shoe would start to shake their heads and back away from the heat. Their hooves gripped in Walter's hands, they'd tremble; it was his job to hold their heads and talk to them, rubbing the velvet space between their ears, telling them how their mothers love them and talk about them still, and how Walter will soon be over.

He doesn't eat for a day or so; it hurts too much. But by the time he reaches Dover the big gash on his scalp has closed, and the tender parts inside, he trusts, have mended themselves: kidneys, lungs and heart.

He knows by the way people look at him that his face is still bruised. Morgan Williams had done an inventory of him before he left: teeth (miraculously) still in his head, and two eyes, miraculously seeing. Two arms, two legs: what more do you want?

He walks around the docks saying to people, do you know where there's a war just now?

Each man he asks stares at his face, steps back and says, ‘You tell me!’

They are so pleased with this, they laugh at their own wit so much, that he continues asking, just to give people pleasure.

Surprisingly, he finds he will leave Dover richer than he arrived. He'd watched a man doing the three-card trick, and when he learned it he set up for himself. Because he's a boy, people stop to have a go. It's their loss.

He adds up what he's got and what he's spent. Deduct a small sum for a brief grapple with a lady of the night. Not the sort of thing you could do in Putney, Wimbledon or Mortlake. Not without the Williams family getting to know, and talking about you in Welsh.

He sees three elderly Lowlanders struggling with their bundles and moves to help them. The packages are soft and bulky, samples of woollen cloth. A port officer gives them trouble about their documents, shouting into their faces. He lounges behind the clerk, pretending to be a Lowland oaf, and tells the merchants by holding up his fingers what he thinks a fair bribe. ‘Please,’ says one of them, in effortful English to the clerk, ‘will you take care of these English coins for me? I find them surplus.’ Suddenly the clerk is all smiles. The Lowlanders are all smiles; they would have paid much more. When they board they say, ‘The boy is with us.’

As they wait to cast off, they ask him his age. He says eighteen, but they laugh and say, child, you are never. He offers them fifteen, and they confer and decide that fifteen will do; they think he's younger, but they don't want to shame him. They ask what's happened to his face. There are several things he could say but he selects the truth. He doesn't want them to think he's some failed robber. They discuss it among themselves, and the one who can translate turns to him: ‘We are saying, the English are cruel to their children. And cold-hearted. The child must stand if his father comes in the room. Always the child should say very correctly, “my father, sir”, and “madam my mother”.’

He is surprised. Are there people in the world who are not cruel to their children? For the first time, the weight in his chest shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better. He talks; he tells them about Bella, and they look sorry, and they don't say anything stupid like, you can get another dog. He tells them about the Pegasus, and about his father's brewhouse and how Walter gets fined for bad beer at least twice a year. He tells them about how he gets fines for stealing wood, cutting down other people's trees, and about the too-many sheep he runs on the common. They are interested in that; they show the woollen samples and discuss among themselves the weight and the weave, turning to him from time to time to include and instruct him. They don't think much of English finished cloth generally, though these samples can make them change their mind … He loses the thread of the conversation when they try to tell him their reasons for going to Calais, and different people they know there.

He tells them about his father's blacksmith business, and the English-speaker says, interested, can you make a horseshoe? He mimes to them what it's like, hot metal and a bad-tempered father in a small space. They laugh; they like to see him telling a story. Good talker, one of them says. Before they dock, the most silent of them will stand up and make an oddly formal speech, at which one will nod, and which the other will translate. ‘We are three brothers. This is our street. If ever you visit our town, there is a bed and hearth and food for you.’

Goodbye, he will say to them. Goodbye and good luck with your lives. Hwyl, cloth men. Golfalwch eich busness. He is not stopping till he gets to a war.

The weather is cold but the sea is flat. Kat has given him a holy medal to wear. He has slung it around his neck with a cord. It makes a chill against the skin of his throat. He unloops it. He touches it with his lips, for luck. He drops it; it whispers into the water. He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

II Paternity 1527

So: Stephen Gardiner. Going out, as he's coming in. It's wet, and for a night in April, unseasonably warm, but Gardiner wears furs, which look like oily and dense black feathers; he stands now, ruffling them, gathering his clothes about his tall straight person like black angel's wings.

‘Late,’ Master Stephen says unpleasantly.

He is bland. ‘Me, or your good self?’

‘You.’ He waits.

‘Drunks on the river. The boatmen say it's the eve of one of their patron saints.’

‘Did you offer a prayer to her?’

‘I'll pray to anyone, Stephen, till I'm on dry land.’

‘I'm surprised you didn't take an oar yourself. You must have done some river work, when you were a boy.’

Stephen sings always on one note. Your reprobate father. Your low birth. Stephen is supposedly some sort of semi-royal by-blow: brought up for payment, discreetly, as their own, by discreet people in a small town. They are wool-trade people, whom Master Stephen resents and wishes to forget; and since he himself knows everybody in the wool trade, he knows too much about his past for Stephen's comfort. The poor orphan boy!

Master Stephen resents everything about his own situation. He resents that he's the king's unacknowledged cousin. He resents that he was put into the church, though the church has done well by him. He resents the fact that someone else has late-night talks with the cardinal, to whom he is confidential secretary. He resents the fact that he's one of those tall men who are hollow-chested, not much weight behind him; he resents his knowledge that if they met on a dark night, Master Thos. Cromwell would be the one who walked away dusting off his hands and smiling.

‘God bless you,’ Gardiner says, passing into the night unseasonably warm.

Cromwell says, ‘Thanks.’

The cardinal, writing, says without looking up, ‘Thomas. Still raining? I expected you earlier.’

Boatman. River. Saint. He's been travelling since early morning and in the saddle for the best part of two weeks on the cardinal's business, and has now come down by stages – and not easy stages – from Yorkshire. He's been to his clerks at Gray's Inn and borrowed a change of linen. He's been east to the city, to hear what ships have come in and to check the whereabouts of an off-the-books consignment he is expecting. But he hasn't eaten, and hasn't been home yet.

The cardinal rises. He opens a door, speaks to his hovering servants. ‘Cherries! What, no cherries? April, you say? Only April? We shall have sore work to placate my guest, then.’ He sighs. ‘Bring what you have. But it will never do, you know. Why am I so ill-served?’

Then the whole room is in motion: food, wine, fire built up. A man takes his wet outer garments with a solicitous murmur. All the cardinal's household servants are like this: comfortable, soft-footed, and kept permanently apologetic and teased. And all the cardinal's visitors are treated in the same way. If you had interrupted him every night for ten years, and sat sulking and scowling at him on each occasion, you would still be his honoured guest.

The servants efface themselves, melting away towards the door. ‘What else would you like?’ the cardinal says.

‘The sun to come out?’

‘So late? You tax my powers.’

‘Dawn would do.’

The cardinal inclines his head to the servants. ‘I shall see to this request myself,’ he says gravely; and gravely they murmur, and withdraw.

The cardinal joins his hands. He makes a great, deep, smiling sigh, like a leopard settling in a warm spot. He regards his man of business; his man of business regards him. The cardinal, at fifty-five, is still as handsome as he was in his prime. Tonight he is dressed not in his everyday scarlet, but in blackish purple and fine white lace: like a humble bishop. His height impresses; his belly, which should in justice belong to a more sedentary man, is merely another princely aspect of his being, and on it, confidingly, he often rests a large, white, beringed hand. A large head – surely designed by God to support the papal tiara – is carried superbly on broad shoulders: shoulders upon which rest (though not at this moment) the great chain of Lord Chancellor of England. The head inclines; the cardinal says, in those honeyed tones, famous from here to Vienna, ‘So now, tell me how was Yorkshire.’

‘Filthy.’ He sits down. ‘Weather. People. Manners. Morals.’

‘Well, I suppose this is the place to complain. Though I am already speaking to God about the weather.’

‘Oh, and the food. Five miles inland, and no fresh fish.’

‘And scant hope of a lemon, I suppose. What do they eat?’

‘Londoners, when they can get them. You have never seen such heathens. They're so high, low foreheads. Live in caves, yet they pass for gentry in those parts.’ He ought to go and look for himself, the cardinal; he is Archbishop of York, but has never visited his see. ‘And as for Your Grace's business –’

‘I am listening,’ the cardinal says. ‘Indeed, I go further. I am captivated.’

As he listens, the cardinal's face creases into its affable, perpetually attentive folds. From time to time he notes down a figure that he is given. He sips from a glass of his very good wine and at length he says, ‘Thomas … what have you done, monstrous servant? An abbess is with child? Two, three abbesses? Or, let me see … Have you set fire to Whitby, on a whim?’

In the case of his man Cromwell, the cardinal has two jokes, which sometimes unite to form one. The first is that he walks in demanding cherries in April and lettuce in December. The other is that he goes about the countryside committing outrages, and charging them to the cardinal's accounts. And the cardinal has other jokes, from time to time: as he requires them.

It is about ten o'clock. The flames of the wax candles bow civilly to the cardinal, and stand straight again. The rain – it has been raining since last September – splashes against the glass window. ‘In Yorkshire,’ he says, ‘your project is disliked.’

The cardinal's project: having obtained the Pope's permission, he means to amalgamate some thirty small, ill-run monastic foundations with larger ones, and to divert the income of these foundations – decayed, but often very ancient – into revenue for the two colleges he is founding: Cardinal College, at Oxford, and a college in his home town of Ipswich, where he is well remembered as the scholar son of a prosperous and pious master butcher, a guild-man, a man who also kept a large and well-regulated inn, of the type used by the best travellers. The difficulty is … No, in fact, there are several difficulties. The cardinal, a Bachelor of Arts at fifteen, a Bachelor of Theology by his mid-twenties, is learned in the law but does not like its delays; he cannot quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money, with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ. When he once, as a test, explained to the cardinal just a minor point of the land law concerning – well, never mind, it was a minor point – he saw the cardinal break into a sweat and say, Thomas, what can I give you, to persuade you never to mention this to me again? Find a way, just do it, he would say when obstacles were raised; and when he heard of some small person obstructing his grand design, he would say, Thomas, give them some money to make them go away.

He has the leisure to think about this, because the cardinal is staring down at his desk, at the letter he has half-written. He looks up. ‘Tom …’ And then, ‘No, never mind. Tell me why you are scowling in that way.’

‘The people up there say they are going to kill me.’

‘Really?’ the cardinal says. His face says, I am astonished and disappointed. ‘And will they kill you? Or what do you think?’

Behind the cardinal is a tapestry, hanging the length of the wall. King Solomon, his hands stretched into darkness, is greeting the Queen of Sheba.

‘I think, if you're going to kill a man, do it. Don't write him a letter about it. Don't bluster and threaten and put him on his guard.’

‘If you ever plan to be off your guard, let me know. It is something I should like to see. Do you know who … But I suppose they don't sign their letters. I shall not give up my project. I have personally and carefully selected these institutions, and His Holiness has approved them under seal. Those who object misunderstand my intention. No one is proposing to put old monks out on the roads.’

This is true. There can be relocation; there can be pensions, compensation. It can be negotiated, with goodwill on both sides. Bow to the inevitable, he urges. Deference to the lord cardinal. Regard his watchful and fatherly care; believe his keen eye is fixed on the ultimate good of the church. These are the phrases with which to negotiate. Poverty, chastity and obedience: these are what you stress when you tell some senile prior what to do. ‘They don't misunderstand,’ he says. ‘They just want the proceeds themselves.’

‘You will have to take an armed guard when next you go north.’

The cardinal, who thinks upon a Christian's last end, has had his tomb designed already, by a sculptor from Florence. His corpse will lie beneath the outspread wings of angels, in a sarcophagus of porphyry. The veined stone will be his monument, when his own veins are drained by the embalmer; when his limbs are set like marble, an inscription of his virtues will be picked out in gold. But the colleges are to be his breathing monument, working and living long after he is gone: poor boys, poor scholars, carrying into the world the cardinal's wit, his sense of wonder and of beauty, his instinct for decorum and pleasure, his finesse. No wonder he shakes his head. You don't generally have to give an armed guard to a lawyer. The cardinal hates any show of force. He thinks it unsubtle. Sometimes one of his people – Stephen Gardiner, let's say – will come to him denouncing some nest of heretics in the city. He will say earnestly, poor benighted souls. You pray for them, Stephen, and I'll pray for them, and we'll see if between us we can't bring them to a better state of mind. And tell them, mend their manners, or Thomas More will get hold of them and shut them in his cellar. And all we will hear is the sound of screaming.

‘Now, Thomas.’ He looks up. ‘Do you have any Spanish?’

‘A little. Military, you know. Rough.’

‘You took service in the Spanish armies, I thought.’

‘French.’

‘Ah. Indeed. And no fraternising?’

‘Not past a point. I can insult people in Castilian.’

‘I shall bear that in mind,’ the cardinal says. ‘Your time may come. For now … I was thinking that it would be good to have more friends in the queen's household.’

Spies, he means. To see how she will take the news. To see what Queen Catalina will say, in private and unleashed, when she has slipped the noose of the diplomatic Latin in which it will be broken to her that the king – after they have spent some twenty years together – would like to marry another lady. Any lady. Any well-connected princess whom he thinks might give him a son.

The cardinal's chin rests on his hand; with finger and thumb, he rubs his eyes. ‘The king called me this morning,’ he says, ‘exceptionally early.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Pity. And at such an hour. I heard a dawn Mass with him, and he talked all through it. I love the king. God knows how I love him. But sometimes my faculty of commiseration is strained.’ He raises his glass, looks over the rim. ‘Picture to yourself, Tom. Imagine this. You are a man of some thirty-five years of age. You are in good health and of a hearty appetite, you have your bowels opened every day, your joints are supple, your bones support you, and in addition you are King of England. But.’ He shakes his head. ‘But! If only he wanted something simple. The Philosopher's Stone. The elixir of youth. One of those chests that occur in stories, full of gold pieces.’

‘And when you take some out, it just fills up again?’

‘Exactly. Now the chest of gold I have hopes of, and the elixir, all the rest. But where shall I begin looking for a son to rule his country after him?’

Behind the cardinal, moving a little in the draught, King Solomon bows, his face obscured. The Queen of Sheba – smiling, light-footed – reminds him of the young widow he lodged with when he lived in Antwerp. Since they had shared a bed, should he have married her? In honour, yes. But if he had married Anselma he couldn't have married Liz; and his children would be different children from the ones he has now.

‘If you cannot find him a son,’ he says, ‘you must find him a piece of scripture. To ease his mind.’

The cardinal appears to be looking for it, on his desk. ‘Well, Deuteronomy. Which positively recommends that a man should marry his deceased brother's wife. As he did.’ The cardinal sighs. ‘But he doesn't like Deuteronomy.’

Useless to say, why not? Useless to suggest that, if Deuteronomy orders you to marry your brother's relict, and Leviticus says don't, or you will not breed, you should try to live with the contradiction, and accept that the question of which takes priority was thrashed out in Rome, for a fat fee, by leading prelates, twenty years ago when the dispensations were issued, and delivered under papal seal.

‘I don't see why he takes Leviticus to heart. He has a daughter living.’

‘But I think it is generally understood, in the Scriptures, that “children” means “sons”.’

The cardinal justifies the text, referring to the Hebrew; his voice is mild, lulling. He loves to instruct, where there is the will to be instructed. They have known each other some years now, and though the cardinal is very grand, formality has faded between them. ‘I have a son,’ he says. ‘You know that, of course. God forgive me. A weakness of the flesh.’

The cardinal's son – Thomas Winter, they call him – seems inclined to scholarship and a quiet life; though his father may have other ideas. The cardinal has a daughter too, a young girl whom no one has seen. Rather pointedly, he has called her Dorothea, the gift of God; she is already placed in a convent, where she will pray for her parents.

‘And you have a son,’ the cardinal says. ‘Or should I say, you have one son you give your name to. But I suspect there are some you don't know, running around on the banks of the Thames?’

‘I hope not. I wasn't fifteen when I ran away.’

It amuses Wolsey, that he doesn't know his age. The cardinal peers down through the layers of society, to a stratum well below his own, as the butcher's beef-fed son; to a place where his servant is born, on a day unknown, in deep obscurity. His father was no doubt drunk at his birth; his mother, understandably, was preoccupied. Kat has assigned him a date; he is grateful for it.

‘Well, fifteen …’ the cardinal says. ‘But at fifteen I suppose you could do it? I know I could. Now I have a son, your boatman on the river has a son, your beggar on the street has a son, your would-be murderers in Yorkshire no doubt have sons who will be sworn to pursue you in the next generation, and you yourself, as we have agreed, have spawned a whole tribe of riverine brawlers – but the king, alone, has no son. Whose fault is that?’

‘God's?’

‘Nearer than God?’

‘The queen?’

‘More responsible for everything than the queen?’

He can't help a broad smile. ‘Yourself, Your Grace.’

‘Myself, My Grace. What am I going to do about it? I tell you what I might do. I might send Master Stephen to Rome to sound out the Curia. But then I need him here …’

Wolsey looks at his expression, and laughs. Squabbling underlings! He knows quite well that, dissatisfied with their original parentage, they are fighting to be his favourite son. ‘Whatever you think of Master Stephen, he is well grounded in canon law, and a very persuasive fellow, except when he tries to persuade you. I will tell you –’ He breaks off; he leans forward, he puts his great lion's head in his hands, the head that would indeed have worn the papal tiara, if at the last election the right money had been paid out to the right people. ‘I have begged him,’ the cardinal says. ‘Thomas, I sank to my knees and from that humble posture I tried to dissuade him. Majesty, I said, be guided by me. Nothing will ensue, if you wish to be rid of your wife, but a great deal of trouble and expense.’

‘And he said …?’

‘He held up a finger. In warning. “Never,” he said, “call that dear lady my wife, until you can show me why she is, and how it can be so. Till then, call her my sister, my dear sister. Since she was quite certainly my brother's wife, before going through a form of marriage with me.”’

You will never draw from Wolsey a word that is disloyal to the king. ‘What it is,’ he says, ‘it's …’ he hesitates over the word, ‘it's, in my opinion … preposterous. Though my opinion, of course, does not go out of this room. Oh, don't doubt it, there were those at the time who raised their eyebrows over the dispensation. And year by year there were persons who would murmur in the king's ear; he didn't listen, though now I must believe that he heard. But you know the king was the most uxorious of men. Any doubts were quashed.’ He places a hand, softly and firmly, down on his desk. ‘They were quashed and quashed.’

But there is no doubt of what Henry wants now. An annulment. A declaration that his marriage never existed. ‘For eighteen years,’ the cardinal says, ‘he has been under a mistake. He has told his confessor that he has eighteen years' worth of sin to expiate.’

He waits, for some gratifying small reaction. His servant simply looks back at him: taking it for granted that the seal of the confessional is broken at the cardinal's convenience.

‘So if you send Master Stephen to Rome,’ he says, ‘it will give the king's whim, if I may –’

The cardinal nods: you may so term it.

‘– an international airing?’

‘Master Stephen may go discreetly. As it were, for a private papal blessing.’

‘You don't understand Rome.’

Wolsey can't contradict him. He has never felt the chill at the nape of the neck that makes you look over your shoulder when, passing from the Tiber's golden light, you move into some great bloc of shadow. By some fallen column, by some chaste ruin, the thieves of integrity wait, some bishop's whore, some nephew-of-a-nephew, some monied seducer with furred breath; he feels, sometimes, fortunate to have escaped that city with his soul intact.

‘Put simply,’ he says, ‘the Pope's spies will guess what Stephen's about while he is still packing his vestments, and the cardinals and the secretaries will have time to fix their prices. If you must send him, give him a great deal of ready money. Those cardinals don't take promises; what they really like is a bag of gold to placate their bankers, because they're mostly run out of credit.’ He shrugs. ‘I know this.’

‘I should send you,’ the cardinal says, jolly. ‘You could offer Pope Clement a loan.’

Why not? He knows the money markets; it could probably be arranged. If he were Clement, he would borrow heavily this year to hire in troops to ring his territories. It's probably too late; for the summer season's fighting, you need to be recruiting by Candlemas. He says, ‘Will you not start the king's suit within your own jurisdiction? Make him take the first steps, then he will see if he really wants what he says he wants.’

‘That is my intention. What I mean to do is to convene a small court here in London. We will approach him in a shocked fashion: King Harry, you appear to have lived all these years in an unlawful manner, with a woman not your wife. He hates – saving His Majesty – to appear in the wrong: which is where we must put him, very firmly. Possibly he will forget that the original scruples were his. Possibly he will shout at us, and hasten in a fit of indignation back to the queen. If not, then I must have the dispensation revoked, here or in Rome, and if I succeed in parting him from Katherine I shall marry him, smartly, to a French princess.’

No need to ask if the cardinal has any particular princess in mind. He has not one but two or three. He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting, shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. While he is doing his best to keep the king married to Queen Katherine and her Spanish-Imperial family, by begging Henry to forget his scruples, he will also plan for an alternative world, in which the king's scruples must be heeded, and the marriage to Katherine is void. Once that nullity is recognised – and the last eighteen years of sin and suffering wiped from the page – he will readjust the balance of Europe, allying England with France, forming a power bloc to oppose the young Emperor Charles, Katherine's nephew. And all outcomes are likely, all outcomes can be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer and pressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass will pass by God's design, a design re-envisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal. He used to say, ‘The king will do such-and-such.’ Then he began to say, ‘We will do such-and-such.’ Now he says, ‘This is what I will do.’

‘But what will happen to the queen?’ he asks. ‘If he casts her off, where will she go?’

‘Convents can be comfortable.’

‘Perhaps she will go home to Spain.’

‘No, I think not. It is another country now. It is – what? – twenty-seven years since she landed in England.’ The cardinal sighs. ‘I remember her, at her coming-in. Her ships, as you know, had been delayed by the weather, and she had been day upon day tossed in the Channel. The old king rode down the country, determined to meet her. She was then at Dogmersfield, at the Bishop of Bath's palace, and making slow progress towards London; it was November and, yes, it was raining. At his arriving, her household stood upon their Spanish manners: the princess must remained veiled, until her husband sees her on her wedding day. But you know the old king!’

He did not, of course; he was born on or about the date the old king, a renegade and a refugee all his life, fought his way to an unlikely throne. Wolsey talks as if he himself had witnessed everything, eye-witnessed it, and in a sense he has, for the recent past arranges itself only in the patterns acknowledged by his superior mind, and agreeable to his eye. He smiles. ‘The old king, in his later years, the least thing could arouse his suspicion. He made some show of reining back to confer with his escort, and then he leapt – he was still a lean man – from the saddle, and told the Spanish to their faces, he would see her or else. My land and my laws, he said; we'll have no veils here. Why may I not see her, have I been cheated, is she deformed, is it that you are proposing to marry my son Arthur to a monster?’

Thomas thinks, he was being unnecessarily Welsh.

‘Meanwhile her women had put the little creature into bed; or said they had, for they thought that in bed she would be safe against him. Not a bit. King Henry strode through the rooms, looking as if he had in mind to tear back the bedclothes. The women bundled her into some decency. He burst into the chamber. At the sight of her, he forgot his Latin. He stammered and backed out like a tongue-tied boy.’ The cardinal chuckled. ‘And then when she first danced at court – our poor prince Arthur sat smiling on the dais, but the little girl could hardly sit still in her chair – no one knew the Spanish dances, so she took to the floor with one of her ladies. I will never forget that turn of her head, that moment when her beautiful red hair slid over one shoulder … There was no man who saw it who didn't imagine – though the dance was in fact very sedate … Ah dear. She was sixteen.’

The cardinal looks into space and Thomas says, ‘God forgive you?’

‘God forgive us all. The old king was constantly taking his lust to confession. Prince Arthur died, then soon after the queen died, and when the old king found himself a widower he thought he might marry Katherine himself. But then …’ He lifts his princely shoulders. ‘They couldn't agree over the dowry, you know. The old fox, Ferdinand, her father. He would fox you out of any payment due. But our present Majesty was a boy of ten when he danced at his brother's wedding, and, in my belief, it was there and then that he set his heart on the bride.’

They sit and think for a bit. It's sad, they both know it's sad. The old king freezing her out, keeping her in the kingdom and keeping her poor, unwilling to miss the part of the dowry he said was still owing, and equally unwilling to pay her widow's portion and let her go. But then it's interesting too, the extensive diplomatic contacts the little girl picked up during those years, the expertise in playing off one interest against another. When Henry married her he was eighteen, guileless. His father was no sooner dead than he claimed Katherine for his own. She was older than he was, and years of anxiety had sobered her and taken something from her looks. But the real woman was less vivid than the vision in his mind; he was greedy for what his older brother had owned. He felt again the little tremor of her hand, as she had rested it on his arm when he was a boy of ten. It was as if she had trusted him, as if – he told his intimates – she had recognised that she was never meant to be Arthur's wife, except in name; her body was reserved for him, the second son, upon whom she turned her beautiful blue-grey eyes, her compliant smile. She always loved me, the king would say. Seven years or so of diplomacy, if you can call it that, kept me from her side. But now I need fear no one. Rome has dispensed. The papers are in order. The alliances are set in place. I have married a virgin, since my poor brother did not touch her; I have married an alliance, her Spanish relatives; but, above all, I have married for love.

And now? Gone. Or as good as gone: half a lifetime waiting to be expunged, eased from the record.

‘Ah, well,’ the cardinal says. ‘What will be the outcome? The king expects his own way, but she, she will be hard to move.’

There is another story about Katherine, a different story. Henry went to France to have a little war; he left Katherine as regent. Down came the Scots; they were well beaten, and at Flodden the head of their king cut off. It was Katherine, that pink-and-white angel, who proposed to send the head in a bag by the first crossing, to cheer up her husband in his camp. They dissuaded her; told her it was, as a gesture, un-English. She sent, instead, a letter. And with it, the surcoat in which the Scottish king had died, which was stiffened, black and crackling with his pumped-out blood.

The fire dies, an ashy log subsiding; the cardinal, wrapped in his dreams, rises from his chair and personally kicks it. He stands looking down, twisting the rings on his fingers, lost in thought. He shakes himself and says, ‘Long day. Go home. Don't dream of Yorkshiremen.’

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation: so the Spanish ambassador will tell us, quite soon. It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt – ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.

He rises to leave, says, ‘If you did have a word with God and the sun came out, then the king could ride out with his gentlemen, and if he were not so fretted and confined then his spirits would rise, and he might not be thinking about Leviticus, and your life would be easier.’

‘You only partly understand him. He enjoys theology, almost as much as he enjoys riding out.’

He is at the door. Wolsey says, ‘By the way, the talk at court … His Grace the Duke of Norfolk is complaining that I have raised an evil spirit, and directed it to follow him about. If anyone mentions it to you … just deny it.’

He stands in the doorway, smiling slowly. The cardinal smiles too, as if to say, I have saved the good wine till last. Don't I know how to make you happy? Then the cardinal drops his head over his papers. He is a man who, in England's service, scarcely needs to sleep; four hours will refresh him, and he will be up when Westminster's bells have rung in another wet, smoky, lightless April day. ‘Good night,’ he says. ‘God bless you, Tom.’

Outside his people are waiting with lights to take him home. He has a house in Stepney but tonight he is going to his town house. A hand on his arm: Rafe Sadler, a slight young man with pale eyes. ‘How was Yorkshire?’

Rafe's smile flickers, the wind pulls the torch flame into a rainy blur.

‘I haven't to speak of it; the cardinal fears it will give us bad dreams.’

Rafe frowns. In all his twenty-one years he has never had bad dreams; sleeping securely under the Cromwell roof since he was seven, first at Fenchurch Street and now at the Austin Friars, he has grown up with a tidy mind, and his night-time worries are all rational ones: thieves, loose dogs, sudden holes in the road.

‘The Duke of Norfolk …’ he says, then, ‘no, never mind. Who's been asking for me while I've been away?’

The damp streets are deserted; the mist is creeping from the river. The stars are stifled in damp and cloud. Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odour of yesterday's unrecollected sins. Norfolk kneels, teeth chattering, beside his bed; the cardinal's late-night pen scratches, scratches, like a rat beneath his mattress. While Rafe, by his side, gives him a digest of the office news, he formulates his denial, for whom it may concern: ‘His Grace the cardinal wholly rejects any imputation that he has sent an evil spirit to wait upon the Duke of Norfolk. He deprecates the suggestion in the strongest possible terms. No headless calf, no fallen angel in the shape of loll-tongued dog, no crawling pre-used winding sheet, no Lazarus nor animated cadaver has been sent by His Grace to pursue His Grace: nor is any such pursuit pending.’

Someone is screaming, down by the quays. The boatmen are singing. There is a faint, faraway splashing; perhaps they are drowning someone. ‘My lord cardinal makes this statement without prejudice to his right to harass and distress my lord of Norfolk by means of any fantasma which he may in his wisdom elect: at any future date, and without notice given: subject only to the lord cardinal's views in the matter.’

This weather makes old scars ache. But he walks into his house as if it were midday: smiling, and imagining the trembling duke. It is one o'clock. Norfolk, in his mind, is still kneeling. A black-faced imp with a trident is pricking his calloused heels.

III At Austin Friars 1527

Lizzie is still up. When she hears the servants let him in, she comes out with his little dog under her arm, fighting and squealing.

‘Forget where you lived?’

He sighs.

‘How was Yorkshire?’

He shrugs.

‘The cardinal?’

He nods.

‘Eaten?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tired?’

‘Not really.’

‘Drink?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rhenish?’

‘Why not.’

The panelling has been painted. He walks into the subdued green and golden glow. ‘Gregory –’

‘Letter?’

‘Of sorts.’

She gives him the letter and the dog, while she fetches the wine. She sits down, taking a cup herself.

‘He greets us. As if there were only one of us. Bad Latin.’

‘Ah, well,’ she says.

‘So, listen. He hopes you are well. Hopes I am well. Hopes his lovely sisters Anne and little Grace are well. He himself is well. And now no more for lack of time, your dutiful son, Gregory Cromwell.’

‘Dutiful?’ she says. ‘Just that?’

‘It's what they teach them.’

The dog Bella nibbles his fingertips, her round innocent eyes shining at him like alien moons. Liz looks well, if worn by her long day; wax tapers stand tall and straight behind her. She is wearing the string of pearls and garnets that he gave her at New Year.

‘You're sweeter to look at than the cardinal,’ he says.

‘That's the smallest compliment a woman ever received.’

‘And I've been working on it all the way from Yorkshire.’ He shakes his head. ‘Ah well!’ He holds Bella up in the air; she kicks her legs in glee. ‘How's business?’

Liz does a bit of silk-work. Tags for the seals on documents; fine net cauls for ladies at court. She has two girl apprentices in the house, and an eye on fashion; but she complains, as always, about the middlemen, and the price of thread. ‘We should go to Genoa,’ he says. ‘I'll teach you to look the suppliers in the eye.’

‘I'd like that. But you'll never get away from the cardinal.’

‘He tried to persuade me tonight that I should get to know people in the queen's household. The Spanish-speakers.’

‘Oh?’

‘I told him my Spanish wasn't so good.’

‘Not good?’ She laughs. ‘You weasel.’

‘He doesn't have to know everything I know.’

‘I've been visiting in Cheapside,’ she says. She names one of her old friends, a master jeweller's wife. ‘Would you like the news? A big emerald was ordered and a setting commissioned, for a ring, a woman's ring.’ She shows him the emerald, big as her thumbnail.

‘Which arrived, after a few anxious weeks, and they were cutting it in Antwerp.’ Her fingers flick outwards. ‘Shattered!’

‘So who bears the loss?’

‘The cutter says he was swindled and it was a hidden flaw in the base. The importer says, if it was so hidden, how could I be expected to know? The cutter says, so collect damages from your supplier …’

‘They'll be at law for years. Can they get another?’

‘They're trying. It must be the king, so we think. Nobody else in London would be in the market for a stone of that size. So who's it for? It isn't for the queen.’

The tiny Bella now lies back along his arm, her eyes blinking, her tail gently stirring. He thinks, I shall be curious to see if and when an emerald ring appears. The cardinal will tell me. The cardinal says, it's all very well, this business of holding the king off and angling after presents, but he will have her in his bed this summer, for sure, and by the autumn he'll be tired of her, and pension her off; if he doesn't, I will. If Wolsey's going to import a fertile French princess, he doesn't want her first weeks spoiled by scenes of spite with superseded concubines. The king, Wolsey thinks, ought to be more ruthless about his women.

Liz waits for a moment, till she knows she isn't going to get a hint. ‘Now, about Gregory,’ she says. ‘Summer coming. Here, or away?’

Gregory is coming up thirteen. He's at Cambridge, with his tutor. He's sent his nephews, his sister Bet's sons, to school with him; it's something he is glad to do for the family. The summer is for their recreation; what would they do in the city? Gregory has little interest in his books so far, though he likes to be told stories, dragon stories, stories of green people who live in the woods; you can drag him squealing through a passage of Latin if you persuade him that over the page there's a sea serpent or a ghost. He likes to be in the woods and fields and he likes to hunt. He has plenty of growing to do, and we hope he will grow tall.

The king's maternal grandfather, as all old men will tell you, stood six foot four. (His father, however, was more the size of Morgan Williams.) The king stands six foot two, and the cardinal can look him in the eye. Henry likes to have about him men like his brother-in-law Charles Brandon, of a similar impressive height and breadth of padded shoulder. Height is not the fashion in the back alleys; and, obviously, not in Yorkshire.

He smiles. What he says about Gregory is, at least he isn't like I was, when I was his age; and when people say, what were you like? he says, oh, I used to stick knives in people. Gregory would never do that; so he doesn't mind – or minds less than people think – if he doesn't really get to grips with declensions and conjugations. When people tell him what Gregory has failed to do, he says, ‘He's busy growing.’ He understands his need to sleep; he never got much sleep himself, with Walter stamping around, and after he ran away he was always on the ship or on the road, and then he found himself in an army. The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbow-men are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.

‘Asleep?’ Liz says.

‘No. But dreaming.’

‘The Castile soap came. And your book from Germany. It was packaged as something else. I almost sent the boy away.’

In Yorkshire, which smelled of unwashed men, wearing sheepskins and sweating with anger, he had dreams about the Castile soap.

Later she says, ‘So who is the lady?’

His hand, resting on her familiar but lovely left breast, removes itself in bewilderment. ‘What?’ Does she think he has taken up with some woman in Yorkshire? He falls on to his back and wonders how to persuade her this is not so; if necessary he'll take her there, and then she'll see.

‘The emerald lady?’ she says. ‘I only ask because people say the king is wanting to do something very strange, and I can't really believe it. But that is the word in the city.’

Really? Rumour has advanced, in the fortnight while he has been north among the slope-heads.

‘If he tries this,’ she says, ‘then half the people in the world will be against it.’

He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn't say, which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. ‘All women,’ she says. ‘All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but no son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.’

She puts her head on his shoulder. Too tired to speak, they lie side by side, in sheets of fine linen, under a quilt of yellow turkey satin. Their bodies breathe out the faint borrowed scent of sun and herbs. In Castilian, he remembers, he can insult people.

‘Are you asleep now?’

‘No. Thinking.’

‘Thomas,’ she says, sounding shocked, ‘it's three o'clock.’

And then it is six. He dreams that all the women of England are in bed, jostling and pushing him out of it. So he gets up, to read his German book, before Liz can do anything about it.

It's not that she says anything; or only, when provoked, she says, ‘My prayer book is good reading for me.’ And indeed she does read her prayer book, taking it in her hand absently in the middle of the day – but only half stopping what she's doing – interspersing her murmured litany with household instructions; it was a wedding present, a book of hours, from her first husband, and he wrote her new married name in it, Elizabeth Williams. Sometimes, feeling jealous, he would like to write other things, contrarian sentiments: he knew Liz's first husband, but that doesn't mean he liked him. He has said, Liz, there's Tyndale's book, his New Testament, in the locked chest there, read it, here's the key; she says, you read it to me if you're so keen, and he says, it's in English, read it for yourself: that's the point, Lizzie. You read it, you'll be surprised what's not in it.

He'd thought this hint would draw her: seemingly not. He can't imagine himself reading to his household; he's not, like Thomas More, some sort of failed priest, a frustrated preacher. He never sees More – a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod – without wanting to ask him, what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory’. Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where it says ‘Pope’.

He turns back to his German book. The king, with help from Thomas More, has written a book against Luther, for which the Pope has granted him the title of Defender of the Faith. It's not that he loves Brother Martin himself; he and the cardinal agree it would be better if Luther had never been born, or better if he had been born more subtle. Still, he keeps up with what's written, with what's smuggled through the Channel ports, and the little East Anglian inlets, the tidal creeks where a small boat with dubious cargo can be beached and pushed out again, by moonlight, to sea. He keeps the cardinal informed, so that when More and his clerical friends storm in, breathing hellfire about the newest heresy, the cardinal can make calming gestures, and say, ‘Gentlemen, I am already informed.’ Wolsey will burn books, but not men. He did so, only last October, at St Paul's Cross: a holocaust of the English language, and so much rag-rich paper consumed, and so much black printers' ink.

The Testament he keeps in the chest is the pirated edition from Antwerp, which is easier to get hold of than the proper German printing. He knows William Tyndale; before London got too hot for him, he lodged six months with Humphrey Monmouth, the master draper, in the city. He is a principled man, a hard man, and Thomas More calls him The Beast; he looks as if he has never laughed in his life, but then, what's there to laugh about, when you're driven from your native shore? His Testament is in octavo, nasty cheap paper: on the title page, where the printer's colophon and address should be, the words ‘PRINTED IN UTOPIA’. He hopes Thomas More has seen one of these. He is tempted to show him, just to see his face.

He closes the new book. It's time to get on with the day. He knows he has not time to put the text into Latin himself, so it can be discreetly circulated; he should ask somebody to do it for him, for love or money. It is surprising how much love there is, these days, between those who read German.

By seven, he is shaved, breakfasted and wrapped beautifully in fresh unborrowed linen and dark fine wool. Sometimes, at this hour, he misses Liz's father; that good old man, who would always be up early, ready to drop a flat hand on his head and say, enjoy your day, Thomas, on my behalf.

He had liked old Wykys. He first came to him on a legal matter. In those days he was – what, twenty-six, twenty-seven? – not long back from abroad, prone to start a sentence in one language and finish it in another. Wykys had been shrewd and had made a tidy fortune in the wool trade. He was a Putney man originally, but that wasn't why he employed him; it was because he came recommended and came cheap. At their first conference, as Wykys laid out the papers, he had said, ‘You're Walter's lad, aren't you? So what happened? Because, by God, there was no one rougher than you were when you were a boy.’

He would have explained, if he'd known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, ‘I found an easier way to be.’

Latterly, Wykys had grown tired, let the business slide. He was still sending broadcloth to the north German market, when – in his opinion, with wool so long in the fleece these days, and good broadcloth hard to weave – he ought to be getting into kerseys, lighter cloth like that, exporting through Antwerp to Italy. But he listened – he was a good listener – to the old man's gripes, and said, ‘Things are changing. Let me take you to the cloth fairs this year.’

Wykys knew he should show his face in Antwerp and Bergen op Zoom, but he didn't like the crossing. ‘He'll be all right with me,’ he told Mistress Wykys. ‘I know a good family where we can stay.’

‘Right, Thomas Cromwell,’ she said. ‘Make a note of this. No strange Dutch drinks. No women. No banned preachers in cellars. I know what you do.’

‘I don't know if I can stay out of cellars.’

‘Here's a bargain. You can take him to a sermon if you don't take him to a brothel.’

Mercy, he suspects, comes from a family where John Wycliffe's writings are preserved and quoted, where the scriptures in English have always been known; scraps of writing hoarded, forbidden verses locked in the head. These things come down the generations, as eyes and noses come down, as meekness or the capacity for passion, as muscle power or the need to take a risk. If you must take risks these days, better the preacher than the whore; eschew Monsieur Breakbone, known in Florence as the Neapolitan Fever, and in Naples, no doubt, as Florence Rot. Good sense enforces abstinence – in any part of Europe, these islands included. Our lives are limited in this way, as the lives of our forefathers were not.

On the boat, he listened to the usual grievances from fellow passengers: these bastard pilots, lanes not marked, English monopolies. The merchants of the Hanse would rather their own men brought the ships up to Gravesend: Germans are a pack of thieves, but they know how to bring a boat upstream. Old Wykys was queasy when they put out to sea. He stayed on deck, making himself useful; you must have been a ship's boy, master, one of the crew said. Once in Antwerp, they made their way to the sign of the Holy Ghost. The servant opening the door shouted ‘It's Thomas come back to us,’ as if he'd risen from the dead. When the three old men came out, the three brothers from the boat, they clucked, ‘Thomas, our poor foundling, our runaway, our little beaten-up friend. Welcome, come in and get warm!’

Nowhere else but here is he still a runaway, still a little, beaten boy.

Their wives, their daughters, their dogs covered him in kisses. He left old Wykys by the fireside – it is surprising how international is the language of old men, swapping tips on salves for aches, commiserating with petty wretchednesses and discussing the whims and demands of their wives. The youngest brother would translate, as usual: straight-faced, even when the terms became anatomical.

He had gone out drinking with the three brothers' three sons. ‘Wat will je?’ they teased him. ‘The old man's business? His wife when he dies?’

‘No,’ he said, surprising himself. ‘I think I want his daughter.’

‘Young?’

‘A widow. Young enough.’

When he got back to London he knew he could turn the business around. Still, he needed to think of the day-to-day. ‘I've seen your stock,’ he said to Wykys. ‘I've seen your accounts. Now show me your clerks.’

That was the key, of course, the key that would unlock profit. People are always the key, and if you can look them in the face you can be pretty sure if they're honest and up to the job. He tossed out the dubious chief clerk – saying, you go, or we go to law – and replaced him with a stammering junior, a boy he'd been told was stupid. Timid, was all he was; he looked over his work each night, mildly and wordlessly indicating each error and omission, and in four weeks the boy was both competent and keen, and had taken to following him about like a puppy. Four weeks invested, and a few days down at the docks, checking who was on the take: by the year end, Wykys was back in profit.

Wykys stumped away after he showed him the figures. ‘Lizzie?’ he yelled. ‘Lizzie? Come downstairs.’

She came down.

‘You want a new husband. Will he do?’

She stood and looked him up and down. ‘Well, Father. You didn't pick him for his looks.’ To him, her eyebrows raised, she said, ‘Do you want a wife?’

‘Should I leave you to talk it over?’ old Wykys said. He seemed baffled: seemed to think they should sit down and write a contract there and then.

Almost, they did. Lizzie wanted children; he wanted a wife with city contacts and some money behind her. They were married in weeks. Gregory arrived within the year. Bawling, strong, one hour old, plucked from the cradle: he kissed the infant's fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

So this morning – waking early, brooding on what Liz said last night – he wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.

One can learn from that, he thinks.

It's eight o'clock. Lizzie is down. Her hair is pushed under a linen cap and her sleeves turned back. ‘Oh, Liz,’ he says, laughing at her. ‘You look like a baker's wife.’

‘You mind your manners,’ she says. ‘Pot-boy.’

Rafe comes in: ‘First back to my lord cardinal?’ Where else, he says. He gathers his papers for the day. Pats his wife, kisses his dog. Goes out. The morning is drizzly but brightening, and before they reach York Place it is clear the cardinal has been as good as his word. A wash of sunlight lies over the river, pale as the flesh of a lemon.

PART TWO

I Visitation 1529

They are taking apart the cardinal's house. Room by room, the king's men are stripping York Place of its owner. They are bundling up parchments and scrolls, missals and memoranda and the volumes of his personal accounts; they are taking even the ink and the quills. They are prising from the walls the boards on which the cardinal's coat of arms is painted.

They arrived on a Sunday, two vengeful grandees: the Duke of Norfolk a bright-eyed hawk, the Duke of Suffolk just as keen. They told the cardinal he was dismissed as Lord Chancellor, and demanded he hand over the Great Seal of England. He, Cromwell, touched the cardinal's arm. A hurried conference. The cardinal turned back to them, gracious: it appears a written request from the king is necessary; have you one? Oh: careless of you. It requires a lot of face to keep so calm; but then the cardinal has face.

‘You want us to ride back to Windsor?’ Charles Brandon is incredulous. ‘For a piece of paper? When the situation's plain?’

That's like Suffolk; to think the letter of the law is some kind of luxury. He whispers to the cardinal again, and the cardinal says, ‘No, I think we'd better tell them, Thomas … not prolong the matter beyond its natural life … My lords, my lawyer here says I can't give you the Seal, written request or not. He says that properly speaking I should only hand it to the Master of the Rolls. So you'd better bring him with you.’

He says, lightly, ‘Be glad we told you, my lords. Otherwise it would have been three trips, wouldn't it?’

Norfolk grins. He likes a scrap. ‘Am obliged, master,’ he says.

When they go Wolsey turns and hugs him, his face gleeful. Though it is the last of their victories and they know it, it is important to show ingenuity; twenty-four hours is worth buying, when the king is so changeable. Besides, they enjoyed it. ‘Master of the Rolls,’ Wolsey says. ‘Did you know that, or did you make it up?’

Monday morning the dukes are back. Their instructions are to turn out the occupants this very day, because the king wants to send in his own builders and furnishers and get the palace ready to hand over to the Lady Anne, who needs a London house of her own.

He's prepared to stand and argue the point: have I missed something? This palace belongs to the archdiocese of York. When was Lady Anne made an archbishop?

But the tide of men flooding in by the water stairs is sweeping them away. The two dukes have made themselves scarce, and there's nobody to argue with. What a terrible sight, someone says: Master Cromwell baulked of a fight. And now the cardinal's ready to go, but where? Over his customary scarlet, he is wearing a travelling cloak that belongs to someone else; they are confiscating his wardrobe piece by piece, so he has to grab what he can. It is autumn, and though he is a big man he feels the cold.

They are overturning chests and tipping out their contents. They scatter across the floor, letters from Popes, letters from the scholars of Europe: from Utrecht, from Paris, from Santiago de Compostela; from Erfurt, from Strassburg, from Rome. They are packing his gospels and taking them for the king's libraries. The texts are heavy to hold in the arms, and awkward as if they breathed; their pages are made of slunk vellum from stillborn calves, reveined by the illuminator in tints of lapis and leaf-green.

They take down the tapestries and leave the bare blank walls. They are rolled up, the woollen monarchs, Solomon and Sheba; as they are brought into coiled proximity, their eyes are filled by each other, and their tiny lungs breathe in the fibre of bellies and thighs. Down come the cardinal's hunting scenes, the scenes of secular pleasure: the sportive peasants splashing in ponds, the stags at bay, the hounds in cry, the spaniels held on leashes of silk and the mastiffs with their collars of spikes: the huntsmen with their studded belts and knives, the ladies on horseback with jaunty caps, the rush-fringed pond, the mild sheep at pasture, and the bluish feathered treetops, running away into a long plumed distance, to a scene of chalky bluffs and a white sailing sky.

The cardinal looks at the scavengers as they go about their work. ‘Have we refreshments for our visitors?’

In the two great rooms that adjoin the gallery they have set up trestle tables. Each trestle is twenty feet long and they are bringing up more. In the Gilt Chamber they have laid out the cardinal's gold plate, his jewels and precious stones, and they are deciphering his inventories and calling out the weight of the plate. In the Council Chamber they are stacking his silver and parcel-gilt. Because everything is listed, down to the last dented pan from the kitchens, they have put baskets under the tables so they can throw in any item unlikely to catch the eye of the king. Sir William Gascoigne, the cardinal's treasurer, is moving constantly between the rooms, preoccupied, talking, directing the attention of the commissioners to any corner, any press and chest that he thinks they may have overlooked.

Behind him trots George Cavendish, the cardinal's gentleman usher; his face is raw and open with dismay. They bring out the cardinal's vestments, his copes. Stiff with embroidery, strewn with pearls, encrusted with gemstones, they seem to stand by themselves. The raiders knock down each one as if they are knocking down Thomas Becket. They itemise it, and having reduced it to its knees and broken its spine, they toss it into their travelling crates. Cavendish flinches: ‘For God's sake, gentlemen, line those chests with a double thickness of cambric. Would you shred the fine work that has taken nuns a lifetime?’ He turns: ‘Master Cromwell, do you think we can get these people out before dark?’

‘Only if we help them. If it's got to be done, we can make sure they do it properly.’

This is an indecent spectacle: the man who has ruled England, reduced. They have brought out bolts of fine holland, velvets and grosgrain, sarcenet and taffeta, scarlet by the yard: the scarlet silk in which he braves the summer heat of London, the crimson brocades that keep his blood warm when snow falls on Westminster and whisks in sleety eddies over the Thames. In public the cardinal wears red, just red, but in various weights, various weaves, various degrees of pigment and dye, but all of them the best of their kind, the best reds to be got for money. There have been days when, swaggering out, he would say, ‘Right, Master Cromwell, price me by the yard!’

And he would say, ‘Let me see,’ and walk slowly around the cardinal; and saying ‘May I?’ he would pinch a sleeve between an expert forefinger and thumb; and standing back, he would view him, to estimate his girth – year on year, the cardinal expands – and so come up with a figure. The cardinal would clap his hands, delighted. ‘Let the begrudgers behold us! On, on, on.’ His procession would form up, his silver crosses, his sergeants-at-arms with their axes of gilt: for the cardinal went nowhere, in public, without a procession.

So day by day, at his request and to amuse him, he would put a value on his master. Now the king has sent an army of clerks to do it. But he would like to take away their pens by force and write across their inventories: Thomas Wolsey is a man beyond price.

‘Now, Thomas,’ the cardinal says, patting him. ‘Everything I have, I have from the king. The king gave it to me, and if it pleases him to take York Place fully furnished, I am sure we own other houses, we have other roofs to shelter under. This is not Putney, you know.’ The cardinal holds on to him. ‘So I forbid you to hit anyone.’ He affects to be pressing his arms by his sides, in smiling restraint. The cardinal's fingers tremble.

The treasurer Gascoigne comes in and says, ‘I hear Your Grace is to go straight to the Tower.’

‘Do you?’ he says. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘Sir William Gascoigne,’ the cardinal says, measuring out his name, ‘what do you suppose I have done that would make the king want to send me to the Tower?’

‘It's like you,’ he says to Gascoigne, ‘to spread every story you're told. Is that all the comfort you've got to offer – walk in here with evil rumours? Nobody's going to the Tower. We're going’ – and the household waits, breath held, as he improvises – ‘to Esher. And your job,’ he can't help giving Gascoigne a little shove in the chest, ‘is to keep an eye on all these strangers and see that everything that's taken out of here gets where it's meant to go, and that nothing goes missing by the way, because if it does you'll be beating on the gates of the Tower and begging them to take you in, to get away from me.’

Various noises: mainly, from the back of the room, a sort of stifled cheer. It's hard to escape the feeling that this is a play, and the cardinal is in it: the Cardinal and his Attendants. And that it is a tragedy.

Cavendish tugs at him, anxious, sweating. ‘But Master Cromwell, the house at Esher is an empty house, we haven't a pot, we haven't a knife or a spit, where will my lord cardinal sleep, I doubt we have a bed aired, we have neither linen nor firewood nor … and how are we going to get there?’

‘Sir William,’ the cardinal says to Gascoigne, ‘take no offence from Master Cromwell, who is, upon the occasion, blunt to a fault; but take what is said to heart. Since everything I have proceeds from the king, everything must be delivered back in good order.’ He turns away, his lips twitching. Except when he teased the dukes yesterday, he hasn't smiled in a month. ‘Tom,’ he says, ‘I've spent years teaching you not to talk like that.’

Cavendish says to him, ‘They haven't seized my lord cardinal's barge yet. Nor his horses.’

‘No?’ He lays a hand on Cavendish's shoulder: ‘We go upriver, as many as the barge will take. Horses can meet us at – at Putney, in fact – and then we will … borrow things. Come on, George Cavendish, exercise some ingenuity, we've done more difficult things in these last years than get the household to Esher.’

Is this true? He's never taken much notice of Cavendish, a sensitive sort of man who talks a lot about table napkins. But he's trying to think of a way to put some military backbone into him, and the best way lies in suggesting that they are brothers from some old campaign.

‘Yes, yes,’ Cavendish says, ‘we'll order up the barge.’

Good, he says, and the cardinal says, Putney? and he tries to laugh. He says, well, Thomas, you told Gascoigne, you did; there's something about that man I never have liked, and he says, why did you keep him then? and the cardinal says, oh, well, one does, and again the cardinal says, Putney, eh?

He says, ‘Whatever we face at journey's end, we shall not forget how nine years ago, for the meeting of two kings, Your Grace created a golden city in some sad damp fields in Picardy. Since then, Your Grace has only increased in wisdom and the king's esteem.’

He is speaking for everyone to hear; and he thinks, that occasion was about peace, notionally, whereas this occasion, we don't know what this is, it is the first day of a long or a short campaign; we had better dig in and hope our supply lines hold. ‘I think we will manage to find some fire irons and soup kettles and whatever else George Cavendish thinks we can't do without. When I remember that Your Grace provisioned the king's great armies, that went to fight in France.’

‘Yes,’ the cardinal says, ‘and we all know what you thought about our campaigns, Thomas.’

Cavendish says, ‘What?’ and the cardinal says, ‘George, don't you call to mind what my man Cromwell said in the House of Commons, was it five years past, when we wanted a subsidy for the new war?’

‘But he spoke against Your Grace!’

Gascoigne – who hangs doggedly to this conversation – says, ‘You didn't advance yourself there, master, speaking against the king and my lord cardinal, because I do remember your speech, and I assure you so will others, and you bought yourself no favours there, Cromwell.’

He shrugs. ‘I didn't mean to buy favour. We're not all like you, Gascoigne. I wanted the Commons to take some lessons from the last time. To cast their minds back.’

‘You said we'd lose.’

‘I said we'd be bankrupted. But I tell you, all our wars would have ended much worse without my lord cardinal to supply them.’

‘In the year 1523 –’ Gascoigne says.

‘Must we refight this now?’ says the cardinal.

‘– the Duke of Suffolk was only fifty miles from Paris.’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and do you know what fifty miles is, to a half-starved infantryman in winter, when he sleeps on wet ground and wakes up cold? Do you know what fifty miles is to a baggage train, with carts up to the axles in mud? And as for the glories of 1513 – God defend us.’

‘Tournai! Thérouanne!’ Gascoigne shouts. ‘Are you blind to what occurred? Two French towns taken! The king so valiant in the field!’

If we were in the field now, he thinks, I'd spit at your feet. ‘If you like the king so much, go and work for him. Or do you already?’

The cardinal clears his throat softly. ‘We all do,’ Cavendish says, and the cardinal says, ‘Thomas, we are the works of his hand.’

When they get out to the cardinal's barge his flags are flying: the Tudor rose, the Cornish choughs. Cavendish says, wide-eyed, ‘Look at all these little boats, waffeting up and down.’ For a moment, the cardinal thinks the Londoners have turned out to wish him well. But as he enters the barge, there are sounds of hooting and booing from the boats; spectators crowd the bank, and though the cardinal's men keep them back, their intent is clear enough. When the oars begin to row upstream, and not downstream to the Tower, there are groans and shouted threats.

It is then that the cardinal collapses, falling into his seat, beginning to talk, and talks, talks, talks, all the way to Putney. ‘Do they hate me so much? What have I done but promote their trades and show them my goodwill? Have I sown hatred? No. Persecuted none. Sought remedies every year when wheat was scarce. When the apprentices rioted, begged the king on my knees with tears in my eyes to spare the offenders, while they stood garlanded with the nooses that were to hang them.’

‘The multitude,’ Cavendish says, ‘is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down – for the novelty of the thing.’

‘Fifteen years Chancellor. Twenty in his service. His father's before that. Never spared myself … rising early, watching late …’

‘There, you see,’ Cavendish says, ‘what it is to serve a prince! We should be wary of their vacillations of temper.’

‘Princes are not obliged to consistency,’ he says. He thinks, I may forget myself, lean across and push you overboard.

The cardinal has not forgotten himself, far from it; he is looking back, back twenty years to the young king's accession. ‘Put him to work, said some. But I said, no, he is a young man. Let him hunt, joust, and fly his hawks and falcons …’

‘Play instruments,’ Cavendish says. ‘Always plucking at something or other. And singing.’

‘You make him sound like Nero.’

‘Nero?’ Cavendish jumps. ‘I never said so.’

‘The gentlest, wisest prince in Christendom,’ says the cardinal. ‘I will not hear a word against him from any man.’

‘Nor shall you,’ he says.

‘But what I would do for him! Cross the Channel as lightly as a man might step across a stream of piss in the street.’ The cardinal shakes his head. ‘Waking and sleeping, on horseback or at my beads … twenty years …’

‘Is it something to do with the English?’ Cavendish asks earnestly. He's still thinking of the uproar back there when they embarked; and even now, people are running along the banks, making obscene signs and whistling. ‘Tell us, Master Cromwell, you've been abroad. Are they particularly an ungrateful nation? It seems to me that they like change for the sake of it.’

‘I don't think it's the English. I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better.’

‘But what do they get by the change?’ Cavendish persists. ‘One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honour, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.’

He closes his eyes. The river shifts beneath them, dim figures in an allegory of Fortune. Decayed Magnificence sits in the centre. Cavendish, leaning at his right like a Virtuous Councillor, mutters words of superfluous and belated advice, to which the sorry magnate inclines his head; he, like a Tempter, is seated on the left, and the cardinal's great hand, with its knuckles of garnet and tourmaline, grips his own hand painfully. George would certainly go in the river, except that what he's saying, despite the platitudes, makes a bleak sense. And why? Stephen Gardiner, he thinks. It may not be proper to call the cardinal a dog grown fat, but Stephen is definitely hungry and lean, and has been promoted by the king to a place as his own private secretary. It is not unusual for the cardinal's staff to transfer in this way, after careful nurture in the Wolsey school of craft and diligence; but still, this places Stephen as the man who – if he manages his duties properly – may be closer than anyone to the king, except perhaps for the gentleman who attends him at his close-stool and hands him a diaper cloth. I wouldn't so much mind, he thinks, if Stephen got that job.

The cardinal closes his eyes. Tears are seeping from beneath his lids. ‘For it is a truth,’ says Cavendish, ‘that fortune is inconstant, fickle and mutable …’

All he has to do is to make a strangling motion, quickly, while the cardinal has his eyes shut. Cavendish, putting a hand to his throat, takes the point. And then they look at each other, sheepish. One of them has said too much; one of them has felt too much. It is not easy to know where the balance rests. His eyes scan the banks of the Thames. Still, the cardinal weeps and grips his hand.

As they move upriver, the littoral ceases to alarm. It is not because, in Putney, Englishmen are less fickle. It's just that they haven't heard yet.

The horses are waiting. The cardinal, in his capacity as a churchman, has always ridden a large strong mule; though, since he has hunted with kings for twenty years, his stable is the envy of every nobleman. Here the beast stands, twitching long ears, in its usual scarlet trappings, and by him Master Sexton, the cardinal's fool.

‘What in God's name is he doing here?’ he asks Cavendish.

Sexton comes forward and says something in the cardinal's ear; the cardinal laughs. ‘Very good, Patch. Now, help me mount, there's a good fellow.’

But Patch – Master Sexton – is not up to the job. The cardinal seems weakened; he seems to feel the weight of his flesh hanging on his bones. He, Cromwell, slides from his saddle, nods to three of the stouter servants. ‘Master Patch, hold Christopher's head.’ When Patch pretends not to know that Christopher is the mule, and puts a headlock on the man next to him, he says, oh for Jesus' sake, Sexton, get out of the way, or I'll stuff you in a sack and drown you.

The man who's nearly had his head pulled off stands up, rubs his neck; says, thanks Master Cromwell, and hobbles forward to hold the bridle. He, Cromwell, with two others, hauls the cardinal into the saddle. The cardinal looks shamefaced. ‘Thank you, Tom.’ He laughs shakily. ‘That's you told, Patch.’

They are ready to ride. Cavendish looks up. ‘Saints protect us!’ A single horseman is heading downhill at a gallop. ‘An arrest!’

‘By one man?’

‘An outrider,’ says Cavendish, and he says, Putney's rough but you don't have to send out scouts. Then someone shouts, ‘It's Harry Norris.’ Harry throws himself from his mount. Whatever he's come to do, he's in a lather about it. Harry Norris is one of the king's closest friends; he is, to be exact, the Groom of the Stool, the man who hands the diaper cloth.

Wolsey sees, immediately, that the king wouldn't send Norris to take him into custody. ‘Now, Sir Henry, get your breath back. What can be so urgent?’

Norris says, beg pardon, my lord, my lord cardinal, sweeps off his feathered cap, wipes his face with his arm, smiles in his most engaging fashion. He speaks to the cardinal gracefully: the king has commanded him to ride after His Grace and overtake him, and speak words of comfort to him and give him this ring, which he knows well – a ring which he holds out, in the palm of his glove.

The cardinal scrambles from his mule and falls to the ground. He takes the ring and presses it to his lips. He's praying. Praying, thanking Norris, calling for blessings on his sovereign. ‘I have nothing to send him. Nothing of value to send to the king.’ He looks around him, as if his eye might light on something he can send; a tree? Norris tries to get him on his feet, ends up kneeling beside him, kneeling – this neat and charming man – in the Putney mud. The message he's giving the cardinal, it seems, is that the king only appears displeased, but is not really displeased; that he knows the cardinal has enemies; that he himself, Henricus Rex, is not one of them; that this show of force is only to satisfy those enemies; that he is able to recompense the cardinal with twice as much as has been taken from him.

The cardinal begins to cry. It's starting to rain, and the wind blows the rain across their faces. The cardinal speaks to Norris fast, in a low voice, and then he takes a chain from around his neck and tries to hang it around Norris's neck, and it gets tangled up in the fastenings of his riding cape and several people rush forward to help and fail, and Norris gets up and begins to brush himself down with one glove while clutching the chain in the other. ‘Wear it,’ the cardinal begs him, ‘and when you look at it think of me, and commend me to the king.’

Cavendish jolts up, riding knee-to-knee. ‘His reliquary!’ George is upset, astonished. ‘To part with it like this! It is a piece of the true Cross!’

‘We'll get him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten for five florins and a round dozen for cash up front. And you get a certificate with St Peter's thumbprint, to say they're genuine.’

‘For shame!’ Cavendish says, and twitches his horse away.

Now Norris is backing away too, his message delivered, and they are trying to get the cardinal back on his mule. This time, four big men step forward, as if it were routine. The play has turned into some kind of low comic interlude; that, he thinks, is why Patch is here. He rides over and says, looking down from the saddle, ‘Norris, can we have all this in writing?’

Norris smiles, says, ‘Hardly, Master Cromwell; it's a confidential message to my lord cardinal. My master's words were meant only for him.’

‘So what about this recompense you mention?’

Norris laughs – as he always does, to disarm hostility – and whispers, ‘I think it might be figurative.’

‘I think it might be, too.’ Double the cardinal's worth? Not on Henry's income. ‘Give us back what's been taken. We don't ask double.’

Norris's hand goes to the chain, now slung about his neck. ‘But it all proceeds from the king. You can't call it theft.’

‘I didn't call it theft.’

Norris nods, thoughtful. ‘No more did you.’

‘They shouldn't have taken the vestments. They belong to my lord as churchman. What will they have next? His benefices?’

‘Esher – which is where you are going, are you not? – is of course one of the houses which my lord cardinal holds as Bishop of Winchester.’

‘And?’

‘He remains for the while in that estate and title, but … shall we say … it must come under the king's consideration? You know my lord cardinal is indicted under the statutes of praemunire, for asserting a foreign jurisdiction in the land.’

‘Don't teach me the law.’

Norris inclines his head.

He thinks, since last spring, when things began to go wrong, I should have persuaded my lord cardinal to let me manage his revenues, and put some money away abroad where they can't get it; but then he would never admit that anything was wrong. Why did I let him rest so cheerful?

Norris's hand is on his horse's bridle. ‘I was ever a person who admired your master,’ he says, ‘and I hope that in his adversity he will remember that.’

‘I thought he wasn't in adversity? According to you.’

How simple it would be, if he were allowed to reach down and shake some straight answers out of Norris. But it's not simple; this is what the world and the cardinal conspire to teach him.

Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook; somehow he thinks that's what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, the cardinal in the mud, the humiliating tussle to get him back in the saddle, the talking, talking on the barge, and worse, the talking, talking on his knees, as if Wolsey's unravelling, in a great unweaving of scarlet thread that might lead you back into a scarlet labyrinth, with a dying monster at its heart.

‘Master Cromwell?’ Norris says.

He can hardly say what he's thinking; so he looks down at Norris, his expression softened, and says, ‘Thanks for this much comfort.’

‘Well, take my lord cardinal out of the rain. I'll tell the king how I found him.’

‘Tell him how you knelt in the mud together. He might be amused.’

‘Yes.’ Norris looks sad. ‘You never know what will do it.’

It is at this point that Patch starts screaming. The cardinal, it seems – casting around for a gift – has given him to the king. Patch, he has often said, is worth a thousand pounds. He is to go with Norris, no time like the present; and it takes four more of the cardinal's men to subdue him to the purpose. He fights. He bites. He lashes out with fists and feet. Till he is thrown on to a baggage mule, stripped of its baggage; till he begins to cry, hiccupping, his ribs heaving, his stupid feet dangling, his coat torn and the feather in his hat broken off to a stub.

‘But Patch,’ the cardinal says, ‘my dear fellow. You shall see me often, once the king and I understand each other again. My dear Patch, I will write you a letter, a letter of your own. I shall write it tonight,’ he promises, ‘and put my big seal on it. The king will cherish you; he is the kindest soul in Christendom.’

Patch wails on a single thin note, like someone taken by the Turks and impaled.

There, he says to Cavendish, he's more than one kind of fool. He shouldn't have drawn attention to himself, should he.

Esher: the cardinal dismounts under the shadow of old Bishop Wayneflete's keep, surmounted by octagonal towers. The gateway is set into a defensive wall topped with a walkway; stern enough at first sight, but the whole thing is built of brick, ornamented and prettily inlaid. ‘You couldn't fortify it,’ he says. Cavendish is silent. ‘George, you're supposed to say, “But the need could never arise.”’

The cardinal's not used the place since he built Hampton Court. They've sent messages ahead, but has anything been done? Make my lord comfortable, he says, and goes straight down to the kitchens. At Hampton Court, the kitchens have running water; here, nothing's running but the cooks' noses. Cavendish is right. In fact it is worse than he thinks. The larders are impoverished and such supplies as they have show signs of ill-keeping and plunder. There are weevils in the flour. There are mouse droppings where the pastry should be rolled. It is nearly Martinmas, and they have not even thought of salting their beef. The batterie de cuisine is an insult, and the stockpot is mildewed. There are a number of small boys sitting by the hearth, and, for cash down, they can be induced into scouring and scrubbing; children take readily to novelty, and the idea of cleaning, it seems, is novel to them.

My lord, he says, needs to eat and drink now; and he needs to eat and drink for … how long we don't know. This kitchen must be put in order for the winter ahead. He finds someone who can write, and dictates his orders. His eyes are fixed on the kitchen clerk. On his left hand he counts off the items: you do this, then this, then thirdly this. With his right hand, he breaks eggs into a basin, each one with a hard professional tap, and between his fingers the white drips, sticky and slow, from the yolk. ‘How old is this egg? Change your supplier. I want a nutmeg. Nutmeg? Saffron?’ They look at him as if he's speaking Greek. Patch's thin scream is still hurting his ears. Dusty angels look down on him as he pounds back to the hall.

It is late before they get the cardinal into any sort of bed worthy of the name. Where is his household steward? Where is his comptroller? By this time, he feels it is true that he and Cavendish are old survivors of a campaign. He stays up with Cavendish – not that there are beds, if they wanted them – working out what they need to keep the cardinal in reasonable comfort; they need plate, unless my lord's going to dine off dented pewter, they need bedsheets, table linen, firewood. ‘I will send some people,’ he says, ‘to sort out the kitchens. They will be Italian. It will be violent at first, but then after three weeks it will work.’

Three weeks? He wants to set those children cleaning the copper. ‘Can we get lemons?’ he asks, just as Cavendish says, ‘So who will be Chancellor now?’

I wonder, he thinks, are there rats down there? Cavendish says, ‘Recall His Grace of Canterbury?’

Recall him – fifteen years after the cardinal chivvied him out of that office? ‘No, Warham's too old.’ And too stubborn, too unaccommodating to the king's wishes. ‘And not the Duke of Suffolk’ – because in his view Charles Brandon is no brighter than Christopher the mule, though better at fighting and fashion and generally showing off – ‘not Suffolk, because the Duke of Norfolk won't have him.’

‘And vice versa.’ Cavendish nods. ‘Bishop Tunstall?’

‘No. Thomas More.’

‘But, a layman and a commoner? And when he's so opposed in the matter of the king's marriage suit.’

He nods, yes, yes, it will be More. The king is known for putting out his conscience to high bidders. Perhaps he hopes to be saved from himself.

‘If the king offers it – and I see that, as a gesture, he might – surely Thomas More won't accept?’

‘He will.’

‘Bet?’ says Cavendish.

They agree the terms and shake hands on it. It takes their mind off the urgent problem, which is the rats, and the cold; which is the question of how they can pack a household staff of several hundred, retained at Westminster, into the much smaller space at Esher. The cardinal's staff, if you include his principal houses, and count them up from priests, law clerks, down to floor-sweepers and laundresses, is about six hundred souls. They expect three hundred following them immediately. ‘As things stand, we'll have to break up the household,’ Cavendish says. ‘But we've no ready money for wages.’

‘I'm damned if they're going unpaid,’ he says, and Cavendish says, ‘I think you are anyway. After what you said about the relic.’

He catches George's eye. They start to laugh. At least they've got something worthwhile to drink; the cellars are full, which is lucky, Cavendish says, because we'll need a drink over the next weeks. ‘What do you think Norris meant?’ George says. ‘How can the king be in two minds? How can my lord cardinal be dismissed if he doesn't want to dismiss him? How can the king give way to my lord's enemies? Isn't the king master, over all the enemies?’

‘You would think so.’

‘Or is it her? It must be. He's frightened of her, you know. She's a witch.’

He says, don't be childish. George says, she is so a witch: the Duke of Norfolk says she is, and he's her uncle, he should know.

It's two o'clock, then it's three; sometimes it's freeing, to think you don't have to go to bed because there isn't a bed. He doesn't need to think of going home; there's no home to go to, he's got no family left. He'd rather be here drinking with Cavendish, huddled in a corner of the great chamber at Esher, cold and tired and frightened of the future, than think about his family and what he's lost. ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, ‘I'll get my clerks down from London and we'll try and make sense of what my lord still has by way of assets, which won't be easy as they've taken all the paperwork. His debtors won't be inclined to pay up when they know what's happened. But the French king pays him a pension, and if I remember it's always in arrears … Maybe he'd like to send a bag of gold, pending my lord's return to favour. And you – you can go looting.’

Cavendish is hollow-faced and hollow-eyed when he throws him on to a fresh horse at first light. ‘Call in some favours. There's hardly a gentleman in the realm that doesn't owe my lord cardinal something.’

It's late October, the sun a coin barely flipped above the horizon. ‘Keep him cheerful,’ Cavendish says. ‘Keep him talking. Keep him talking about what Harry Norris said …’

‘Off you go. If you should see the coals on which St Lawrence was roasted, we could make good use of them here.’

‘Oh, don't,’ Cavendish begs. He has come far since yesterday, and is able to make jokes about holy martyrs; but he drank too much last night, and it hurts him to laugh. But not to laugh is painful too. George's head droops, the horse stirs beneath him, his eyes are full of bafflement. ‘How did it come to this?’ he asks. ‘My lord cardinal kneeling in the dirt. How could it happen? How in the world could it?’

He says, ‘Saffron. Raisins. Apples. And cats, get cats, huge starving ones. I don't know, George, where do cats come from? Oh, wait! Do you think we can get partridges?’

If we can get partridges we can slice the breasts, and braise them at the table. Whatever we can do that way, we will; and so, if we can help it, my lord won't be poisoned.

II An Occult History of Britain 1521–1529

Once, in the days of time immemorial, there was a king of Greece who had thirty-three daughters. Each of these daughters rose up in revolt and murdered her husband. Perplexed as to how he had bred such rebels, but not wanting to kill his own flesh and blood, their princely father exiled them and set them adrift in a rudderless ship.

Their ship was provisioned for six months. By the end of this period, the winds and tides had carried them to the edge of the known earth. They landed on an island shrouded in mist. As it had no name, the eldest of the killers gave it hers: Albina.

When they hit shore, they were hungry and avid for male flesh. But there were no men to be found. The island was home only to demons.

The thirty-three princesses mated with the demons and gave birth to a race of giants, who in turn mated with their mothers and produced more of their own kind. These giants spread over the whole landmass of Britain. There were no priests, no churches and no laws. There was also no way of telling the time.

After eight centuries of rule, they were overthrown by Trojan Brutus.

The great-grandson of Aeneas, Brutus was born in Italy; his mother died in giving birth to him, and his father, by accident, he killed with an arrow. He fled his birthplace and became leader of a band of men who had been slaves in Troy. Together they embarked on a voyage north, and the vagaries of wind and tide drove them to Albina's coast, as the sisters had been driven before. When they landed they were forced to do battle with the giants, led by Gogmagog. The giants were defeated and their leader thrown into the sea.

Whichever way you look at it, it all begins in slaughter. Trojan Brutus and his descendants ruled till the coming of the Romans. Before London was called Lud's Town, it was called New Troy. And we were Trojans.

Some say the Tudors transcend this history, bloody and demonic as it is: that they descend from Brutus through the line of Constantine, son of St Helena, who was a Briton. Arthur, High King of Britain, was Constantine's grandson. He married up to three women, all called Guinevere, and his tomb is at Glastonbury, but you must understand that he is not really dead, only waiting his time to come again.

His blessed descendant, Prince Arthur of England, was born in the year 1486, eldest son of Henry, the first Tudor king. This Arthur married Katherine the princess of Aragon, died at fifteen and was buried in Worcester Cathedral. If he were alive now, he would be King of England. His younger brother Henry would likely be Archbishop of Canterbury, and would not (at least, we devoutly hope not) be in pursuit of a woman of whom the cardinal hears nothing good: a woman to whom, several years before the dukes walk in to despoil him, he will need to turn his attention; whose history, before ruin seizes him, he will need to comprehend.

Beneath every history, another history.

The lady appeared at court at the Christmas of 1521, dancing in a yellow dress. She was – what? – about twenty years old. Daughter of the diplomat, Thomas Boleyn, she has been brought up since childhood in the Burgundian court at Mechelen and Brussels, and more recently in Paris, moving in Queen Claude's train between the pretty chateaux of the Loire. Now she speaks her native tongue with a slight, unplaceable accent, strewing her sentences with French words when she pretends she can't think of the English. At Shrovetide, she dances in a court masque. The ladies are costumed as Virtues, and she takes the part of Perseverance. She dances gracefully but briskly, with an amused expression on her face, a hard, impersonal touch-me-not smile. Soon she has a little trail of petty gentlemen following her; and one not so petty gentleman. The rumour spreads that she is going to marry Harry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland's heir.

The cardinal hauls in her father. ‘Sir Thomas Boleyn,’ he says, ‘speak to your daughter, or I will. We brought her back from France to marry her into Ireland, to the Butlers' heir. Why does she tarry?’

‘The Butlers …’ Sir Thomas begins, and the cardinal says, ‘Oh yes? The Butlers what? Any problem you have there, I'll fix the Butlers. What I want to know is, did you put her up to it? Conniving in corners with that foolish boy? Because, Sir Thomas, let me make myself plain: I won't have it. The king won't have it. It must be stopped.’

‘I have scarcely been in England these last months. Your Grace cannot think that I am party to the scheme.’

‘No? You would be surprised what I can think. Is this your best excuse? That you can't govern your own children?’

Sir Thomas is looking wry and holding out his hands. He's on the verge of saying, young people today … But the cardinal stops him. The cardinal suspects – and has confided his suspicion – that the young woman is not enticed by the prospect of Kilkenny Castle and its frugal amenities, nor by the kind of social life that will be available to her when, on special occasions, she hacks on the poor dirt roads to Dublin.

‘Who's that?’ Boleyn says. ‘In the corner there?’

The cardinal waves a hand. ‘Just one of my legal people.’

‘Send him out.’

The cardinal sighs.

‘Is he taking notes of this conversation?’

‘Are you, Thomas?’ the cardinal calls. ‘If so, stop it at once.’

Half the world is called Thomas. Afterwards, Boleyn will never be sure if it was him.

‘Look now, my lord,’ he says, his voice playing up and down the diplomat's scales: he is frank, a man of the world, and his smile says, now Wolsey, now Wolsey, you're a man of the world too. ‘They're young.’ He makes a gesture, designed to impersonate frankness. ‘She caught the boy's eye. It's natural. I've had to break it to her. She knows it can't proceed. She knows her place.’

‘Good,’ the cardinal says, ‘because it's below a Percy. I mean,’ he adds, ‘below, in the dynastic sense. I am not speaking of what one might do in a haystack on a warm night.’

‘He doesn't accept it, the young man. They tell him to marry Mary Talbot, but …’ and Boleyn gives a little careless laugh, ‘he doesn't care to marry Mary Talbot. He believes he is free to choose his wife.’

‘Choose his –!’ the cardinal breaks off. ‘I never heard the like. He's not some ploughboy. He's the man who will have to hold the north for us, one of these days, and if he doesn't understand his position in the world then he must learn it or forfeit it. The match already made with Shrewsbury's daughter is a fit match for him, and a match made by me, and agreed by the king. And the Earl of Shrewsbury, I can tell you, doesn't take kindly to this sort of moonstruck clowning by a boy who's promised to his daughter.’

‘The difficulty is …’ Boleyn allows a discreet diplomatic pause. ‘I think that, Harry Percy and my daughter, they may have gone a little far in the matter.’

‘What? You mean we are speaking of a haystack and a warm night?’

From the shadows he watches; he thinks Boleyn is the coldest, smoothest man he has ever seen.

‘From what they tell me, they have pledged themselves before witnesses. How can it be undone, then?’

The cardinal smashes his fist on the table. ‘I'll tell you how. I shall get his father down from the borders, and if the prodigal defies him, he will be tossed out of his heirdom on his prodigal snout. The earl has other sons, and better. And if you don't want the Butler marriage called off, and your lady daughter shrivelling unmarriageable down in Sussex and costing you bed and board for the rest of her life, you will forget any talk of pledges, and witnesses – who are they, these witnesses? I know those kind of witnesses who never show their faces when I send for them. So never let me hear it. Pledges. Witnesses. Contracts. God in Heaven!’

Boleyn is still smiling. He is a poised, slender man; it takes the effort of every finely tuned muscle in his body to keep the smile on his face.

‘I do not ask you,’ says Wolsey, relentless, ‘whether in this matter you have sought the advice of your relatives in the Howard family. I should be reluctant to think that it was with their agreement that you launched yourself on this scheme. I should be sorry to hear the Duke of Norfolk was apprised of this: oh, very sorry indeed. So let me not hear it, eh? Go and ask your relatives for some good advice. Marry the girl into Ireland before the Butlers hear any rumour that she's spoiled goods. Not that I'd mention it. But the court does talk.’

Sir Thomas has two spots of angry red on his cheekbones. He says, ‘Finished, my lord cardinal?’

‘Yes. Go.’

Boleyn turns, in a sweep of dark silks. Are those tears of temper in his eyes? The light is dim, but he, Cromwell, is of very strong sight. ‘Oh, a moment, Sir Thomas …’ the cardinal says. His voice loops across the room and pulls his victim back. ‘Now, Sir Thomas, remember your ancestry. The Percy family comprise, I do think, the noblest in the land. Whereas, notwithstanding your remarkable good fortune in marrying a Howard, the Boleyns were in trade once, were they not? A person of your name was Lord Mayor of London, not so? Or have I mixed up your line with some Boleyns more distinguished?’

Sir Thomas's face has drained; the scarlet spots have vanished from his cheeks, and he is almost fainting with rage. As he quits the room, he whispers, ‘Butcher's boy.’ And as he passes the clerk – whose beefy hand lies idly on his desk – he sneers, ‘Butcher's dog.’

The door bangs. The cardinal says, ‘Come out, dog.’ He sits laughing, with his elbows on his desk and his head in his hands. ‘Mark and learn,’ he says. ‘You can never advance your own pedigree – and God knows, Tom, you were born in a more dishonourable estate than me – so the trick is always to keep them scraped up to their own standards. They made the rules; they cannot complain if I am the strictest enforcer. Percys above Boleyns. Who does he think he is?’

‘Is it good policy to make people angry?’

‘Oh, no. But it amuses me. My life is hard and I find I want amusement.’ The cardinal casts on him a kindly eye; he suspects he may be this evening's further diversion, now that Boleyn has been torn into strips and dropped on the ground like orange peel. ‘Who need one look up to? The Percys, the Staffords, the Howards, the Talbots: yes. Use a long stick to stir them, if you must. As for Boleyn – well, the king likes him, and he is an able man. Which is why I open all his letters, and have done for years.’

‘So has your lordship heard – no, forgive me, it is not fit for your ears.’

‘What?’ says the cardinal.

‘It is only rumour. I should not like to mislead Your Grace.’

‘You cannot speak and not speak. You must tell me now.’

‘It's only what the women are saying. The silk women. And the cloth merchants' wives.’ He waits, smiling. ‘Which is of no interest to you, I'm sure.’

Laughing, the cardinal pushes back his chair, and his shadow rises with him. Firelit, it leaps. His arm darts out, his reach is long, his hand is like the hand of God.

But when God closes his hand, his subject is across the room, back to the wall.

The cardinal gives ground. His shadow wavers. It wavers and comes to rest. He is still. The wall records the movement of his breath. His head inclines. In a halo of light he seems to pause, to examine his handful of nothing. He splays his fingers, his giant firelit hand. He places it flat on his desk. It vanishes, melted into the cloth of damask. He sits down again. His head is bowed; his face, half-dark.

He Thomas, also Tomos, Tommaso and Thomaes Cromwell, withdraws his past selves into his present body and edges back to where he was before. His single shadow slides against the wall, a visitor not sure of his welcome. Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you. You shy, you duck, you run; or else the past takes your fist and actuates it, without the intervention of will. Suppose you have a knife in your fist? That's how murder happens.

He says something, the cardinal says something. They break off. Two sentences go nowhere. The cardinal resumes his chair. He hesitates before him; he sits down. The cardinal says, ‘I really would like the London gossip. But I wasn't planning to beat it out of you.’

The cardinal bows his head, frowns at a paper on his desk; he is allowing time for the difficult moment to pass, and when he speaks again his tone is measured and easy, like a man telling anecdotes after supper. ‘When I was a child, my father had a friend – a customer, really – who was of a florid complexion.’ He touches his sleeve, in illustration. ‘Like this … scarlet. Revell was his name, Miles Revell.’ His hand drifts to rest again, palm downwards on the blackish damask. ‘For some reason I used to believe … though I dare say he was an honest citizen, and liked a glass of Rhenish … I used to believe he was a drinker of blood. I don't know … some story I suppose that I had heard from my nurse, or from some other silly child … and then when my father's apprentices knew about it – only because I was foolish enough to whine and cry – they would shout out, “Here comes Revell for his cup of blood, run, Thomas Wolsey …” I used to flee as if the devil were after me. Put the marketplace between us. I marvel that I didn't fall under a wagon. I used to run, and never look. Even today,’ he says – he picks up a wax seal from the desk, turns it over, turns it over, puts it down – ‘even today, when I see a fair, florid man – let us say, the Duke of Suffolk – I feel inclined to burst into tears.’ He pauses. His gaze comes to rest. ‘So, Thomas … can't a cleric stand up, unless you think he's after your blood?’ He picks up the seal again; he turns it over in his fingers; he averts his eyes; he begins to play with words. ‘Would a bishop abash you? A parish clerk panic you? A deacon disconcert?’

He says, ‘What is the word? I don't know in English … an estoc …’

Perhaps there is no English word for it: the short-bladed knife that, at close quarters, you push up under the ribs. The cardinal says, ‘And this was …?’

This was some twenty years ago. The lesson is learned and learned well. Night, ice, the still heart of Europe; a forest, lakes silver beneath a pattern of winter stars; a room, firelight, a shape slipping against the wall. He didn't see his assassin, but he saw his shadow move.

‘All the same …’ says the cardinal. ‘It's forty years since I saw Master Revell. He will be long dead, I suppose. And your man?’ He hesitates. ‘Long dead too?’

It is the most delicate way that can be contrived, to ask a man if he has killed someone.

‘And in Hell, I should think. If your lordship pleases.’

That makes Wolsey smile; not the mention of Hell, but the bow to the breadth of his jurisdiction. ‘So if you attacked the young Cromwell, you went straight to the fiery pit?’

‘If you had seen him, my lord. He was too dirty for Purgatory. The Blood of the Lamb can do much, we are told, but I doubt if it could have wiped this fellow clean.’

‘I am all for a spotless world,’ Wolsey says. He looks sad. ‘Have you made a good confession?’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Have you made a good confession?’

‘My lord cardinal, I was a soldier.’

‘Soldiers have hope of Heaven.’

He looks up into Wolsey's face. There's no knowing what he believes. He says, ‘We all have that.’ Soldiers, beggars, sailors, kings.

‘So you were a ruffian in your youth,’ the cardinal says. ‘Ça ne fait rien.’ He broods. ‘This dirty fellow who attacked you … he was not, in fact, in holy orders?’

He smiles. ‘I didn't ask.’

‘These tricks of memory …’ the cardinal says. ‘Thomas, I shall try not to move without giving you warning. And in that way we shall do very well together.’

But the cardinal looks him over; he is still puzzling. It is early in their association and his character, as invented by the cardinal, is at this stage a work in progress; in fact, perhaps it is this evening that sets it going? In the years to come, the cardinal will say, ‘I often wonder, about the monastic ideal – especially as applied to the young. My servant Cromwell, for instance – his youth was secluded, spent almost entirely in fasting, prayer and study of the Church Fathers. That's why he's so wild nowadays.’

And when people say, is he? – recalling, as best they can, a man who seems peculiarly discreet; when they say, really? Your man Cromwell? the cardinal will shake his head and say, but I try to mend matters, of course. When he breaks the windows we just call in the glaziers and part with the cash. As for the procession of aggrieved young women … Poor creatures, I pay them off …

But tonight he is back to business; hands clasped on his desk, as if holding together the evening passed. ‘Come now, Thomas, you were telling me of a rumour.’

‘The women judge from orders to the silk merchants that the king has a new –’ He breaks off and says, ‘My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?’

‘Ah,’ the cardinal says, entering into the problem. ‘To her face, “my lady.” Behind her back – well, what is her name? Which knight?’

He nods to where, ten minutes ago, Boleyn stood.

The cardinal looks alarmed. ‘Why did you not speak up?’

‘How could I have introduced the topic?’

The cardinal bows to the difficulty.

‘But it is not the Boleyn lady new at court. Not Harry Percy's lady. It is her sister.’

‘I see.’ The cardinal drops back in his chair. ‘Of course.’

Mary Boleyn is a kind little blonde, who is said to have been passed all around the French court before coming home to this one, scattering goodwill, her frowning little sister trotting always at her heels.

‘Of course, I have followed the direction of His Majesty's eye,’ the cardinal says. He nods to himself. ‘Are they now close? Does the queen know? Or can't you say?’

He nods. The cardinal sighs. ‘Katherine is a saint. Still, if I were a saint, and a queen, perhaps I would feel I could take no harm from Mary Boleyn. Presents, eh? What sort? Not lavish, you say? I am sorry for her then; she should seize her advantage while it lasts. It's not that our king has so many adventures, though they do say … they say that when His Majesty was young, not yet king, it was Boleyn's wife who relieved him of his virgin state.’

‘Elizabeth Boleyn?’ He is not often surprised. ‘This one's mother?’

‘The same. Perhaps the king lacks imagination in that way. Not that I ever believed it … If we were at the other side, you know,’ he gestures in the direction of Dover, ‘we wouldn't even try to keep track of the women. My friend King François – they do say he once oozed up to the lady he'd been with the night before, gave her a formal kiss of the hand, asked her name, and wished they might be better friends.’ He bobs his head, liking the success of his story. ‘But Mary won't cause difficulties. She's an easy armful. The king could do worse.’

‘But her family will want to get something out of it. What did they get before?’

‘The chance to make themselves useful.’ Wolsey breaks off and makes a note. He can imagine its content: what Boleyn can have, if he asks nicely. The cardinal looks up. ‘So should I have been, in my interview with Sir Thomas – how shall I put it – more douce?’

‘I don't think my lord could have been sweeter. Witness his face when he left us. The picture of soothed gratification.’

‘Thomas, from now on, any London gossip,’ he touches the damask cloth, ‘bring it right here to me. Don't trouble about the source. Let the trouble be mine. And I promise never to assault you. Truly.’

‘It is forgotten.’

‘I doubt that. Not if you've carried the lesson all these years.’ The cardinal sits back; he considers. ‘At least she is married.’ Mary Boleyn, he means. ‘So if she whelps, he can acknowledge it or not, as he pleases. He has a boy from John Blount's daughter and he won't want too many.’

Too large a royal nursery can be encumbering to a king. The example of history and of other nations shows that the mothers fight for status, and try to get their brats induced somehow into the line of succession. The son Henry acknowledges is known as Henry Fitzroy; he is a handsome blond child made in the king's own image. His father has created him Duke of Somerset and Duke of Richmond; he is not yet ten years old, and the senior nobleman in England.

Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.

When he leaves the cardinal, he is miserably angry. When he thinks back to his earlier life – that boy half-dead on the cobbles in Putney – he feels no tenderness for him, just a faint impatience: why doesn't he get up? For his later self – still prone to getting into fights, or at least being in the place where a fight might occur – he feels something like contempt, washed with a queasy anxiety. That was the way of the world: a knife in the dark, a movement on the edge of vision, a series of warnings which have worked themselves into flesh. He has given the cardinal a shock, which is not his job; his job, as he has defined it at this time, is to feed the cardinal information and soothe his temper and understand him and embellish his jokes. What went wrong was an accident of timing only. If the cardinal had not moved so fast; if he had not been so edgy, not knowing how he could signal to him to be less despotic to Boleyn. The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.

In the year 1529, my lord cardinal newly disgraced, he will think back to that evening.

He is at Esher; it is the lightless, fireless night, when the great man has gone to his (possibly damp) bed, and there is only George Cavendish to keep his spirits alive. What happened next, he asked George, with Harry Percy and Anne Boleyn?

He knew the story only in the cardinal's chilly and dismissive rendition. But George said, ‘I shall tell you how it was. Now. Stand up, Master Cromwell.’ He does it. ‘A little to the left. Now, which would you like to be? My lord cardinal, or the young heir?’

‘Oh, I see, is it a play? You be the cardinal. I don't feel equal to it.’

Cavendish adjusts his position, turning him imperceptibly from the window, where night and bare trees are their audience. His gaze rests on the air, as if he were seeing the past: shadowy bodies, moving in this lightless room. ‘Can you look troubled?’ George asks. ‘As if you were brooding upon mutinous speech, and yet dare not speak? No, no, not like that. You are youthful, gangling, your head drooping, you are blushing.’ Cavendish sighs. ‘I believe you never blushed in your life, Master Cromwell. Look.’ Cavendish sets his hands, gently, on his upper arms. ‘Let us change roles. Sit here. You be the cardinal.’

At once he sees Cavendish transformed. George twitches, he fumbles, he all but weeps; he becomes the quaking Harry Percy, a young man in love. ‘Why should I not match with her?’ he cries. ‘Though she be but a simple maid –’

‘Simple?’ he says. ‘Maid?’

George glares at him. ‘The cardinal never said that!’

‘Not at the time, I agree.’

‘Now I am Harry Percy again. “Though she be but a simple maid, her father a mere knight, yet her lineage is good –”’

‘She's some sort of cousin of the king's, isn't she?’

‘Some sort of cousin?’ Cavendish again breaks up his role, indignant. ‘My lord cardinal would have their descent unfolded before him, all drawn up by the heralds.’

‘So what shall I do?’

‘Just pretend! Now: her forebears are not without merit, young Percy argues. But the stronger the boy argues, the more my lord cardinal waxes into a temper. The boy says, we have made a contract of matrimony, which is as good as a true marriage …’

‘Does he? I mean, did he?’

‘Yes, that was the sense of it. Good as a true marriage.’

‘And what did my lord cardinal do there?’

‘He said, good God, boy, what are you telling me? If you have involved yourself in any such false proceeding, the king must hear of it. I shall send for your father, and between us we will contrive to annul this folly of yours.’

‘And Harry Percy said?’

‘Not much. He hung his head.’

‘I wonder the girl had any respect for him.’

‘She didn't. She liked his title.’

‘I see.’

‘So then his father came down from the north – will you be the earl, or will you be the boy?’

‘The boy. I know how to do it now.’

He jumps to his feet and imitates penitence. It seems they had a long talk in a long gallery, the earl and the cardinal; then they had a glass of wine. Something strong, it must have been. The earl stamped the length of the gallery, then sat down, Cavendish said, on a bench where the waiting-boys used to rest between orders. He called his heir to stand before him, and took him apart in front of the servants.

‘“Sir,”’ says Cavendish, ‘“thou hast always been a proud, presumptuous, disdainful and very unthrift waster.” So that was a good start, wasn't it?’

‘I like,’ he says, ‘the way you remember the exact words. Did you write them down at the time? Or do you use some licence?’

Cavendish looks sly. ‘No one exceeds your own powers of memory,’ he says. ‘My lord cardinal asks for an accounting of something or other, and you have all the figures at your fingertips.’

‘Perhaps I invent them.’

‘Oh, I don't think so.’ Cavendish is shocked. ‘You couldn't do that for long.’

‘It is a method of remembering. I learned it in Italy.’

‘There are people, in this household and elsewhere, who would give much to know the whole of what you learned in Italy.’

He nods. Of course they would. ‘But now, where were we? Harry Percy, who is as good as married, you say, to Lady Anne Boleyn, is standing before his father, and the father says …?’

‘That if he comes into the title, he would be the death of his noble house – he would be the last earl of Northumberland there ever was. And “Praise be to God,” he says, “I have more choice of boys …” And he stamped off. And the boy was left crying. He had his heart set on Lady Anne. But the cardinal married him to Mary Talbot, and now they're as miserable as dawn on Ash Wednesday. And the Lady Anne said – well, we all laughed at the time – she said that if she could work my lord cardinal any displeasure, she would do it. Can you think how we laughed? Some sallow chit, forgive me, a knight's daughter, to menace my lord cardinal! Her nose out of joint because she could not have an earl! But we could not know how she would rise and rise.’

He smiles.

‘So tell me,’ Cavendish says, ‘what did we do wrong? I'll tell you. All along, we were misled, the cardinal, young Harry Percy, his father, you, me – because when the king said, Mistress Anne is not to marry into Northumberland, I think, I think, the king had his eye cast on her, all that long time ago.’

‘While he was close with Mary, he was thinking about sister Anne?’

‘Yes, yes!’

‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king's pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded.’ At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled. The Lady Anne, whom he has chosen to amuse him, while the old wife is cast off and the new wife brought in, refuses to accommodate him at all. How can she refuse? Nobody knows.

Cavendish looks downcast because they have not continued the play. ‘You must be tired,’ he says.

‘No, I'm just thinking. How has my lord cardinal …’ Missed a trick, he wants to say. But that is not a respectful way to speak of a cardinal. He looks up. ‘Go on. What happened next?’

In May 1527, feeling embattled and bad-tempered, the cardinal opens a court of inquiry at York Place, to look into the validity of the king's marriage. It's a secret court; the queen is not required to appear, or even be represented; she's not even supposed to know, but all Europe knows. It is Henry who is ordered to appear, and produce the dispensation that allowed him to marry his brother's widow. He does so, and he is confident that the court will find the document defective in some way. Wolsey is prepared to say that the marriage is open to doubt. But he does not know, he tells Henry, what the legatine court can do for him, beyond this preparatory step; since Katherine, surely, is bound to appeal to Rome.

Six times (to the world's knowledge) Katherine and the king have lived in hope of an heir. ‘I remember the winter child,’ Wolsey says. ‘I suppose, Thomas, you would not be back in England then. The queen was taken unexpectedly with pains and the prince was born early, just at the turn of the year. When he was less than an hour old I held him in my arms, the sleet falling outside the windows, the chamber alive with firelight, the dark coming down by three o'clock, and the tracks of birds and beasts covered that night by the snow, every mark of the old world wiped out, and all our pain abolished. We called him the New Year's prince. We said he would be the richest, the most beautiful, the most devoted. The whole of London was lit up in celebration … He breathed fifty-two days, and I counted every one of them. I think that if he had lived, our king might have been – I do not say a better king, for that could hardly be – but a more contented Christian.’

The next child was a boy who died within an hour. In the year 1516 a daughter was born, the Princess Mary, small but vigorous. The year following, the queen miscarried a male child. Another small princess lived only a few days; her name would have been Elizabeth, after the king's own mother.

Sometimes, says the cardinal, the king speaks of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, and tears stand in his eyes. She was, you know, a lady of great beauty and calm, so meek under the misfortunes God sent her. She and the old king were blessed with many children, and some of them died. But, says the king, my brother Arthur was born to my mother and father within a year of their marriage, and followed, in not too long a time, by another goodly son, which was me. So why have I been left, after twenty years, with one frail daughter whom any vagrant wind may destroy?

By now they are, this long-married couple, dragged down by the bewildered consciousness of sin. Perhaps, some people say, it would be a kindness to set them free? ‘I doubt Katherine will think so,’ the cardinal says. ‘If the queen has a sin laid on her conscience, believe me, she will shrive it. If it takes the next twenty years.’

What have I done? Henry demands of the cardinal. What have I done, what has she done, what have we done together? There is no answer the cardinal can make, even though his heart bleeds for his most benevolent prince; there is no answer he can make, and he detects something not entirely sincere in the question; he thinks, though he will not say so, except in a small room alone with his man of business, that no rational man could worship a God so simply vengeful, and he believes the king is a rational man. ‘Look at the examples before us,’ he says. ‘Dean Colet, that great scholar. Now he was one of twenty-two children, and the only one to live past infancy. Some would suggest that to invite such attrition from above, Sir Henry Colet and his wife must have been monsters of iniquity, infamous through Christendom. But in fact, Sir Henry was Lord Mayor of London –’

‘Twice.’

‘– and made a very large fortune, so in no way was he slighted by the Almighty, I would say; but rather received every mark of divine favour.’

It's not the hand of God kills our children. It's disease and hunger and war, rat-bites and bad air and the miasma from plague pits; it's bad harvests like the harvest this year and last year; it's careless nurses. He says to Wolsey, ‘What age is the queen now?’

‘She will be forty-two, I suppose.’

‘And the king says she can have no more children? My mother was fifty-two when I was born.’

The cardinal stares at him. ‘Are you sure?’ he says: and then he laughs, a merry, easy laugh that makes you think, it's good to be a prince of the church.

‘Well, about that, anyway. Over fifty.’ They were hazy about these things in the Cromwell family.

‘And did she survive the ordeal? She did? I congratulate both of you. But don't tell people, will you?’

The living result of the queen's labours is the diminutive Mary – not really a whole princess, perhaps two-thirds of one. He has seen her when he has been at court with the cardinal, and thought she was about the size of his daughter Anne, who is two or three years younger.

Anne Cromwell is a tough little girl. She could eat a princess for breakfast. Like St Paul's God, she is no respecter of persons, and her eyes, small and steady as her father's, fall coldly on those who cross her; the family joke is, what London will be like when our Anne becomes Lord Mayor. Mary Tudor is a pale, clever doll with fox-coloured hair, who speaks with more gravity than the average bishop. She was barely ten years old when her father sent her to Ludlow to hold court as Princess of Wales. It was where Katherine had been taken as a bride; where her husband Arthur died; where she herself almost died in that year's epidemic, and lay bereft, weakened and forgotten, till the old king's wife paid out of her private purse to have her brought back to London, day by painful day, in a litter. Katherine had hidden – she hides so much – any grief at the parting with her daughter. She herself is daughter of a reigning queen. Why should Mary not rule England? She had taken it as a sign that the king was content.

But now she knows different.

As soon as the secret hearing is convened, Katherine's stored-up grievances come pouring out. According to her, the whole business is the fault of the cardinal. ‘I told you,’ Wolsey said. ‘I told you it would be. Look for the hand of the king in it? Look for the will of the king? No, she cannot do that. For the king, in her eyes, is immaculate.’

Ever since Wolsey rose in the king's service, the queen claims, he has been working to push her out of her rightful place as Henry's confidante and adviser. He has used every means he can, she says, to drive me from the king's side, so that I know nothing of his projects, and so that he, the cardinal, should have the direction of all. He has prevented my meetings with the ambassador of Spain. He has put spies in my household – my women are all spies for him.

The cardinal says, wearily, I have never favoured the French, nor the Emperor neither: I have favoured peace. I have not stopped her seeing the Spanish ambassador, only made the quite reasonable request that she should not see him alone, so that I might have some check on what insinuations and lies he presents to her. The ladies of her household are English gentlewomen who have a right to wait upon their queen; after almost thirty years in England, would she have nothing but Spaniards? As for driving her from the king's side, how could I do that? For years his conversation was, ‘The queen must see this,’ and ‘Katherine will like to hear of this, we must go to her straight away.’ There never was a lady who knew better her husband's needs.

She knows them; for the first time, she doesn't want to comply with them.

Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife? He, Cromwell, admires Katherine: he likes to see her moving about the royal palaces, as wide as she is high, stitched into gowns so bristling with gemstones that they look as if they are designed less for beauty than to withstand blows from a sword. Her auburn hair is faded and streaked with grey, tucked back under her gable hood like the modest wings of a city sparrow. Under her gowns she wears the habit of a Franciscan nun. Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. At an earlier stage in life this would have surprised him; he had thought that under their clothes people wore their skin.

There are many precedents, the cardinal says, that can help the king in his current concerns. King Louis XII was allowed to set aside his first wife. Nearer home, his own sister Margaret, who had first married the King of Scotland, divorced her second husband and remarried. And the king's great friend Charles Brandon, who is now married to his youngest sister Mary, had an earlier alliance put aside in circumstances that hardly bear inquiry.

But set against that, the fact that the church is not in the business of breaking up established marriages or bastardising children. If the dispensation was technically defective, or in any other way defective, why can it not be mended with a new one? So Pope Clement may think, Wolsey says.

When he says this, the king shouts. He can shrug that off, the shouting; one grows accustomed, and he watches how the cardinal behaves, as the storm breaks over his head; half-smiling, civil, regretful, he waits for the calm that succeeds it. But Wolsey is becoming uneasy, waiting for Boleyn's daughter – not the easy armful, but the younger girl, the flat-chested one – to drop her coy negotiations and please the king. If she would do this, the king would take an easier view of life and talk less about his conscience; after all, how could he, in the middle of an amour? But some people suggest that she is bargaining with the king; some say that she wants to be the new wife; which is laughable, Wolsey says, but then the king is infatuated, so perhaps he doesn't demur, not to her face. He has drawn the cardinal's attention to the emerald ring Lady Anne now wears, and has told him the provenance and the price. The cardinal looked shocked.

After the Harry Percy debacle, the cardinal had got Anne sent down to her family house at Hever, but she had insinuated herself back to court somehow, among the queen's ladies, and now he never knows where she'll be, and whether Henry will disappear from his grasp because he's chasing her across country. He thinks of calling in her father, Sir Thomas, and telling him off again, but – even without mentioning the old rumour about Henry and Lady Boleyn – how can you explain to a man that as his first daughter was a whore, so his second one should be too: insinuating that it's some sort of family business he puts them into?

‘Boleyn is not rich,’ he says. ‘I'd get him in. Cost it out for him. The credit side. The debit side.’

‘Ah yes,’ the cardinal says, ‘but you are the master of practical solutions, whereas I, as a churchman, have to be careful not actively to recommend that my monarch embark on a studied course of adultery.’ He moves the quills around on his desk, shuffles some papers. ‘Thomas, if you are ever … How shall I put it?’

He cannot imagine what the cardinal might say next.

‘If you are ever close to the king, if you should find, perhaps after I am gone …’ It's not easy to speak of non-existence, even if you've already commissioned your tomb. Wolsey cannot imagine a world without Wolsey. ‘Ah well. You know I would prefer you to his service, and never hold you back, but the difficulty is …’

Putney, he means. It is the stark fact. And since he's not a churchman, there are no ecclesiastical titles to soften it, as they have softened the stark fact of Ipswich.

‘I wonder,’ Wolsey says, ‘would you have patience with our sovereign lord? When it is midnight and he is up drinking and giggling with Brandon, or singing, and the day's papers not yet signed, and when you press him he says, I'm for my bed now, we're hunting tomorrow … If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.’

The idea that he or anyone else might come to have Wolsey's hold over the king is about as likely as Anne Cromwell becoming Lord Mayor. But he doesn't altogether discount it. One has heard of Jeanne d'Arc; and it doesn't have to end in flames.

He goes home and tells Liz about the fighting dogs. She also thinks it strikingly apt. He doesn't tell her about the fitful charm, in case it's something only the cardinal can see.

The court of inquiry is just about to break up, leaving the matter for further advisement, when the news comes from Rome that the Emperor's Spanish and German troops, who have not been paid for months, have run wild through the Holy City paying themselves, plundering the treasuries and stoning the artworks. Dressed satirically in stolen vestments, they have raped the wives and virgins of Rome. They have tumbled to the ground statues and nuns, and smashed their heads on the pavements. A common soldier has stolen the head of the lance that opened the side of Christ, and has attached it to the shaft of his own murderous weapon. His comrades have torn up antique tombs and tipped out the human dust, to blow away in the wind. The Tiber brims with fresh bodies, the stabbed and the strangled bobbing against the shore. The most grievous news is that the Pope is taken prisoner. As the young Emperor, Charles, is nominally in charge of these troops, and presumably will assert his authority and take advantage of the situation, King Henry's matrimonial cause is set back. Charles is the nephew of Queen Katherine, and while he is in the Emperor's hands, Pope Clement is not likely to look favourably on any appeals passed up from the legate in England.

Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a small scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell's, is that somebody makes these instruments of daily torture. Someone combs the horsehair into coarse tufts, knots them and chops the blunt ends, knowing that their purpose is to snap off under the skin and irritate it into weeping sores. Is it monks who make them, knotting and snipping in a fury of righteousness, chuckling at the thought of the pain they will cause to persons unknown? Are simple villagers paid – how, by the dozen? – for making flails with waxed knots? Does it keep farm workers busy during the slow winter months? When the money for their honest labour is put into their hands, do the makers think of the hands that will pick up the product?

We don't have to invite pain in, he thinks. It's waiting for us: sooner rather than later. Ask the virgins of Rome.

He thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs.

Let us, says the cardinal at this point, take a step back from the situation. He suffers some genuine alarm; it has always been clear to him that one of the secrets of stability in Europe is to have the papacy independent, and in the clutches of neither France nor the Emperor. But his nimble mind is already skipping towards some advantage for Henry.

Suppose, he says – for in this emergency, it will be to me that Pope Clement looks to hold Christendom together – suppose I were to cross the Channel, stop off in Calais to reassure our people there and suppress any unhelpful rumours, then travel into France and conduct face-to-face talks with their king, then progress to Avignon, where they know how to host a papal court, and where the butchers and the bakers, the candlestick-makers and the keepers of lodgings and indeed the whores have lived in hope these many years. I would invite the cardinals to meet me, and set up a council, so that the business of church government could be carried on while His Holiness is suffering the Emperor's hospitality. If the business brought before this council were to include the king's private matter, would we be justified in keeping so Christian a monarch waiting on the resolution of military events in Italy? Might we not rule? It ought not to be beyond the wit of men or angels to send a message to Pope Clement, even in captivity, and the same men or angels will bring a message back – surely endorsing our ruling, for we will have heard the full facts. And when, of course, in due time – and how we all look for that day – Pope Clement is restored to perfect liberty, he will be so grateful for the good order kept in his absence that any little matter of signatures or seals will be a formality. Voilà – the King of England will be a bachelor.

Before this can happen the king has to talk to Katherine; he can't always be hunting somewhere else, while she waits for him, patient, implacable, his place set for supper in her private apartments. It is June, 1527; well barbered and curled, tall and still trim from certain angles, and wearing white silk, the king makes his way to his wife's apartments. He moves in a perfumed cloud made of the essence of roses: as if he owns all the roses, owns all the summer nights.

His voice is low, gentle, persuasive, and full of regret. If he were free, he says, if there were no impediment, it is she, above all women, that he would choose for his wife. The lack of sons wouldn't matter; God's will be done. He would like nothing better than to marry her all over again; lawfully, this time. But there it is: it can't be managed. She was his brother's wife. Their union has offended divine law.

You can hear what Katherine says. That wreck of a body, held together by lacing and stays, encloses a voice that you can hear as far as Calais: it resounds from here to Paris, from here to Madrid, to Rome. She is standing on her status, she is standing on her rights; the windows are rattled, from here to Constantinople.

What a woman she is, Thomas Cromwell remarks in Spanish: to no one in particular.

By mid-July the cardinal is making his preparations for the voyage across the Narrow Sea. The warm weather has brought sweating sickness to London, and the city is emptying. A few have gone down already and many more are imagining they have it, complaining of headaches and pains in their limbs. The gossip in the shops is all about pills and infusions, and friars in the streets are doing a lucrative trade in holy medals. This plague came to us in the year 1485, with the armies that brought us the first Henry Tudor. Now every few years it fills the graveyards. It kills in a day. Merry at breakfast, they say: dead by noon.

So the cardinal is relieved to be quitting the city, though he cannot embark without the entourage appropriate for a prince of the church. He must persuade King François of the efforts he should make, in Italy, to free Pope Clement by military action; he must assure François of the King of England's amity and assistance, but without committing any troops or funds. If God gives him a following wind, he will bring back not only an annulment, but a treaty of mutual aid between England and France, one which will make the young Emperor's large jaw quiver, and draw a tear from his narrow Habsburg eye.

So why is he not more cheerful, as he strides about his private chamber at York Place? ‘What will I get, Cromwell, if I gain everything I ask? The queen, who does not like me, will be cast off and, if the king persists in his folly, the Boleyns brought in, who do not like me either; the girl has a spite against me, her father I've made a fool of for years, and her uncle, Norfolk, would see me dead in a ditch. Do you think this plague will be over by the time I return? They say these visitations are all from God, but I can't pretend to know his purposes. While I'm away you should get out of the city yourself.’

He sighs; is the cardinal his only work? No; he is just the patron who demands the most constant attendance. Business always increases. When he works for the cardinal, in London or elsewhere, he pays his own expenses and those of the staff he sends out on Wolsey business. The cardinal says, reimburse yourself, and trusts him to take a fair percentage on top; he doesn't quibble, because what is good for Thomas Cromwell is good for Thomas Wolsey – and vice versa. His legal practice is thriving, and he is able to lend money at interest, and arrange bigger loans, on the international market, taking a broker's fee. The market is volatile – the news from Italy is never good two days together – but as some men have an eye for horseflesh or cattle to be fattened, he has an eye for risk. A number of noblemen are indebted to him, not just for arranging loans, but for making their estates pay better. It is not a matter of exactions from tenants, but, in the first place, giving the landowner an accurate survey of land values, crop yield, water supply, built assets, and then assessing the potential of all these; next, putting in bright people as estate managers, and with them setting up an accounting system that makes yearly sense and can be audited. Among the city merchants, he is in demand for his advice on trading partners overseas. He has a sideline in arbitration, commercial disputes mostly, as his ability to assess the facts of a case and give a swift impartial decision is trusted here, in Calais and in Antwerp. If you and your opponent can at least concur on the need to save the costs and delays of a court hearing, then Cromwell is, for a fee, your man; and he has the pleasant privilege, often enough, of sending away both sides happy.

These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. ‘Still serving your Hebrew God, I see,’ remarks Sir Thomas More. ‘I mean, your idol Usury.’ But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in for a session of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to Lombard Street to get the day's exchange rates. Not that he sprints, quite; an old injury drags sometimes, and when he's tired a foot turns inward, as if he's walking back towards himself. People suggest it is the legacy of a summer with Cesare Borgia. He likes the stories they tell about him. But where's Cesare now? He's dead.

‘Thomas Cromwell?’ people say. ‘That is an ingenious man. Do you know he has the whole of the New Testament by heart?’ He is the very man if an argument about God breaks out; he is the very man for telling your tenants twelve good reasons why their rents are fair. He is the man to cut through some legal entanglement that's ensnared you for three generations, or talk your sniffling little daughter into the marriage she swears she will never make. With animals, women and timid litigants, his manner is gentle and easy; but he makes your creditors weep. He can converse with you about the Caesars or get you Venetian glassware at a very reasonable rate. Nobody can out-talk him, if he wants to talk. Nobody can better keep their head, when markets are falling and weeping men are standing on the street tearing up letters of credit. ‘Liz,’ he says one night, ‘I believe that in a year or two we'll be rich.’

She is embroidering shirts for Gregory with a black-work design; it's the same one the queen uses, for she makes the king's shirts herself.

‘If I were Katherine I'd leave the needle in them,’ he says.

She grins. ‘I know you would.’

Lizzie had grown silent and stern when he told her how the king had spoken, at the meeting with Katherine. He had told her they should separate, pending a judgment on their marriage; perhaps she would retire from court? Katherine had said no; she said that would not be possible; she said she would seek advice from canon lawyers, and that he, himself, should equip himself with better lawyers, and better priests; and then, after the shouting was done, the people with their ears pressed to the walls had heard Katherine crying. ‘He doesn't like her crying.’

‘Men say,’ Liz reaches for her scissors, ‘“I can't endure it when women cry” – just as people say, “I can't endure this wet weather.” As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen.’

‘I've never made you cry, have I?’

‘Only with laughter,’ she says.

Conversation fades into an easy silence; she is embroidering her own thoughts, he is plotting what to do with his money. He is supporting two young scholars, not belonging to the family, through Cambridge University; the gift blesses the giver. I could increase those endowments, he thinks, and – ‘I suppose I should make a will,’ he says.

She reaches out for his hand. ‘Tom, don't die.’

‘Good God, no, I'm not proposing it.’

He thinks, I may not be rich yet but I am lucky. Look how I got out from under Walter's boots, from Cesare's summer, and a score of bad nights in back alleys. Men, it is supposed, want to pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to protect his own son from a quarter of what he knows. Where does Gregory's sweet nature come from? It must be the result of his mother's prayers. Richard Williams, Kat's boy, is sharp, keen and forward. Christopher, his sister Bet's boy, is clever and willing too. And then he has Rafe Sadler, whom he trusts as he would trust his son; it's not a dynasty, he thinks, but it's a start. And quiet moments like this are rare, because his house is full of people every day, people who want to be taken to the cardinal. There are artists looking for a subject. There are solemn Dutch scholars with books under their arms, and Lübeck merchants unwinding at length solemn Germanic jokes; there are musicians in transit tuning up strange instruments, and noisy conclaves of agents for the Italian banks; there are alchemists offering recipes and astrologers offering favourable fates, and lonely Polish fur traders who've wandered by to see if someone speaks their language; there are printers, engravers, translators and cipherers; and poets, garden designers, cabalists and geometricians. Where are they tonight?

‘Hush,’ Liz says. ‘Listen to the house.’

At first, there is no sound. Then the timbers creak, breathe. In the chimneys, nesting birds shuffle. A breeze blows from the river, faintly shivering the tops of trees. They hear the sleeping breath of children, imagined from other rooms. ‘Come to bed,’ he says.

The king can't say that to his wife. Or, with any good effect, to the woman they say he loves.

Now the cardinal's many bags are packed for France; his entourage yields little in splendour to the one with which he crossed seven years ago to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. His itinerary is leisurely, before he embarks: Dartford, Rochester, Faversham, Canterbury for three or four days, prayers at the shrine of Becket.

So, Thomas, he says, if you know the king's had Anne, get a letter to me the very day. I'll only trust it if I hear it from you. How will you know it's happened? I should think you'll know by his face. And if you have not the honour of seeing it? Good point. I wish I had presented you; I should have taken the chance while I had it.

‘If the king doesn't tire of Anne quickly,’ he tells the cardinal, ‘I don't see what you are to do. We know princes please themselves, and usually it's possible to put some gloss on their actions. But what case can you make for Boleyn's daughter? What does she bring him? No treaty. No land. No money. How are you to present it as a creditable match at all?’

Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England.

You can't know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them.

He speaks of the deaths of kings: of how the second Richard vanished into Pontefract Castle and was murdered there or starved; how the fourth Henry, the usurper, died of a leprosy which so scarred and contracted his body that it was the size of a mannikin or child. He talks of the fifth Henry's victories in France, and the price, not in money, to be paid for Agincourt. He talks of the French princess whom that great prince married; she was a sweet lady, but her father was insane and believed that he was made of glass. From this marriage – Fifth Henry and the Glass Princess – sprung another Henry who ruled an England dark as winter, cold, barren, calamitous. Edward Plantagenet, son of the Duke of York, came as the first sign of spring: he was a native of Aries, the sign under which the whole world was made.

When Edward was eighteen years old, he seized the kingdom, and he did it because of a sign he received. His troops were baffled and battle-weary, it was the darkest time of one of God's darkest years, and he had just heard the news that should have broken him: his father and his youngest brother had been captured, mocked and slaughtered by the Lancastrian forces. It was Candlemas; huddled in his tent with his generals, he prayed for the slaughtered souls. St Blaise's Day came: 3 February, black and icy. At ten in the morning, three suns rose in the sky: three blurred discs of silver, sparkling and hazy through particles of frost. Their garland of light spread over the sorry fields, over the sodden forests of the Welsh borderlands, over his demoralised and unpaid troops. His men knelt in prayer on the frozen ground. His knights genuflected to the sky. His whole life took wing and soared. In that wash of brilliant light he saw his future. When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it means to be a king. At the Battle of Mortimer's Cross he took prisoner one Owen Tudor. He beheaded him in Hereford marketplace and set his head to rot on the market cross. An unknown woman brought a basin of water and washed the severed head; she combed its bloody hair.

From then on – St Blaise's Day, the three suns shining – every time he touched his sword he touched it to win. Three months later he was in London and he was king. But he never saw the future again, not clearly as he had that year. Dazzled, he stumbled through his kingship as through a mist. He was entirely the creature of astrologers, of holy men and fantasists. He didn't marry as he should, for foreign advantage, but became enmeshed in a series of half-made, half-broken promises to an unknown number of women. One of them was a Talbot girl, Eleanor by name, and what was special about her? It was said she was descended – in the female line – from a woman who was a swan.

And why did he fasten his affection, finally, on the widow of a Lancastrian knight? Was it because, as some people thought, her cold blonde beauty raised his pulse? It was not exactly that; it was that she claimed descent from the serpent woman, Melusine, whom you may see in old parchments, winding her coils about the Tree of Knowledge and presiding over the union of the moon and the sun. Melusine faked her life as an ordinary princess, a mortal, but one day her husband saw her naked and glimpsed her serpent's tail. As she slid from his grip she predicted that her children would found a dynasty that would reign for ever: power with no limit, guaranteed by the devil. She slid away, says the cardinal, and no one ever saw her again.

Some of the candles have gone out; Wolsey does not call for more lights. ‘So you see,’ he says, ‘King Edward's advisers were planning to marry him to a French princess. As I … as I have intended. And look what happened instead. Look how he chose.’

‘How long is that? Since Melusine?’

It is late; the whole great palace of York Place is quiet, the city sleeping; the river creeping in its channels, silting its banks. In these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine, mutable, sly.

‘But the woman King Edward married – she brought, did she not, a claim to the throne of Castile? Very ancient, very obscure?’

The cardinal nods. ‘That was the meaning of the three suns. The throne of England, the throne of France, the throne of Castile. So when our present king married Katherine, he was moving closer to his ancient rights. Not that anyone, I imagine, dared put it in those terms to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. But it is as well to remember, and mention from time to time, that our king is the ruler of three kingdoms. If each had their own.’

‘By your account, my lord, our king's Plantagenet grandfather beheaded his Tudor great-grandfather.’

‘A thing to know. But not to mention.’

‘And the Boleyns? I thought they were merchants, but should I have known they had serpent fangs, or wings?’

‘You are laughing at me, Master Cromwell.’

‘Indeed not. But I want the best information, if you are leaving me to watch this situation for you.’

The cardinal talks then about killing. He talks about sin: about what's to be expiated. He talks about the sixth King Henry, murdered in the Tower; of King Richard, born under Scorpio, the sign of secret dealings, tribulation and vice. At Bosworth, where the Scorpian died, bad choices were made; the Duke of Norfolk fought on the losing side, and his heirs were turned out of their dukedom. They had to work hard, long and hard, to get it back. So do you wonder, he says, why the Norfolk that is now shakes sometimes, if the king is in a temper? It's because he thinks he will lose all he has, at an angry man's whim.

The cardinal sees his man make a mental note; and he speaks of the loose rattling bones under the paving of the Tower, those bones bricked into staircases and mulched into the Thames mud. He talks about King Edward's two vanished sons, the younger of them prone to stubborn resurrections that almost threw Henry Tudor out of his kingdom. He speaks of the coins the Pretender struck, stamped with their message to the Tudor king: ‘Your days are numbered. You are weighed in the balance: and found wanting.’

He speaks of the fear that was then, of the return of civil war. Katherine was contracted to be married into England, had been called ‘Princess of Wales’ since she was three years old; but before her family would let her embark from Corunna, they exacted a price in blood and bone. They asked Henry to turn his attention to the chief Plantagenet claimant, the nephew of King Edward and wicked King Richard, whom he had held in the Tower since he was a child of ten. To gentle pressure, King Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God's light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed, though not unsupervised. There will always be the need for more killing; one must, says the cardinal, have the stomach for it, I suppose, though I don't know I ever have; I am always ill when there is an execution. I pray for them, these old dead people. I even pray for wicked King Richard sometimes, though Thomas More tells me he is burning in Hell.

Wolsey looks down at his own hands, twists the rings on his fingers. ‘I wonder,’ he murmurs. ‘Wonder which it is.’ Those who envy the cardinal say he has a ring which enables its owner to fly, and allows him to encompass the death of his enemies. It detects poisons, renders ferocious beasts harmless, ensures the favour of princes, and protects against drowning.

‘I suppose other people know, my lord. Because they have employed conjurers, to try to get it copied.’

‘If I knew, I'd get it copied myself. I'd give one to you.’

‘I picked up a snake once. In Italy.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘For a bet.’

‘Was it poisonous?’

‘We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.’

‘Did it bite you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Why of course?’

‘It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?’

Unwillingly, the cardinal laughs. ‘What will I do without you,’ he says, ‘among the double-tongued French?’

In the house at Austin Friars, Liz is in bed but she stirs in her sleep. She half wakes, says his name and inches into his arms. He kisses her hair and says, ‘Our king's grandfather married a serpent.’

Liz murmurs, ‘Am I awake or asleep?’ A heartbeat, and she slides away from him, and turns over, throwing out an arm; he wonders what she will dream. He lies awake, thinking. All that Edward did, his battles, his conquests, he did with Medici money behind him; their letters of credit were more important than signs and wonders. If King Edward was, as many people say, not the son of his father at all, not the son of the Duke of York; if King Edward's mother, as some people do believe, had bred him from an honest English soldier, an archer called Blaybourne; then if Edward married a serpent woman, his offspring would be … Unreliable, is the word that comes to mind. If all the old stories are to be believed, and some people, let us remember, do believe them, then our king is one part bastard archer, one part hidden serpent, one part Welsh, and all of him in debt to the Italian banks … He too slides, drifts towards sleep. His accounting fails; the spectral world moves in, where pages of figures used to be. Try always, the cardinal says, to learn what people wear under their clothes, for it's not just their skin. Turn the king inside out, and you will find his scaly ancestors: his warm, solid, serpentine flesh.

When in Italy he had picked up a snake for a bet, he had to hold it till they counted ten. They counted, rather slowly, in the slower languages: eins, zwei, drei … At four, the startled snake flicked its head and bit him. Between four and five he tightened his grip. Now some cried, ‘Blood of Christ, drop it!’ Some prayed and some swore, some just kept on counting. The snake looked sick; when they had all reached ten, and not before, he eased its coiled body gently to the ground, and let it slip away into its future.

There was no pain, but one could see clearly the puncture wound. On instinct, he tasted it, almost bit his own wrist. He noticed, surprised by it, the private, white, English flesh of his inner arm; he saw the narrow blue-green veins into which the snake had slipped the poison.

He collected his winnings. He waited to die, but he never did die. If anything, he got stronger, quick to hide and quick to strike. There was no Milanese quartermaster could out-bawl him, no bought-in Bernese capitaine who would not fall back before his grim reputation for blood first and bargaining later. Tonight is hot, it is July; he is asleep; he dreams. Somewhere in Italy, a snake has children. He calls his children Thomas; they carry in their heads pictures of the Thames, of muddy shallow banks beyond the reach of the tide, beyond the wash of the water.

Next morning when he wakes, Liz is still sleeping. The sheets are damp. She is warm and flushed, her face smooth like a young girl's. He kisses her hairline. She tastes of salt. She murmurs, ‘Tell me when you are coming home.’

‘Liz, I'm not going,’ he says. ‘I'm not going with Wolsey.’ He leaves her. His barber comes to shave him. He sees his own eyes in a polished mirror. They look alive; serpent eyes. What a strange dream, he says to himself.

As he goes downstairs he thinks he sees Liz following him. He think he sees the flash of her white cap. He turns, and says, ‘Liz, go back to bed …’ But she's not there. He is mistaken. He picks up his papers and goes to Gray's Inn.

It is recess. The business is not legal; the discussion is of texts, and the whereabouts of Tyndale (somewhere in Germany), and the immediate problem is a fellow lawyer (so who shall say he should not be there, visiting Gray's Inn?) called Thomas Bilney, who is a priest also, and a fellow of Trinity Hall. ‘Little Bilney’ he's called, on account of his short stature and worm-like attributes; he sits twisting on a bench, and talking about his mission to lepers.

‘The scriptures, to me, are as honey,’ says Little Bilney, swivelling his meagre bottom, and kicking his shrunken legs. ‘I am drunk on the word of God.’

‘For Christ's sake, man,’ he says. ‘Don't think you can crawl out of your hole because the cardinal is away. Because now the Bishop of London has his hands free, not to mention our friend in Chelsea.’

‘Masses, fasting, vigils, pardons out of Purgatory … all useless,’ Bilney says. ‘This is revealed to me. All that remains, in effect, is to go to Rome and discuss it with His Holiness. I am sure he will come over to my way of thinking.’

‘You think your viewpoint is original, do you?’ he says gloomily. ‘Still, at that, it may be, Father Bilney. If you think the Pope would welcome your advice in these matters.’

He goes out, saying, there's one who will jump into the fire, given an invitation. Masters, be careful there.

He doesn't take Rafe to these meetings. He will not draw any member of his household into dangerous company. The Cromwell household is as orthodox as any in London, and as pious. They must be, he says, irreproachable.

The rest of the day is nothing to remember. He would have been home early, if he had not arranged to meet up in the German enclave, the Steelyard, with a man from Rostock, who brought along a friend from Stettin, who offered to teach him some Polish.

It's worse than Welsh, he says at the end of the evening. I'll need a lot of practice. Come to my house, he says. Give us notice and we'll pickle some herring; otherwise, it's pot-luck.

There's something wrong when you arrive home at dusk but torches are burning. The air is sweet and you feel so well as you walk in, you feel young, unscarred. Then you see the dismayed faces; they turn away at the sight of you.

Mercy comes and stands before him, but here is no mercy. ‘Say it,’ he begs her.

She looks away when she says, I am so sorry.

He thinks it's Gregory; he thinks his son is dead. Then he half knows, because where is Liz? He begs her, ‘Say it.’

‘We looked for you. We said, Rafe, go and see if he's at Gray's Inn, bring him back, but the gatekeepers denied they'd seen you the whole day. Rafe said, trust me, I'll find him, if I go over the whole city: but not a sign of you.’

He remembers the morning: the damp sheets, her damp forehead. Liz, he thinks, didn't you fight? If I had seen your death coming, I would have taken him and beaten in his death's head; I would have crucified him against the wall.

The little girls are still up, though someone has put them into their nightdresses, as if it were any ordinary night. Their legs and feet are bare and their nightcaps, round lace bonnets made by their mother, are knotted under their chins with a resolute hand. Anne's face is like a stone. She has Grace's hand tucked in her fist. Grace looks up at him, dubious. She almost never sees him; why is he here? But she trusts him and lets him lift her, without protest, into his arms. Against his shoulder she tumbles at once into sleep, her arms flung around his neck, the crown of her head tucked beneath his chin. ‘Now, Anne,’ he says, ‘we must take Grace to bed, because she is little. I know you are not ready to sleep yet, but you must go in beside her, because she may wake and feel cold.’

‘I may feel cold,’ Anne says.

Mercy walks before him to the children's room. Grace is put down without waking. Anne cries, but she cries in silence. I'll sit with them, Mercy says: but he says, ‘I will.’ He waits until Anne's tears stop flowing, and her hand slackens in his.

These things happen; but not to us.

‘Now let me see Liz,’ he says.

The room – which this morning was only their bedroom – is lively with the scent of the herbs they are burning against contagion. They have lit candles at her head and feet. They have bound up her jaw with linen, so already she does not look like herself. She looks like the dead; she looks fearless, and as if she could judge you; she looks flatter and deader than people he has seen on battlefields, with their guts spilled.

He goes down, to get an account of her deathbed; to deal with the household. At ten this morning, Mercy said, she sat down: Jesu, I am so weary. In the middle of the day's business. Not like me, is it? she'd said. I said, it's not like you, Liz. I put my hand to her forehead, and I said, Liz, my darling … I told her, lie down, get to bed with you, you have to sweat this out. She said, no, give me a few minutes, I'm dizzy, perhaps I need to eat a little something, but we sat down at the table and she pushed her food away …

He would like her to shorten her account, but he understands her need to tell it over, moment by moment, to say it out loud. It is like a package of words she is making, to hand to him: this is yours now.

At midday Elizabeth lay down. She was shivering, though her skin burned. She said, is Rafe in the house? Tell him to go and find Thomas. And Rafe did go, and any number of people went, and they didn't find you.

At half past twelve, she said, tell Thomas to look after the children. And then what? She complained her head ached. But nothing to me, no message? No; she said she was thirsty. Nothing more. But then Liz, she never did say much.

At one o'clock, she called for a priest. At two, she made her confession. She said she had once picked up a snake, in Italy. The priest said it was the fever speaking. He gave her absolution. And he could not wait, Mercy said, he could not wait to get out of the house, he was so afraid he might take the contagion and die.

At three in the afternoon, she declined. At four, she put off the burden of this life.

I suppose, he says, she will want to be buried with her first husband.

Why should you think that?

Because I came more lately. He walks away. There is no point in writing the usual directions about mourning clothes, beadsmen, candles. Like all the others touched by this sickness, Liz must be buried quickly. He will not be able to send for Gregory or call the family together. The rule is for the household to hang a bunch of straw outside the door as sign of infection, and then restrict entry for forty days, and go abroad as little as possible.

Mercy comes in and says, a fever, it could be any fever, we don't have to admit to the sweat … If we all stayed at home, London would come to a standstill.

‘No,’ he says. ‘We must do it. My lord cardinal made these rules and it would not be proper for me to scant them.’

Mercy says, where were you anyway? He looks into her face; he says, you know Little Bilney? I was with him; I warned him, I said he will jump into the fire.

And later? Later I was learning Polish.

Of course. You would be, she says.

She doesn't expect to make sense of it. He never expects to make any better sense of it than it makes now. He knows the whole of the New Testament by heart, but find a text: find a text for this.

Later, when he thinks back to that morning, he will want to catch again that flash of her white cap: though when he turned, no one was there. He would like to picture her with the bustle and warmth of the household behind her, standing in the doorway, saying, ‘Tell me when you are coming home.’ But he can only picture her alone, at the door; and behind her is a wasteland, and a blue-tinged light.

He thinks of their wedding night; her trailing taffeta gown, her little wary gesture of hugging her elbows. Next day she said, ‘That's all right then.’

And smiled. That's all she left him. Liz who never did say much.

For a month he is at home: he reads. He reads his Testament, but he knows what it says. He reads Petrarch whom he loves, reads how he defied the doctors: when they had given him up to fever he lived still, and when they came back in the morning, he was sitting up writing. The poet never trusted any doctor after that; but Liz left him too fast for physician's advice, good or bad, or for the apothecary with his cassia, his galingale, his wormwood, and his printed cards with prayers on.

He has got Niccolò Machiavelli's book, Principalities; it is a Latin edition, shoddily printed in Naples, which seems to have passed through many hands. He thinks of Niccolò on the battlefield; of Niccolò in the torture chamber. He feels he is in the torture chamber but he knows that one day he will find the door out, because it is he who has the key. Someone says to him, what is in your little book? and he says, a few aphorisms, a few truisms, nothing we didn't know before.

Whenever he looks up from his book, Rafe Sadler is there. Rafe is a slight boy, and the game with Richard and the others is to pretend not to see him, and say, ‘I wonder where Rafe is?’ They are as pleased with this joke as a bunch of three-year-olds might be. Rafe's eyes are blue, his hair is sandy-brown, and you couldn't take him for a Cromwell. But still he is a tribute to the man who brought him up: dogged, sardonic, quick on the uptake.

He and Rafe read a book about chess. It is a book printed before he was born, but it has pictures. They frown over them, perfecting their game. For what seems like hours, neither of them makes a move. ‘I was a fool,’ Rafe says, a forefinger resting on the head of a pawn. ‘I should have found you. When they said you weren't at Gray's Inn, I should have known you were.’

‘How could you have known? I'm not reliably where I shouldn't be. Are you moving that pawn, or just patting it?’

‘J'adoube.' Rafe snatches his hand away.

For a long time they sit gazing at their pieces, at the configuration which locks them in place. They see it coming: stalemate. ‘We're too good for each other.’

‘Perhaps we ought to play against other people.’

‘Later. When we can wipe out all-comers.’

Rafe says, ‘Ah, wait!’ He seizes his knight and makes it leap. Then he looks at the result, aghast.

‘Rafe, you are foutu.’

‘Not necessarily.’ Rafe rubs his forehead. ‘You might yet do something stupid.’

‘Right. You live in hope.’

Voices murmur. Sunlight outside. He feels he could almost sleep, but when he sleeps Liz Wykys comes back, cheerful and brisk, and when he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again.

From a distant room a child is crying. Footsteps overhead. The crying stops. He picks up his king and looks at the base of it, as if to see how it is made. He murmurs, ‘J'adoube.’ He puts it back where it was.

Anne Cromwell sits with him, as the rain falls, and writes her beginner's Latin in her copy book. By St John's Day she knows all common verbs. She is quicker than her brother and he tells her so. ‘Let me see,’ he says, holding out his hand for her book. He finds that she has written her name over and over, ‘Anne Cromwell, Anne Cromwell …’

News comes from France of the cardinal's triumphs, parades, public Masses and extempore Latin orations. It seems that, once disembarked, he has stood on every high altar in Picardy and granted the worshippers remission of their sins. That's a few thousand Frenchmen free to start all over again.

The king is chiefly at Beaulieu, a house in Essex he has recently bought from Sir Thomas Boleyn, whom he has made Viscount Rochford. All day he hunts, undeterred by the wet weather. In the evening he entertains. The Duke of Suffolk and the Duke of Norfolk join him at private suppers, which they share with the new viscount. The Duke of Suffolk is his old friend and if the king said, knit me some wings so I may fly, he would say, what colour? The Duke of Norfolk is, of course, chief of the Howard family and Boleyn's brother-in-law: a sinewy little twitcher, always twitching after his own advantage.

He does not write to the cardinal to tell him that everybody in England is saying that the king means to marry Anne Boleyn. He doesn't have the news the cardinal wants, so he doesn't write at all. He gets his clerks to do it, to keep the cardinal updated on his legal affairs, his finances. Tell him we are all well here, he says. Tender him my respects and my duty. Tell him how much we would like to see his face.

No one else in their household falls sick. This year London has escaped lightly – or at least, everyone says so. Prayers of thanksgiving are offered in the city churches; or prayers of appeasement, perhaps one should call them? In the little conclaves that meet at night, God's purpose is interrogated. London knows that it sins. As the Bible tells us, ‘A merchant shall hardly keep himself from doing wrong.’ And elsewhere it is stated, ‘He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.’ It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation. ‘Whom the Lord loveth he correcteth.’

By early September, the plague has run its course and the family is able to gather to pray for Liz. Now she can have the ceremonies that were denied her when she left them so suddenly. Black coats are given to twelve poor men of the parish, the same mourners who would have followed her coffin; and each man in the family has pledged seven years of Masses for her soul. On the day appointed, the weather clears briefly, and there is a chill in the air. ‘The harvest is passed, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.’

The small child Grace wakes in the night and says that she sees her mother in her shroud. She does not cry like a child, noisy and hiccupping, but like a grown woman, weeping tears of dread.

‘All the rivers run into the sea, but the seas are not yet full.’

Morgan Williams shrinks year by year. Today especially he looks small and grey and harassed, as he grips his arm and says, ‘Why are the best taken? Ah, why are they?’ Then, ‘I know you were happy with her, Thomas.’

They are back at Austin Friars, a swarm of women and children and robust men whom mourning hardly takes out of their customary black, the garb of lawyers and merchants, of accountants and brokers. There is his sister, Bet Wellyfed; her two boys, her little daughter Alice. There is Kat; his sisters have their heads together, deciding who shall move in to help out Mercy with the girls, ‘until you marry again, Tom.’

His nieces, two good little girls, still clutch their rosary beads. They stare around them, unsure what they must do next. Ignored, as the people talk over their heads, they lean against the wall, and flick their eyes at each other. Slowly, they slide down the wall, straight-backed, till they are the height of two-year-olds, and balancing on their heels. ‘Alice! Johane!’ someone snaps; slowly they rise, solemn-faced, to their proper heights. Grace approaches them; silently they trap her, take off her cap, shake out her blonde hair and begin to plait it. While the brothers-in-law talk about what the cardinal is doing in France, his attention strays towards her. Grace's eyes grow wide as her cousins draw her hair back tight. Her mouth opens in a silent gape, like a fish's mouth. When one squeak escapes her, it is Liz's sister, the elder Johane, who crosses the room and scoops her up. Watching Johane, he thinks, as he often has, how alike the sisters are: were.

His daughter Anne turns her back on the women, slides her arm into her uncle's. ‘We're talking about the Low Countries trade,’ Morgan tells her.

‘One thing's for sure, Uncle, they won't be pleased in Antwerp if Wolsey signs a treaty with the French.’

‘That's what we're saying to your father. But, oh, he will stick by his cardinal. Come, Thomas! You don't like the French any more than we do.’

He knows, as they do not, how much the cardinal needs the friendship of King François; without one of the major powers of Europe to speak for him, how will the king get his divorce?

‘Treaty of Perpetual Peace? Let's think, when was the last Perpetual Peace? I give it three months.’ It is his brother-in-law Wellyfed who speaks, laughing; and John Williamson, who is Johane's husband, asks will they take bets on it: three months, six? Then he remembers they're at a solemn occasion. ‘Sorry, Tom,’ he says, and breaks into a spasm of coughing.

Johane's voice cuts across it: ‘If the old gamester keeps coughing like this, the winter will finish him off, and then I'll marry you, Tom.’

‘Will you?’

‘Oh, for sure. As long as I get the right piece of paper from Rome.’

The party smile and hide their smiles. They give each other knowing looks. Gregory says, why is that funny? You can't marry your wife's sister, can you? He and his boy cousins go off into a corner to talk about private subjects – Bet's boys Christopher and Will, Kat's boys Richard and Walter – why did they call that child Walter? Did they need a reminder of their father, lurking around after his death, to remind them not to get too happy? The family never meet but he thanks God that Walter's not with them any more. He tells himself he should have more kindness towards his father, but his kindness extends only to paying for Masses for his soul.

In the year before he came back to England for good, he had crossed and recrossed the sea, undecided; he had so many friends in Antwerp, besides good business contacts, and as the city expanded, which it did every year, it seemed more and more the right place to be. If he was homesick, it was for Italy: the light, the language, Tommaso as he'd been there. Venice had cured him of any nostalgia for the banks of the Thames. Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home. But something pulled at him – curiosity about who was dead and who'd been born, a desire to see his sisters again, and laugh – one can always laugh somehow – about their upbringing. He had written to Morgan Williams to say, I'm thinking of London next. But don't tell my father. Don't tell him I'm coming home.

During the early months they tried to coax him. Look, Walter's settled down, you wouldn't know him. He's eased back on the drink. Well, he knew it was killing him. He keeps out of the law courts these days. He's even served his turn as churchwarden.

What? he said. And he didn't get drunk on the altar wine? He didn't make off with the candle funds?

Nothing they said could persuade him down to Putney. He waited more than a year, till he was married and a father. Then he felt safe to go.

It was more than twelve years he'd been out of England. He'd been taken aback by the change in people. He left them young and they had softened or sharpened into middle age. The lissom were lean now and dried out. The plump were plumper. Fine features had blurred and softened. Bright eyes were duller. There were some people he didn't recognise at all, not at first glance.

But he would have known Walter anywhere. As his father walked towards him he thought, I'm seeing myself, in twenty, thirty years, if I'm spared. They said that drink had nearly done for him, but he didn't look half-dead. He looked as he had always looked: as if he could knock you down, and might decide to do it. His short strong body had broadened and coarsened. His hair, thick and curling, had hardly a thread of grey. His glance was skewering; small eyes, bright and golden-brown. You need good eyes in a smithy, he used to say. You need good eyes wherever you are, or they'll rob you blind.

‘Where've you been?’ Walter said. Where once he would have sounded angry, he now sounded merely irritated. It was as if his son had been on a message to Mortlake, and had taken his time over it.

‘Oh … here and there,’ he said.

‘You look like a foreigner.’

‘I am a foreigner.’

‘So what have you been doing?’

He could imagine himself saying, ‘This and that.’ He did say it.

‘And what sort of this and that are you doing now?’

‘I'm learning the law.’

‘Law!’ Walter said. ‘If it weren't for the so-called law, we would be lords. Of the manor. And a whole lot of other manors round here.’

That is, he thinks, an interesting point to make. If you get to be a lord by fighting, shouting, being bigger, better, bolder and more shameless than the next man, Walter should be a lord. But it's worse than that; Walter thinks he's entitled. He'd heard it all his childhood: the Cromwells were a rich family once, we had estates. ‘When, where?’ he used to say. Walter would say, ‘Somewhere in the north, up there!’ and yell at him for quibbling. His father didn't like to be disbelieved even when he was telling you an outright lie. ‘So how do we come to such a low place?’ he would ask, and Walter would say it was because of lawyers and cheats and lawyers who are all cheats, and who thieve land away from its owners. Understand it if you can, Walter would say, for I can't – and I'm not stupid, boy. How dare they drag me into court and fine me for running beasts on the so-called common? If all had their own, that would be my common.

Now, if the family's land was in the north, how could that be? No point saying this – in fact, it's the quickest way to get a lesson from Walter's fist. ‘But was there no money?’ he'd persist. ‘What happened to it?’

Just once, when he was sober, Walter had said something that sounded true, and was, by his lights, eloquent: I suppose, he said, I suppose we pissed it away. I suppose once it's gone it's gone. I suppose fortune, when it's lost, it will never visit again.

He thought about it, over the years. On that day when he went back to Putney, he'd asked him, ‘If ever the Cromwells were rich, and I were to go after what's left, would that content you?’

His tone was meant to be soothing but Walter was hard to soothe. ‘Oh yes, and share it out, I suppose? You and bloody Morgan that you're so thick with. That's my money, if all have their own.’

‘It would be family money.’ What are we doing, he thought, quarrelling right off, rowing within five minutes over this nonexistent wealth? ‘You have a grandson now.’ He added, not aloud, ‘And you aren't coming anywhere near him.’

‘Oh, I have those already,’ Walter said. ‘Grandsons. What is she, some Dutch girl?’

He told him about Liz Wykys. Admitting, therefore, that he had been in England long enough to marry and have a child. ‘Caught yourself a rich widow,’ Walter said, sniggering. ‘I suppose that was more important than coming to see me. It would be. I suppose you thought I'd be dead. Lawyer, is it? You were always a talker. A slap in the mouth couldn't cure it.’

‘But God knows you tried.’

‘I suppose you don't admit to the smithy work now. Or helping your uncle John and sleeping among the swill buckets.’

‘Good God, father,’ he'd said, ‘I never rose so high! What are you thinking?’

When he was a little boy and his uncle John was a cook for the great man, he used to run away to Lambeth to the palace, because the chances of getting fed were better. He used to hang around by the entrance nearest the river – Morton hadn't built his big gateway then – and watch the people come and go, asking who was who and recognising them next time by the colours of their clothes and the animals and objects painted on their shields. ‘Don't stand about,’ people bellowed at him, ‘make yourself useful.’

Other children than he made themselves useful in the kitchen by fetching and carrying, their small fingers employed in plucking songbirds and hulling strawberries. Each dinner time the household officers formed up in procession in the passages off the kitchens, and they carried in the tablecloths and the Principal Salt. His uncle John measured the loaves and if they were not just right they were tossed into a basket for the lower household. Those that passed his test he counted as they went in; standing by him, pretending to be his deputy, he learned to count. Into the great hall would go the meats and the cheeses, the sugared fruits and the spiced wafers, to the archbishop's table – he was not a cardinal then. When the scrapings and remnants came back they were divided up. First choice to the kitchen staff. Then to the almshouse and the hospital, the beggars at the gate. What wasn't fit for them would go down the line to the children and the pigs.

Each morning and evening the boys earned their keep by running up the back staircases with beer and bread to put in the cupboards for the young gentlemen who were the cardinal's pages. The pages were of good family. They would wait at table and so become intimate with great men. They would hear their talk and learn from it. When they were not at the table they were learning out of great volumes from their music masters and other masters, who passed up and down the house holding nosegays and pomanders, who spoke in Greek. One of the pages was pointed out to him: Master Thomas More, whom the archbishop himself says will be a great man, so deep his learning already and so pleasant his wit.

One day he brought a wheaten loaf and put it in the cupboard and lingered, and Master Thomas said, ‘Why do you linger?’ But he did not throw anything at him. ‘What is in that great book?’ he asked, and Master Thomas replied, smiling, ‘Words, words, just words.’

Master More is fourteen this year, someone says, and is to go to Oxford. He doesn't know where Oxford is, or whether he wants to go there or has just been sent. A boy can be sent; and Master Thomas is not yet a man.

Fourteen is twice seven. Am I seven? he asks. Don't just say yes. Tell me am I? His father says, for God's sake, Kat, make him up a birthday. Tell him anything, but keep him quiet.

When his father says, I'm sick of the sight of you, he leaves Putney and sets off to Lambeth. When Uncle John says, we have plenty of boys this week, and the devil finds work for idle hands, he sets off back to Putney. Sometimes he gets a present to take home. Sometimes it is a brace of pigeons with their feet tied together, and gaping bloody beaks. He walks along the riverbank whirling them about his head, and they look as if they are flying, till somebody shouts at him, stop that! He can't do anything without someone shouting. Is it any wonder, John says, when you are into any mischief going, prone to giving back answers and always reliably to be found where you shouldn't be?

In a small cold room off the kitchen passages there is a woman called Isabella, who makes marzipan figures, for the archbishop and his friends to make plays with after supper. Some of the figures are heroes, such as Prince Alexander, Prince Caesar. Some are saints; today I am making St Thomas, she says. One day she makes marzipan beasts and gives him a lion. You can eat it, she says; he would rather keep it, but Isabella says it will soon fall to pieces. She says, ‘Haven't you got a mother?’

He learns to read from the scribbled orders for wheat flour or dried beans, for barley and for ducks' eggs, that come out of the stewards' pantries. For Walter, the point of being able to read is to take advantage of people who can't; for the same purpose one must learn to write. So his father sends him to the priest. But again he is always in the wrong, for priests have such strange rules; he should come to the lesson specially, not on his way from whatever else he is doing, not carrying a toad in a bag, or knives that want sharpening, and not cut and bruised either, from one of those doors (doors called Walter) that he is always walking into. The priest shouts, and forgets to feed him, so he takes off to Lambeth again.

On the days when he turns up in Putney, his father says, where by the sweet saints have you been: unless he's busy inside, on top of a stepmother. Some of the stepmothers last such a short time that his father's done with them and kicked them out by the time he gets home, but Kat and Bet tell him about them, screeching with laughter. Once when he comes in, dirty and wet, that day's stepmother says, ‘Who does this boy belong to?’ and tries to kick him out into the yard.

One day when he is nearly home he finds the first Bella lying in the street, and he sees that nobody wants her. She is no longer than a small-sized rat and so shocked and cold that she doesn't even cry. He carries her home in one hand, and in the other a small cheese wrapped in sage leaves.

The dog dies. His sister Bet says, you can get another. He looks in the street but never finds one. There are dogs, but they belong to somebody.

It can take a long time to get to Putney from Lambeth and sometimes he eats the present, if it's not raw. But if he only gets a cabbage, he kicks it and rolls it and thrashes it till it is utterly, utterly destroyed.

At Lambeth he follows the stewards around and when they say a number he remembers it; so people say, if you haven't time to write it down, just tell John's nephew. He will cast an eye on a sack of whatever's been ordered in, then warn his uncle to check if it's short weight.

At night at Lambeth, when it's still light and all the pots have been scoured, the boys go outside on to the cobbles and play at football. Their shouts rise into the air. They curse and barge into each other, and till somebody yells to stop, they fight with their fists and sometimes bite each other. From the open window above, the young gentlemen sing a part-song in the high careful voices they learn.

Sometimes the face of Master Thomas More appears. He waves to him, but Master Thomas looks down without recognition at the children below. He smiles impartially; his white scholar's hand draws close the shutter. The moon rises. The pages go to their truckle-beds. The kitchen children wrap themselves in sacking and sleep by the hearth.

He remembers one night in summer when the footballers had stood silent, looking up. It was dusk. The note from a single recorder wavered in the air, thin and piercing. A blackbird picked up the note, and sang from a bush by the water gate. A boatman whistled back from the river.

1527: when the cardinal comes back from France, he immediately begins ordering up banquets. French ambassadors are expected, to set the seal on his concordat. Nothing, he says, nothing, will be too good for these gentlemen.

The court leaves Beaulieu on 27 August. Soon afterwards, Henry meets the returned cardinal, face-to-face for the first time since early June. ‘You will hear that the king's reception of me was cold,’ Wolsey says, ‘but I can tell you it was not. She – Lady Anne – was present … this is true.’

On the face of it, a large part of his mission has been a failure. The cardinals would not meet him at Avignon: made the excuse that they didn't want to go south in the heat. ‘But now,’ he says, ‘I have a better plan. I will ask the Pope to send me a co-legate, and I will try the king's matter in England.’

While you were in France, he says, my wife Elizabeth died.

The cardinal looks up. His hands fly to his heart. His right hand creeps down to the crucifix he wears. He asks how it occurred. He listens. His thumb runs over the tortured body of God: over and over, as if it were any lump of metal. He bows his head. He murmurs, ‘Whom the Lord loveth …’ They sit in silence. To break the silence, he begins to ask the cardinal unnecessary questions.

He scarcely needs an account of the tactics of the summer just past. The cardinal has promised to help finance a French army which will go into Italy and try to expel the Emperor. While this is happening, the Pope, who has lost not just the Vatican but the papal states, and seen Florence throw out his Medici relatives, will be grateful and obliged to King Henry. But as for any longterm rapprochement with the French – he, Cromwell, shares the scepticism of his friends in the city. If you have been in the street in Paris or Rouen, and seen a mother pull her child by the hand, and say, ‘Stop that squalling, or I'll fetch an Englishman,’ you are inclined to believe that any accord between the countries is formal and transient. The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island. English armies laid waste to the land they moved through. As if systematically, they performed every action proscribed by the codes of chivalry, and broke every one of the laws of war. The battles were nothing; it was what they did between the battles that left its mark. They robbed and raped for forty miles around the line of their march. They burned the crops in the fields, and the houses with the people inside them. They took bribes in coin and in kind and when they were encamped in a district they made the people pay for every day on which they were left unmolested. They killed priests and hung them up naked in the marketplaces. As if they were infidels, they ransacked the churches, packed the chalices in their baggage, fuelled their cooking fires with precious books; they scattered relics and stripped altars. They found out the families of the dead and demanded that the living ransom them; if the living could not pay, they torched the corpses before their eyes, without ceremony, without a single prayer, disposing of the dead as one might the carcases of diseased cattle.

This being so, the kings may forgive each other; the people scarcely can. He does not say this to Wolsey, who has enough bad news waiting for him. During his absence, the king had sent his own envoy to Rome for secret negotiations. The cardinal had found it out; and it had come to nothing, of course. ‘But if the king is less than frank with me, it does nothing to aid our cause.’

He has never before met with such double-dealing. The fact is, the king knows his case is weak in law. He knows this, but does not want to know it. In his own mind, he has convinced himself he was never married and so is now free to marry. Let us say, his will is convinced, but not his conscience. He knows canon law, and where he does not know it already he has made himself expert. Henry, as the younger brother, was brought up and trained for the church, and for the highest offices within it. ‘If His Majesty's brother Arthur had lived,’ Wolsey says, ‘then His Majesty would have been the cardinal, and not me. Now there's a thought. Do you know, Thomas, I haven't had a day off since … since I was on the boat, I suppose. Since the day I was seasick, starting at Dover.’

They had once crossed the Narrow Sea together. The cardinal had lain below, calling on God, but he, being used to the voyage, spent the time on deck, making drawings of the sails and rigging, and of notional ships with notional rigging, and trying to persuade the captain – ‘yourself not offended,’ he said – that there was a way of going faster. The captain thought it over and said, ‘When you fit out a merchant ship of your own, you can do it that way. Of course, any Christian vessel will think you're pirates, so don't look for help if you get in difficulties. Sailors,’ he explained, ‘don't like anything new.’

‘Nor does anyone else,’ he'd said. ‘Not as far as I can see.’

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree, like Walter's, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don't try to go it alone, or they'll think you're pirates.

This summer, with the cardinal back on dry land, he remembers that voyage. He waits for the enemy to come alongside, and for the hand-to-hand fighting to begin.

But for now he goes down to the kitchens, to see how they are getting on with their masterpieces to impress the French envoys. They have got the steeple on their sugar-paste model of St Paul's, but they are having trouble with the cross and ball on top. He says, ‘Make marzipan lions – the cardinal wants them.’

They roll their eyes and say, will it never end?

Since he returned from France their master has been uncharacteristically sour. It is not just the overt failures that make him grumble, but the dirty work behind the scenes. Squibs and slanders were printed against him and as fast as he could buy them up there was a new batch on the street. Every thief in France seemed to converge on his baggage train; at Compiègne, though he mounted a day-and-night guard on his gold plate, a little boy was found to be going up and down the back stairs, passing out the dishes to some great robber who had trained him up.

‘What happened? Did you catch him?’

‘The great robber was put in the pillory. The boy ran away. Then one night, some villain sneaked into my chamber, and carved a device by the window …’ And next morning, a shaft of early sun, creeping through mist and rain, had picked out a gallows, from which dangled a cardinal's hat.

Once again the summer has been wet. He could swear it has never been light. The harvest will be ruined. The king and the cardinal exchange recipes for pills. The king lays down cares of state should he happen to sneeze, and prescribes for himself an easy day of music-making or strolling – if the rain abates – in his gardens. In the afternoon, he and Anne sometimes retire and are private. The gossip is that she allows him to undress her. In the evenings, good wine keeps the chills out, and Anne, who reads the Bible, points out strong scriptural commendations to him.

After supper he grows thoughtful, says he supposes the King of France is laughing at him; he supposes the Emperor is laughing too. After dark the king is sick with love. He is melancholy, sometimes unreachable. He drinks and sleeps heavily, sleeps alone; he wakes, and because he is a strong man and a young man still he is optimistic, clear-headed, ready for the new day. In daylight, his cause is hopeful.

The cardinal doesn't stop work if he's ill. He just goes on at his desk, sneezing, aching, and complaining.

In retrospect, it is easy to see where the cardinal's decline began, but at the time it was not easy. Look back, and you remember being at sea. The horizon dipped giddily, and the shoreline was lost in mist.

October comes, and his sisters and Mercy and Johane take his dead wife's clothes and cut them up carefully into new patterns. Nothing is wasted. Every good bit of cloth is made into something else.

At Christmas the court sings:

As the holly groweth green

And never changes hue

So I am, and ever hath been,

Unto my lady true.

Green groweth the holly, so doth the ivy.

Though winter blasts blow ever so high.

As the holly groweth green,

With ivy all alone,

When flowers cannot be seen

And green-wood leaves be gone,

Green groweth the holly.

Spring, 1528: Thomas More, ambling along, genial, shabby. ‘Just the man,’ he says. ‘Thomas, Thomas Cromwell. Just the man I want to see.’

He is genial, always genial; his shirt collar is grubby. ‘Are you bound for Frankfurt this year, Master Cromwell? No? I thought the cardinal might send you to the fair, to get among the heretic booksellers. He is spending a deal of money buying up their writings, but the tide of filth never abates.’

More, in his pamphlets against Luther, calls the German shit. He says that his mouth is like the world's anus. You would not think that such words would proceed from Thomas More, but they do. No one has rendered the Latin tongue more obscene.

‘Not really my business,’ Cromwell says, ‘heretics' books. Heretics abroad are dealt with abroad. The church being universal.’

‘Oh, but once these Bible men get over to Antwerp, you know … What a town it is! No bishop, no university, no proper seat of learning, no proper authorities to stop the proliferation of so-called translations, translations of scripture which in my opinion are malicious and wilfully misleading … But you know that, of course, you spent some years there. And now Tyndale's been sighted in Hamburg, they say. You'd know him, wouldn't you, if you saw him?’

‘So would the Bishop of London. You yourself, perhaps.’

‘True. True.’ More considers it. He chews his lip. ‘And you'll say to me, well, it's not work for a lawyer, running after false translations. But I hope to get the means to proceed against the brothers for sedition, do you see?’ The brothers, he says; his little joke; he drips with disdain. ‘If there is a crime against the state, our treaties come into play, and I can have them extradited. To answer for themselves in a straiter jurisdiction.’

‘Have you found sedition in Tyndale's writing?’

‘Ah, Master Cromwell!’ More rubs his hands together. ‘I relish you, I do indeed. Now I feel as a nutmeg must do when it's grated. A lesser man – a lesser lawyer – would say, “I have read Tyndale's work, and I find no fault there.” But Cromwell won't be tripped – he casts it back, he asks me, rather, have you read Tyndale? And I admit it. I have studied the man. I have picked apart his so-called translations, and I have done it letter by letter. I read him, of course, I do. By licence. From my bishop.’

‘It says in Ecclesiasticus, “he that toucheth pitch shall be defiled.” Unless his name's Thomas More.’

‘Well now, I knew you were a Bible reader! Most apt. But if a priest hears a confession, and the matter be wanton, does that make the priest a wanton fellow himself?’ By way of diversion, More takes his hat off, and absently folds it up in his hands; he creases it in two; his bright, tired eyes glance around, as if he might be confuted from all sides. ‘And I believe the Cardinal of York has himself licensed his young divines at Cardinal College to read the sectaries' pamphlets. Perhaps he includes you in his dispensations. Does he?’

It would be strange for him to include his lawyer; but then it's strange work for lawyers altogether. ‘We have come around in a circle,’ he says.

More beams at him. ‘Well, after all, it's spring. We shall soon be dancing around the maypole. Good weather for a sea voyage. You could take the chance to do some wool-trade business, unless it's just men you're fleecing these days? And if the cardinal asked you to go to Frankfurt, I suppose you'd go? Now if he wants some little monastery knocked down, when he thinks it has good endowments, when he thinks the monks are old, Lord bless them, and a little wandering in their wits; when he thinks the barns are full and the ponds well stocked with fish, the cattle fat and the abbot old and lean … off you go, Thomas Cromwell. North, south, east or west. You and your little apprentices.’

If another man were saying this, he'd be trying to start a fight. When Thomas More says it, it leads to an invitation to dinner. ‘Come out to Chelsea,’ he says. ‘The talk is excellent, and we shall like you to add to it. Our food is simple, but good.’

Tyndale says a boy washing dishes in the kitchen is as pleasing to the eye of God as a preacher in the pulpit or the apostle on the Galilee shore. Perhaps, he thinks, I won't mention Tyndale's opinion.

More pats his arm. ‘Have you no plans to marry again, Thomas? No? Perhaps wise. My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?’

‘Your father has married, what, three times?’

‘Four.’ He smiles. The smile is real. It crinkles the corner of his eyes. ‘Your beadsman, Thomas,’ he says, as he ambles away.

When More's first wife died, her successor was in the house before the corpse was cold. More would have been a priest, but human flesh called to him with its inconvenient demands. He did not want to be a bad priest, so he became a husband. He had fallen in love with a girl of sixteen, but her sister, at seventeen, was not yet married; he took the elder, so that her pride should not be hurt. He did not love her; she could not read or write; he hoped that might be amended, but seemingly not. He tried to get her to learn sermons by heart, but she grumbled and was stubborn in her ignorance; he took her home to her father, who suggested beating her, which made her so frightened that she swore she would complain no more. ‘And she never did,’ More will say. ‘Though she didn't learn any sermons either.’ It seems he thought the negotiations had been satisfactory: honour preserved all round. The stubborn woman gave him children, and when she died at twenty-four, he married a city widow, getting on in years and advanced in stubbornness: another one who couldn't read. There it is: if you are so lenient with yourself as to insist on living with a woman, then for the sake of your soul you should make it a woman you really don't like.

Cardinal Campeggio, whom the Pope is sending to England at Wolsey's request, was a married man before he was a priest. It makes him especially suitable to help Wolsey – who of course has no experience of marital problems – on the next stage of the journey to thwart the king in his heart's desire. Though the imperial army has withdrawn from Rome, a spring of negotiations has failed to yield any definite result. Stephen Gardiner has been in Rome, with a letter from the cardinal, praising the Lady Anne, trying to disabuse the Pope of any notion he may entertain that the king is being wilful and whimsical in his choice of bride. The cardinal had sat long over the letter listing her virtues, writing it in his own hand. ‘Womanly modesty … chastity … can I say chastity?’

‘You'd better.’

The cardinal looked up. ‘Know something?’ He hesitated, and returned to his letter. ‘Apt to bear children? Well, her family is fertile. Loving and faithful daughter of the church … Perhaps stretching a point … they say she has the scriptures in French set up in her chamber, and lets her women read them, but I would have no positive knowledge of that …’

‘King François allows the Bible in French. She learned her scriptures there, I suppose.’

‘Ah, but women, you see. Women reading the Bible, there's another point of contention. Does she know what Brother Martin thinks is a woman's place? We shouldn't mourn, he says, if our wife or daughter dies in childbirth – she's only doing what God made her for. Very harsh, Brother Martin, very intractable. And perhaps she is not a Bible-woman. Perhaps it is a slur on her. Perhaps it is just that she is out of patience with churchmen. I wish she did not blame me for her difficulties. Not blame me so very much.’

Lady Anne sends friendly messages to the cardinal, but he thinks she does not mean them. ‘If,’ Wolsey had said, ‘I saw the prospect of an annulment for the king, I would go to the Vatican in person, have my veins opened and allow the documents to be written in my own blood. Do you think, if Anne knew that, it would content her? No, I didn't think so, but if you see any of the Boleyns, make them the offer. By the way, I suppose you know a person called Humphrey Monmouth? He is the man who had Tyndale in his house for six months, before he ran off to wherever. They say he sends him money still, but that can't possibly be true, as how would he know where to send? Monmouth … I am merely mentioning his name. Because … now why am I?’ The cardinal had closed his eyes. ‘Because I am merely mentioning it.’

The Bishop of London has already filled his own prisons. He is locking up Lutherans and sectaries in Newgate and the Fleet, with common criminals. There they remain until they recant and do public penance. If they relapse they will be burned; there are no second chances.

When Monmouth's house is raided, it is clear of all suspect writings. It's almost as if he was forewarned. There are neither books nor letters that link him to Tyndale and his friends. All the same, he is taken to the Tower. His family is terrified. Monmouth is a gentle and fatherly man, a master draper, well liked in his guild and the city at large. He loves the poor and buys cloth even when trade is bad, so the weavers may keep in work. No doubt the imprisonment is designed to break him; his business is tottering by the time he is released. They have to let him go, for lack of evidence, because you can't make anything of a heap of ashes in the hearth.

Monmouth himself would be a heap of ashes, if Thomas More had his way. ‘Not come to see us yet, Master Cromwell?’ he says. ‘Still breaking dry bread in cellars? Come now, my tongue is sharper than you deserve. We must be friends, you know.’

It sounds like a threat. More moves away, shaking his head: ‘We must be friends.’

Ashes, dry bread. England was always, the cardinal says, a miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people, who are working slowly towards their deliverance, and who are visited by God with special tribulations. If England lies under God's curse, or some evil spell, it has seemed for a time that the spell has been broken, by the golden king and his golden cardinal. But those golden years are over, and this winter the sea will freeze; the people who see it will remember it all their lives.

Johane has moved into the house at Austin Friars with her husband John Williamson and her daughter little Johane – Jo, the children call her, seeing she is too small for a full name. John Williamson is needed in the Cromwell business. ‘Thomas,’ says Johane, ‘what exactly is your business these days?’

In this way she detains him in talk. ‘Our business,’ he says, ‘is making people rich. There are many ways to do this and John is going to help me out with them.’

‘But John won't have to deal with my lord cardinal, will he?’

The gossip is that people – people of influence – have complained to the king, and the king has complained to Wolsey, about the monastic houses he has closed down. They don't think of the good use to which the cardinal has put the assets; they don't think of his colleges, the scholars he maintains, the libraries he is founding. They're only interested in getting their own fingers in the spoils. And because they've been cut out of the business, they pretend to believe the monks have been left naked and lamenting in the road. They haven't. They've been transferred elsewhere, to bigger houses better run. Some of the younger ones have been let go, boys who have no calling to the life. Questioning them, he usually finds they know nothing, which makes nonsense of the abbeys' claims to be the light of learning. They can stumble through a Latin prayer, but when you say, ‘Go on then, tell me what it means,’ they say, ‘Means, master?’ as if they thought that words and their meanings were so loosely attached that the tether would snap at the first tug.

‘Don't worry about what people say,’ he tells Johane. ‘I take responsibility for it, I do, alone.’

The cardinal has received the complaints with a supreme hauteur. He has grimly noted in his file the names of the complainers. Then he has taken out of his file the list, and handed it over to his man, with a tight smile. All he cares for are his new buildings, his banners flying, his coat of arms embossed on the brickwork, his Oxford scholars; he's plundering Cambridge to get the brightest young doctors over to Cardinal College. There was trouble before Easter, when the dean found six of the new men in possession of a number of forbidden books. Lock them up by all means, Wolsey said, lock them up and reason with them. If the weather is not too hot, or not too wet, I might come up and reason with them myself.

No use trying to explain this to Johane. She only wants to know her husband's not within arrow-shot of the slanders that are flying. ‘You know what you're doing, I suppose.’ Her eyes dart upwards. ‘At least, Tom, you always look as if you do.’

Her voice, her footstep, her raised eyebrow, her pointed smile, everything reminds him of Liz. Sometimes he turns, thinking that Liz has come into the room.

The new arrangements confuse Grace. She knows her mother's first husband was called Tom Williams; they name him in their household prayers. Is Uncle Williamson therefore his son? she asks.

Johane tries to explain it. ‘Save your breath,’ Anne says. She taps her head. Her bright little fingers bounce from the seed pearls of her cap. ‘Slow,’ she says.

Later, he says to her, ‘Grace isn't slow, just young.’

‘I never remember I was as foolish as that.’

‘They're all slow, except us? Is that right?’

Anne's face says, more or less, that is right. ‘Why do people marry?’

‘So there can be children.’

‘Horses don't marry. But there are foals.’

‘Most people,’ he says, ‘feel it increases their happiness.’

‘Oh, yes, that,’ Anne says. ‘May I choose my husband?’

‘Of course,’ he says; meaning, up to a point.

‘Then I choose Rafe.’

For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life might mend. Then he thinks, how could I ask Rafe to wait? He needs to set up his own household. Even five years from now, Anne would be a very young bride.

‘I know,’ she says. ‘And time goes by so slowly.’

It's true; one always seems to be waiting for something. ‘You seem to have thought it through,’ he says. You don't have to spell out to her, keep this to yourself, because she knows to do that; you don't have to lead this female child through a conversation with the little shifts and demurs that most women demand. She's not like a flower, a nightingale: she's like … like a merchant adventurer, he thinks. A look in the eye to skewer your intentions, and a deal done with a slap of the palm.

She pulls off her cap; she twists the seed pearls in her fingers, and tugs at a strand of her dark hair, stretching it and pulling out its wave. She scoops up the rest of her hair, twists it and wraps it around her neck. ‘I could do that twice,’ she says, ‘if my neck were smaller.’ She sounds fretful. ‘Grace thinks I cannot marry Rafe because we are related. She thinks everybody who lives in a house must be cousins.’

‘You are not Rafe's cousin.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I am sure. Anne … put your cap back on. What will your aunt say?’

She makes a face. It is a face imitative of her aunt Johane. ‘Oh, Thomas,’ she murmurs, ‘you are always so sure!’

He raises a hand to cover his smile. For a moment Johane seems less worrying. ‘Put your cap on,’ he says mildly.

She squashes it back on to her head. She is so little, he thinks; but still, she'd be better suited by a helmet. ‘How did Rafe come here?’ she says.

He came here from Essex, because that's where his father happened to be at the time. His father Henry was a steward to Sir Edward Belknap, who was a cousin of the Grey family, and so related to the Marquis of Dorset, and the marquis was Wolsey's patron, when the cardinal was a scholar at Oxford. So yes, cousins come into it; and the fact that, when he had only been back in England for a year or two, he was already somehow in the cardinal's affinity, though he had never set eyes on the great man himself; already he, Cromwell, was a man useful to employ. He worked for the Dorset family on various of their tangled lawsuits. The old marchioness had him tracking down bed hangings and carpets for her. Send that. Be here. To her, all the world was a menial. If she wanted a lobster or a sturgeon, she ordered it up, and if she wanted good taste she ordered it in the same way. The marchioness would run her hand over Florentine silks, making little squeaks of pleasure. ‘You bought it, Master Cromwell,’ she would say. ‘And very beautiful it is. Your next task is to work out how we pay for it.’

Somewhere in this maze of obligations and duties, he met Henry Sadler, and agreed to take his son into his household. ‘Teach him all you know,’ Henry proposed, a little fearfully. He arranged to collect Rafe on his way back from business in his part of the country, but he picked a bad day for it: mud and drenching rain, clouds chasing in from the coast. It was not much after two when he splashed up to the door, but the light was already failing; Henry Sadler said, can't you stay, you won't make it to London before they close the gates. I ought to try to get home tonight, he said. I have to be in court, and then there'll be my Lady Dorset's debt collectors to see off, and you know how that is … Mistress Sadler glanced fearfully outside, and down at her child: from whom she must now part, trusting him, at the age of seven, to the weather and the roads.

This is not harsh, this is usual. But Rafe was so small that he almost thought it harsh. His baby curls had been cropped and his ginger hair stood up at the crown. His mother and father knelt down and patted him. Then they swaddled and pulled and knotted him into multiple layers of over-wrapped padding, so that his slight frame swelled into the likeness of a small barrel. He looked down at the child and out at the rain and thought, sometimes I should be warm and dry like other men; how do they contrive it while I never can? Mistress Sadler knelt and took her son's face in her hands. ‘Remember everything we have told you,’ she whispered. ‘Say your prayers. Master Cromwell, please see he says his prayers.’

When she looked up he saw that her eyes were blurred with tears and he saw that the child could not bear it, and was shaking inside his vast wrappings and about to howl. He threw his cloak around himself. A scatter of raindrops flew from it, baptised the scene. ‘Well, Rafe, what do you think? If you're man enough …’ He held out his gauntleted hand. The child's hand slotted into it. ‘Shall we see how far we get?’

We'll do this fast so you don't look back, he thought. The wind and rain drove the parents back from the open door. He threw Rafe into the saddle. The rain came at them horizontally. On the outskirts of London the wind dropped. He lived at Fenchurch Street then. At the door a servant held out his arms in an offer to take Rafe, but he said, ‘We drowned men will stick together.’

The child had become a dead weight in his arms, shrinking flesh inside seven sodden layers of interwrapped wool. He stood Rafe before the fire; vapours rose from him. Roused by the warmth, he put up small frozen fingers and tentatively began to unpick, to unravel himself. What place is this, he said, in a distinct, polite tone.

‘London,’ he said. ‘Fenchurch Street. Home.’

He took a linen towel and gently blotted from his face the journey just passed. He rubbed his head. Rafe's hair stood up in spikes. Liz came in. ‘Heaven direct me: boy or hedgehog?’ Rafe turned his face to her. He smiled. He slept on his feet.

When the sweat comes back this summer, 1528, people say, as they did last year, that you won't get it if you don't think about it. But how can you not? He sends the girls out of London; first to the Stepney house, and then beyond. This time the court is infected. Henry tries to outride the plague, moving from one hunting lodge to the next. Anne is sent to Hever. The fever breaks out there among the Boleyn family and the lady's father goes down first. He lives; her sister Mary's husband dies. Anne falls ill but within twenty-four hours she is reported back on her feet. Still, it can wreck a woman's looks. You don't know what outcome to pray for, he says to the cardinal.

The cardinal says, ‘I am praying for Queen Katherine … and also for the dear Lady Anne. I am praying for King François's armies in Italy, that they may meet with success, and yet not so much success that they forget how they need their friend and ally King Henry. I am praying for the king's Majesty and all his councillors, and for the beasts in the field, and for the Holy Father and the Curia, may their decisions be guided from above. I am praying for Martin Luther, and for all those infected with his heresy, and for all who combat him, most especially the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, our dear friend Thomas More. Against all common sense and observation, I am praying for a good harvest, and for the rain to stop. I am praying for everybody. I am praying for everything. That is what it is, to be a cardinal. Only when I say to the Lord, “Now, about Thomas Cromwell –” does God say to me, “Wolsey, what have I told you? Don't you know when to give up?”’

When the infection reaches Hampton Court, the cardinal seals himself off from the world. Only four servants are allowed to approach him. When he re-emerges, he does look as if he has been praying.

At the end of the summer, when the girls come back to London, they have grown and Grace's hair has been bleached by the sun. She is shy of him and he wonders if now she can only associate him with that night when he carried her to bed, after she had been told her mother was dead. Anne says, next summer, whatever happens, I prefer to stay with you. The sickness has left the city, but the cardinal's prayers have met with variable success. The harvest is poor; the French are losing badly in Italy and their commander has died of plague.

Autumn comes. Gregory goes back to his tutor; his reluctance is clear enough, though little about Gregory is clear to him. ‘What is it,’ he asks him, ‘what's wrong?’ The boy won't say. With other people, he is sunny and lively, but with his father guarded and polite, as if to keep a formal distance between them. He says to Johane, ‘Is Gregory frightened of me?’

Quick as a needle into canvas, she darts at him. ‘He's not a monk; has he cause?’ Then she softens. ‘Thomas, why should he be? You're a kind father; in fact, I think too much so.’

‘If he doesn't want to go back to his tutor, I could send him to Antwerp to my friend Stephen Vaughan.’

‘Gregory will never make a man of business.’

‘No.’ You can't see him beating out a deal on interest rates with one of the Fuggers' agents or some sniggering de Medici clerk. ‘So what will I do with him?’

‘I'll tell you what to do – when he is ready, marry him well. Gregory is a gentleman. Anyone can see that.’

Anne is eager to make a start with Greek. He is thinking who best to teach her, asking around. He wants someone congenial, whom he can talk to over supper, a young scholar who will live in the house. He regrets the choice of tutor he's made for his son and nephews, but he won't take them away at this point. The man is quarrelsome, and to be sure there was a sad episode when one of the boys set fire to his room, because he'd been reading in bed with a candle. ‘It wouldn't be Gregory, would it?’ he'd said, always hopeful; the master seemed to think he was treating it as a joke. And he's always sending him bills that he believes he's paid; I need a household accountant, he thinks.

He sits at his desk, piled high with drawings and plans from Ipswich and Cardinal College, with craftsmen's estimates and bills for Wolsey's planting schemes. He examines a scar in the palm of his hand; it is an old burn-mark, and it looks like a twist of rope. He thinks about Putney. He thinks about Walter. He thinks about the jittery sidestep of a skittish horse, the smell of the brewery. He thinks about the kitchen at Lambeth, and about the tow-headed boy who used to bring the eels. He remembers taking the eel-boy by the hair and dipping his head in a tub of water, and holding it under. He thinks, did I really do that? I wonder why. The cardinal's probably right, I am beyond redemption. The scar sometimes itches; it is as hard as a spur of bone. He thinks, I need an accountant. I need a Greek tutor. I need Johane, but who says I can have what I need?

He opens a letter. It is from a priest called Thomas Byrd. He is in want of money, and it seems the cardinal owes him some. He makes a note, to have it checked out and paid, then picks up the letter again. It mentions two men, two scholars, Clerke and Sumner. He knows the names. They are two of the six college men, the Oxford men who had the Lutheran books. Lock them up and reason with them, the cardinal had said. He holds the letter and glances away from it. He knows something bad is coming; its shadow moves on the wall.

He reads. Clerke and Sumner are dead. The cardinal should be told, the writer says. Having no other secure place, the Dean saw fit to shut them in the college cellars, the deep cold cellars intended for storing fish. Even in that silent place, secret, icy, the summer plague sought them out. They died in the dark and without a priest.

All summer we have prayed and not prayed hard enough. Had the cardinal simply forgotten his heretics? I must go and tell him, he thinks.

It is the first week in September. His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It also must be suppressed.

But when at last the year turns, and the cardinal says, Thomas, what shall I give you for a new-year gift?, he says, ‘Give me Little Bilney.’ And without waiting for the cardinal to answer he says, ‘My lord, he has been in the Tower for a year. The Tower would frighten anyone, but Bilney is a timid man and not strong and I am afraid he is straitly kept, and my lord, you remember Sumner and Clerke and how they died. My lord, use your power, write letters, petition the king if you must. Let him go.’

The cardinal leans back. He puts his fingertips together. ‘Thomas,’ he says. ‘My dear Thomas Cromwell. Very well. But Father Bilney must go back to Cambridge. He must give up his project of going to Rome and addressing the Pope to bring him to a right way of thinking. There are very deep vaults under the Vatican, and my arm will not be able to reach him there.’

It is at the tip of his tongue to say, ‘You could not reach into the cellars of your own college.’ But he stops himself. Heresy – his brush with it – is a little indulgence that the cardinal allows him. He is always glad to have the latest bad books filleted, and any gossip from the Steelyard, where the German merchants live. He is happy to turn over a text or two, and enjoy an after-supper debate. But for the cardinal, any contentious point must be wrapped around and around again with a fine filament of words, fine as split hairs. Any dangerous opinion must be so plumped out with laughing apologies that it is as fat and harmless as the cushions you lean on. It is true that when he was told of the deaths underground, my lord was moved to tears. ‘How could I not have known?’ he said. ‘Those fine young men!’

He cries easily in recent months, though that does not mean his tears are less genuine; and indeed now he wipes away a tear, because he knows the story: Little Bilney at Gray's Inn, the man who spoke Polish, the futile messengers, the dazed children, Elizabeth Cromwell's face set in the fixed severity of death. He leans across his desk and says, ‘Thomas, please don't despair. You still have your children. And in time you may wish to marry again.’

I am a child, he thinks, who cannot be consoled. The cardinal places his hand over his. The strange stones flicker in the light, showing their depths: a garnet like a blood bubble; a turquoise with a silver sheen; a diamond with a yellow-grey blink, like the eye of a cat.

He will never tell the cardinal about Mary Boleyn, though the impulse will arise. Wolsey might laugh, he might be scandalised. He has to smuggle him the content, without the context.

Autumn, 1528: he is at court on the cardinal's business. Mary is running towards him, her skirts lifted, showing a fine pair of green silk stockings. Is her sister Anne chasing her? He waits to see.

She stops abruptly. ‘Ah, it's you!’

He wouldn't have thought Mary knew him. She puts one hand against the panelling, catching her breath, and the other against his shoulder, as if he were just part of the wall. Mary is still dazzlingly pretty; fair, soft-featured. ‘My uncle, this morning,’ she says. ‘My uncle Norfolk. He was roaring against you. I said to my sister, who is this terrible man, and she said –’

‘He's the one who looks like a wall?’

Mary takes her hand away. She laughs, blushes, and with a little heave of her bosom tries to get her breath back.

‘What was my lord of Norfolk's complaint?’

‘Oh …’ she flaps a hand to fan herself, ‘he said, cardinals, legates, it was never merry in England when we had cardinals among us. He says the Cardinal of York is despoiling the noble houses, he says he will have all to rule himself, and the lords to be like schoolboys creeping in for a whipping. Not that you should take any notice of what I say …’

She looks fragile, breathless still: but his eyes tell her to talk. She gives a little laugh and says, ‘My brother George roared too. He said that the Cardinal of York was born in a hospital for paupers and he employs a man was born in the gutter. My lord father said, come now, my dear boy, you lose nothing if you are exact: not quite a gutter, but a brewer's yard, I believe, for he's certainly no gentleman.’ Mary takes a step back. ‘You look a gentleman. I like your grey velvet, where did you find that?’

‘Italy.’

He has been promoted, from being the wall. Mary's hand creeps back; absorbed, she strokes him. ‘Could you get me some? Though a bit sober for a woman, perhaps?’

Not for a widow, he thinks. The thought must show on his face because Mary says, ‘That's it, you see. William Carey's dead.’

He bows his head and is very correct; Mary alarms him. ‘The court misses him sadly. As you must yourself.’

A sigh. ‘He was kind. Given the circumstances.’

‘It must have been difficult for you.’

‘When the king turned his mind to Anne, he thought that, knowing how things are done in France, she might accept a … a certain position, in the court. And in his heart, as he put it. He said he would give up all other mistresses. The letters he has written, in his own hand …’

‘Really?’

The cardinal always says that you can never get the king to write a letter himself. Even to another king. Even to the Pope. Even when it might make a difference.

‘Yes, since last summer. He writes and then sometimes, where he would sign Henricus Rex …’ She takes his hand, turns up his palm, and with her forefinger traces a shape. ‘Where he should sign his name, instead he draws a heart – and he puts their initials in it. Oh, you mustn't laugh …’ She can't keep the smile off her face. ‘He says he is suffering.’

He wants to say, Mary, these letters, can you steal them for me?

‘My sister says, this is not France, and I am not a fool like you, Mary. She knows I was Henry's mistress and she sees how I'm left. And she takes a lesson from it.’

He is almost holding his breath: but she's reckless now, she will have her say.

‘I tell you, they will ride over Hell to marry. They have vowed it. Anne says she will have him and she cares not if Katherine and every Spaniard is in the sea and drowned. What Henry wants he will have, and what Anne wants she will have, and I can say that, because I know them both, who better?’ Her eyes are soft and welling with tears. ‘So that is why,’ she says, ‘why I miss William Carey, because now she is everything, and I am to be swept out after supper like the old rushes. Now I'm no one's wife, they can say anything they like to me. My father says I'm a mouth to feed and my uncle Norfolk says I'm a whore.’

As if he didn't make you one. ‘Are you short of money?’

‘Oh, yes!’ she says. ‘Yes, yes, yes, and no one has even thought about that! No one has even asked me that before. I have children. You know that. I need …’ She presses her fingers against her mouth, to stop it trembling. ‘If you saw my son … well, why do you think I called him Henry? The king would have owned him as his son, just as he has owned Richmond, but my sister forbade it. He does what she says. She means to give him a prince herself, so she doesn't want mine in his nursery.’

Reports have been sent to the cardinal: Mary Boleyn's child is a healthy boy with red-gold hair and lively appetites. She has a daughter, older, but in the context that's not so interesting, a daughter. He says, ‘What age is your son now, Lady Carey?’

‘Three in March. My girl Catherine is five.’ Again she touches her lips, in consternation. ‘I'd forgotten … your wife died. How could I forget?’ How would you even know, he wonders, but she answers him at once. ‘Anne knows everything about people who work for the cardinal. She asks questions and writes the answers in a book.’ She looks up at him. ‘And you have children?’

‘Yes … do you know, no one ever asks me that either?’ He leans one shoulder against the panelling, and she moves an inch closer, and their faces soften, perhaps, from their habitual brave distress, and into the conspiracy of the bereft. ‘I have a big boy,’ he says, ‘he's at Cambridge with a tutor. I have a little girl called Grace; she's pretty and she has fair hair, though I don't … My wife was not a beauty, and I am as you see. And I have Anne, Anne wants to learn Greek.’

‘Goodness,’ she says. ‘For a woman, you know …’

‘Yes, but she says, “Why should Thomas More's daughter have the pre-eminence?” She has such good words. And she uses them all.’

‘You like her best.’

‘Her grandmother lives with us, and my wife's sister, but it's not … for Anne it's not the best arrangement. I could send her into some other household, but then … well, her Greek … and I hardly see her as it is.’ It feels like the longest speech, unless to Wolsey, that he's made for some time. He says, ‘Your father should be providing properly for you. I'll ask the cardinal to speak to him.’ The cardinal will enjoy that, he thinks.

‘But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names. Can the cardinal get husbands?’

‘The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband would you like?’

She considers. ‘One who will take care of my children. One who can stand up to my family. One who doesn't die.’ She touches her fingertips together.

‘You should ask for someone young and handsome too. Don't ask, don't get.’

‘Really? I was brought up in the other tradition.’

Then you had a different upbringing from your sister, he thinks. ‘In the masque, at York Place, do you remember … were you Beauty, or Kindness?’

‘Oh …’ she smiles, ‘that must be, what, seven years ago? I don't remember. I've dressed up so many times.’

‘Of course, you are still both.’

‘That's all I used to care about. Dressing up. I remember Anne, though. She was Perseverance.’

He says, ‘Her particular virtue may be tested.’

Cardinal Campeggio came here with a brief from Rome to obstruct. Obstruct and delay. Do anything, but avoid giving judgment.

‘Anne is always writing letters, or writing in her little book. She walks up and down, up and down. When she sees my lord father she holds up a palm to him, don't dare speak … and when she sees me, she gives me a little pinch. Like …’ Mary demonstrates an airy pinch, with the fingers of her left hand. ‘Like that.’ She strokes the fingers of her right hand along her throat, till she reaches the little pulsing dip above her collarbone. ‘There,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I am bruised. She thinks to disfigure me.’

‘I'll talk to the cardinal,’ he says.

‘Do.’ She waits.

He needs to go. He has things to do.

‘I no longer want to be a Boleyn,’ she says. ‘Or a Howard. If the king would recognise my boy it would be different, but as it is I don't want any more of these masques and parties and dressing up as Virtues. They have no virtues. It's all show. If they don't want to know me, I don't want to know them. I'd rather be a beggar.’

‘Really … it doesn't have to come to that, Lady Carey.’

‘Do you know what I want? I want a husband who upsets them. I want to marry a man who frightens them.’

There is a sudden light in her blue eyes. An idea has dawned. She rests one delicate finger on the grey velvet she so admires, and says softly, ‘Don't ask, don't get.’

Thomas Howard for an uncle? Thomas Boleyn for a father? The king, in time, for a brother?

‘They'd kill you,’ he says.

He thinks he shouldn't enlarge on the statement: just let it stand as fact.

She laughs, bites her lip. ‘Of course. Of course they would. What am I thinking? Anyway, I'm grateful for what you have done already. For an interval of peace this morning – because when they're shouting about you, they're not shouting about me. One day,’ she says, ‘Anne will want to talk to you. She'll send for you and you'll be flattered. She'll have a little job for you, or she'll want some advice. So before that happens, you can have my advice. Turn around and walk the other way.’

She kisses the tip of her forefinger and touches it to his lips.

The cardinal does not need him that night, so he goes home to Austin Friars. His feeling is to put distance between himself and any Boleyns at all. There are some men, possibly, who would be fascinated by a woman who had been a mistress to two kings, but he is not one of them. He thinks about sister Anne, why she should take any interest in him; possibly she has information through what Thomas More calls ‘your evangelical fraternity’, and yet this is puzzling: the Boleyns don't seem like a family who think much about their souls. Uncle Norfolk has priests to do that for him. He hates ideas and never reads a book. Brother George is interested in women, hunting, clothes, jewellery and tennis. Sir Thomas Boleyn, the charming diplomat, is interested only in himself.

He would like to tell somebody what occurred. There is no one he can tell, so he tells Rafe. ‘I think you imagined it,’ Rafe says severely. His pale eyes open wide at the story of the initials inside the heart, but he doesn't even smile. He confines his incredulity to the marriage proposal. ‘She must have meant something else.’

He shrugs; it's hard to see what. ‘The Duke of Norfolk would fall on us like a pack of wolves,’ Rafe says. ‘He would come round and set fire to our house.’ He shakes his head.

‘But the pinching. What remedy?’

‘Armour. Evidently,’ says Rafe.

‘It might raise questions.’

‘Nobody's looking at Mary these days.’ He adds accusingly, ‘Except you.’

With the arrival of the papal legate in London, the quasi-regal household of Anne Boleyn is broken up. The king does not want the issue confused; Cardinal Campeggio is here to deal with his qualms about his marriage to Katherine, which are quite separate, he will insist, from any feelings he may entertain about Lady Anne. She is packed off to Hever, and her sister goes with her. A rumour floats back to London, that Mary is pregnant. Rafe says, ‘Saving your presence, master, are you sure you only leaned against the wall?’ The dead husband's family says it can't be his child, and the king is denying it too. It's sad to see the alacrity with which people assume the king is lying. How does Anne like it? She'll have time to get over her sulks, while she's rusticated. ‘Mary will be pinched black and blue,’ Rafe says.

People all over town tell him the gossip, without knowing quite how interested he is. It makes him sad, it makes him dubious, it makes him wonder about the Boleyns. Everything that passed between himself and Mary he now sees, hears, differently. It makes his skin creep, to think that if he had been flattered, susceptible, if he had said yes to her, he might soon have become father to a baby that looked nothing like a Cromwell and very like a Tudor. As a trick, you must admire it. Mary may look like a doll but she's not stupid. When she ran down the gallery showing her green stockings, she had a sharp eye out for prey. To the Boleyns, other people are for using and discarding. The feelings of others mean nothing, or their reputations, their family name.

He smiles, at the thought of the Cromwells having a family name. Or any reputation to defend.

Whatever has happened, nothing comes of it. Perhaps Mary was mistaken, or the talk was simply malice; God knows, the family invite it. Perhaps there was a child, and she lost it. The story peters out, with no definite conclusion. There is no baby. It is like one of the cardinal's strange fairy tales, where nature itself is perverted and women are serpents and appear and disappear at will.

Queen Katherine had a child that disappeared. In the first year of her marriage to Henry, she miscarried, but the doctors said that she was carrying twins, and the cardinal himself remembers her at court with her bodices loosened and a secret smile on her face. She took to her rooms for her confinement; after a time, she emerged tight-laced, with a flat belly, and no baby.

It must be a Tudor speciality.

A little later, he hears that Anne has taken the wardship of her sister's son, Henry Carey. He wonders if she intends to poison him. Or eat him.

New Year 1529: Stephen Gardiner is in Rome, issuing certain threats to Pope Clement, on the king's behalf; the content of the threats has not been divulged to the cardinal. Clement is easily panicked at the best of times, and it is not surprising that, with Master Stephen breathing sulphur in his ear, he falls ill. They are saying that he is likely to die, and the cardinal's agents are around and about in Europe, taking soundings and counting heads, chinking their purses cheerfully. There would be a swift solution to the king's problem, if Wolsey were Pope. He grumbles a little about his possible eminence; the cardinal loves his country, its May garlands, its tender birdsong. In his nightmares he sees squat spitting Italians, a forest of nooses, a corpse-strewn plain. ‘I shall want you to come with me, Thomas. You can stand by my side and move quick if any of those cardinals tries to stab me.’

He pictures his master stuck full of knives, as St Sebastian is stuck full of arrows. ‘Why does the Pope have to be in Rome? Where is it written?’

A slow smile spreads over the cardinal's face. ‘Bring the Holy See home. Why not?’ He loves a bold plan. ‘I couldn't bring it to London, I suppose? If only I were Archbishop of Canterbury, I could hold my papal court at Lambeth Palace … but old Warham does hang on and on, he always baulks me …’

‘Your Grace could move to your own see.’

‘York is so remote. I couldn't have the papacy in Winchester, you don't think? Our ancient English capital? And nearer the king?’

What an unusual regime this will turn out to be. The king at supper, with the Pope, who is also his Lord Chancellor … Will the king have to hand him his napkin, and serve him first?

When news comes of Clement's recovery, the cardinal doesn't say, a glorious chance lost. He says, Thomas, what shall we do next? We must open the legatine court, it can be no longer delayed. He says, ‘Go and find me a man called Anthony Poynes.’

He stands, arms folded, waiting for further and better particulars.

‘Try the Isle of Wight. And fetch me Sir William Thomas, whom I believe you will find in Carmarthen – he's elderly, so tell your men to go slowly.’

‘I don't employ anyone slow.’ He nods. ‘Still, I take the point. Don't kill the witnesses.’

The trial of the king's great matter is approaching. The king intends to show that when Queen Katherine came to him she was not a virgin, having consummated her marriage with his brother Arthur. To that end he is assembling the gentlemen who attended the royal couple after their wedding at Baynard's Castle, then later at Windsor, where the court moved in November that year, and later at Ludlow, where they were sent to play at Prince and Princess of Wales. ‘Arthur,’ Wolsey says, ‘would have been about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ The attendants, the witnesses, are at least a generation older. And so many years have gone by – twenty-eight, to be precise. How good can their memories be?

It should never have come to this – to this public and unseemly exposure. Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

Meanwhile she presents reasons why the legatine court should not try the issue. It is still sub judice at Rome, for one thing. For another, she is a stranger, she says, in a strange country; she ignores the decades in which she's been intimate with every twist and turn of English policy. The judges, she claims, are biased against her; certainly, she has reason to believe it. Campeggio lays hand on heart, and assures her he would give an honest judgment, even if he were in fear of his life. Katherine finds him too intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.

Who is advising Katherine? John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. ‘Do you know what I can't endure about that man?’ the cardinal says. ‘He's all skin and bone. I abhor your skeletal prelate. It makes the rest of us look bad. One looks … corporeal.’

He is in his corporeal pomp, his finest scarlet, when the king and queen are summoned before the two cardinals at Blackfriars. Everyone had supposed that Katherine would send a proxy, but instead she appears in person. The whole bench of bishops is assembled. The king answers to his name, in a full, echoing voice, speaking out of his big bejewelled chest. He, Cromwell, would have advised a motion of the hand, a murmur, a dip of the head to the court's authority. Most humility, in his view, is pretence; but the pretence can be winning.

The hall is packed. He and Rafe are far-off spectators. Afterwards, when the queen has made her statement – a few men have been seen to cry – they come out into the sunshine. Rafe says, ‘If we had been nearer, we could have seen whether the king could meet her eye.’

‘Yes. That is really all anyone needs to know.’

‘I'm sorry to say it, but I believe Katherine.’

‘Hush. Believe nobody.’

Something blots out the light. It is Stephen Gardiner, black and scowling, his aspect in no way improved by his trip to Rome.

‘Master Stephen!’ he says. ‘How was your journey home? Never pleasant, is it, to come back empty-handed? I've been feeling sorry for you. I suppose you did your best, such as it is.’

Gardiner's scowl deepens. ‘If this court can't give the king what he wants, your master will be finished. And then it is I who will feel sorry for you.’

‘Except you won't.’

‘Except I won't,’ Gardiner concedes; and moves on.

The queen does not return for the sordid parts of the proceedings. Her counsel speaks for her; she has told her confessor how her nights with Arthur left her untouched, and she has given him permission to break the seal of the confessional and make her assertion public. She has spoken before the highest court there is, God's court; would she lie, to the damnation of her soul?

Besides, there is another point, which everyone has in mind. After Arthur died, she was presented to prospective bridegrooms – to the old king, as it may be, or to the young Prince Henry – as fresh meat. They could have brought a doctor, who would have looked at her. She would have been frightened, she would have cried; but she would have complied. Perhaps now she wishes it had been so; that they had brought in a strange man with cold hands. But they never asked her to prove what she claimed; perhaps people were not so shameless in those days. The dispensations for her marriage to Henry were meant to cover either case: she was/was not a virgin. The Spanish documents are different from the English documents, and that is where we should be now, among the subclauses, studying paper and ink, not squabbling in a court of law over a shred of skin and a splash of blood on a linen sheet.

If he had been her adviser, he would have kept the queen in court, however much she squealed. Because, would the witnesses have spoken, to her face, as they spoke behind her back? She would be ashamed to face them, gnarled and grizzled and each equipped with perfect recollection; but he would have had her greet them cordially, and declare she would never have recognised them, after so much time gone by; and ask if they have grandchildren, and whether the summer heat eases their elderly aches and pains? The greater shame would be theirs: would they not hesitate, would they not falter, under the steady gaze of the queen's honest eyes?

Without Katherine present, the trial becomes a bawdy entertainment. The Earl of Shrewsbury is before the court, a man who fought with the old king at Bosworth. He recalls his own long-ago wedding night, when he was, like Prince Arthur, a boy of fifteen; never had a woman before, he says, but did his duty to his bride. On Arthur's wedding night, he and the Earl of Oxford had taken the prince to Katherine's chamber. Yes, says the Marquis of Dorset, and I was there too; Katherine lay under the coverlet, the prince got into bed beside her. ‘No one is willing to swear to having climbed in with them,’ Rafe whispers. ‘But I wonder they haven't found someone.’

The court must make do with evidence of what was said next morning. The prince, coming out of the bridal chamber, said he was thirsty and asked Sir Anthony Willoughby for a cup of ale. ‘Last night I was in Spain,’ he said. A little boy's crude joke, dragged back into the light; the boy has been, these thirty years, a corpse. How lonely it is to die young, to go down into the dark without any company! Maurice St John is not there with him, in his vault at Worcester Cathedral: nor Mr Cromer nor William Woodall, nor any of the men who heard him say, ‘Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife.’

When they have listened to all this, and they come out into the air, he feels strangely cold. He puts a hand to his face, touches his cheekbone. Rafe says, ‘It would be a poor sort of bridegroom who would come out in the morning and say, “Good day, masters. Nothing done!” He was boasting, wasn't he? That was all. They've forgotten what it's like to be fifteen.’

Even as the court is sitting, King François in Italy is losing a battle. Pope Clement is preparing to sign a new treaty with the Emperor, Queen Katherine's nephew. He doesn't know this when he says, ‘This is a bad day's work. If we want Europe to laugh at us, they've every reason now.’

He looks sideways at Rafe, whose particular problem, clearly, is that he cannot imagine anyone, even a hasty fifteen-year-old, wanting to penetrate Katherine. It would be like copulation with a statue. Rafe, of course, has not heard the cardinal on the subject of the queen's former attractions. ‘Well, I reserve judgment. Which is what the court will do. It's all they can do.’ He says, ‘Rafe, you are so much closer in these matters. I can't remember being fifteen.’

‘Surely? Were you not fifteen or so when you fetched up in France?’

‘Yes, I must have been.’ Wolsey: ‘Arthur would have been about your age, Thomas, if he had lived.’ He remembers a woman in Dover, up against a wall; her small crushable bones, her young, bleak, pallid face. He feels a small sensation of panic, loss; what if the cardinal's joke isn't a joke, and the earth is strewn with his children, and he has never done right by them? It is the only honest thing to be done: look after your children. ‘Rafe,’ he says, ‘do you know I haven't made my will? I said I would but I never did. I think I should go home and draft it.’

‘Why?’ Rafe looks amazed. ‘Why now? The cardinal will want you.’

‘Come home.’ He takes Rafe's arm. On his left side, a hand touches his: fingers without flesh. A ghost walks: Arthur, studious and pale. King Henry, he thinks, you raised him; now you put him down.

July 1529: Thomas Cromwell of London, gentleman. Being whole in body and memory. To his son Gregory six hundred and sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and four pence. And featherbeds, bolsters and the quilt of yellow turkey satin, the joined bed of Flanders work and the carved press and the cupboards, the silver and the silver gilt and twelve silver spoons. And leases of farms to be held for him by the executors till he comes to full age, and another two hundred pounds for him in gold at that date. Money to the executors for the upbringing and marriage portions of his daughter Anne, and his little daughter Grace. A marriage portion for his niece Alice Wellyfed; gowns, jackets and doublets to his nephews; to Mercy all sorts of household stuff and some silver and anything else the executors think she should have. Bequests to his dead wife's sister Johane, and her husband John Williamson, and a marriage portion to her daughter, also Johane. Money to his servants. Forty pounds to be divided between forty poor maidens on their marriage. Twenty pounds for mending the roads. Ten pounds towards feeding poor prisoners in the London gaols.

His body to be buried in the parish where he dies: or at the direction of his executors.

The residue of his estate to be spent on Masses for his parents.

To God his soul. To Rafe Sadler his books.

When the summer plague comes back, he says to Mercy and Johane, shall we send the children out?

In which direction, Johane says: not challenging him, just wanting to know.

Mercy says, can anyone outrun it? They take comfort from a belief that since the infection killed so many last year, it won't be so violent this year; which he does not think is necessarily true, and he thinks they seem to be endowing this plague with a human or at least bestial intelligence: the wolf comes down on the sheepfold, but not on the nights when the men with dogs are waiting for him. Unless they think the plague is more than bestial or human – that it is God behind it – God, up to his old tricks. When he hears the bad news from Italy, about Clement's new treaty with the Emperor, Wolsey bows his head and says, ‘My Master is capricious.’ He doesn't mean the king.

On the last day of July, Cardinal Campeggio adjourns the legatine court. It is, he says, the Roman holidays. News comes that the Duke of Suffolk, the king's great friend, has hammered the table before Wolsey, and threatened him to his face. They all know the court will never sit again. They all know the cardinal has failed.

That evening with Wolsey he believes, for the first time, that the cardinal will come down. If he falls, he thinks, I come down with him. His reputation is black. It is as if the cardinal's joke has been incarnated: as if he wades through streams of blood, leaving in his wake a trail of smashed glass and fires, of widows and orphans. Cromwell, people say: that's a bad man. The cardinal will not talk about what is happening in Italy, or what has happened in the legate's court. He says, ‘They tell me the sweating sickness is back. What shall I do? Shall I die? I have fought four bouts with it. In the year … what year? … I think it was 1518 … now you will laugh, but it was so – when the sweat had finished with me, I looked like Bishop Fisher. My flesh was wasted. God picked me up and rattled my teeth.’

‘Your Grace was wasted?’ he says, trying to raise a smile. ‘I wish you'd had your portrait made then.’

Bishop Fisher has said in court – just before the Roman holidays set in – that no power, human or divine, could dissolve the marriage of the king and queen. If there's one thing he'd like to teach Fisher, it's not to make grand overstatements. He has an idea of what the law can do, and it's different from what Bishop Fisher thinks.

Until now, every day till today, every evening till this, if you told Wolsey a thing was impossible, he'd just laugh. Tonight he says – when he can be brought to the point – my friend King François is beaten and I am beaten too. I don't know what to do. Plague or no plague, I think I may die.

‘I must go home,’ he says. ‘But will you bless me?’

He kneels before him. Wolsey raises his hand, and then, as if he has forgotten what he's doing, lets it hover in mid-air. He says, ‘Thomas, I am not ready to meet God.’

He looks up, smiling. ‘Perhaps God is not ready to meet you.’

‘I hope that you will be with me when I die.’

‘But that will be at some distant date.’

He shakes his head. ‘If you had seen how Suffolk set on me today. He, Norfolk, Thomas Boleyn, Thomas Lord Darcy, they have been waiting only for this, for my failure with this court, and now I hear they are devising a book of articles, they are drawing up a list of accusations, how I have reduced the nobility, and so forth – they are making a book called – what will they call it? – “Twenty Years of Insults”? They are brewing some stewpot into which they are pouring the dregs of every slight, as they conceive it, by which they mean every piece of truth I have told them …’ He takes a great rattling breath, and looks at the ceiling, which is embossed with the Tudor rose.

‘There will be no such stewpots in Your Grace's kitchen,’ he says. He gets up. He looks at the cardinal, and all he can see is more work to be done.

‘Liz Wykys,’ Mercy says, ‘wouldn't have wanted her girls dragged about the countryside. Especially as Anne, to my knowledge, cries if she does not see you.’

‘Anne?’ He is amazed. ‘Anne cries?’

‘What did you think?’ Mercy asks, with some asperity. ‘Do you think your children don't love you?’

He lets her make the decision. The girls stay at home. It's the wrong decision. Mercy hangs outside their door the signs of the sweating sickness. She says, how has this happened? We scour, we scrub the floors, I do not think you will find in the whole of London a cleaner house than ours. We say our prayers. I have never seen a child pray as Anne does. She prays as if she's going into battle.

Anne falls ill first. Mercy and Johane shout at her and shake her to keep her awake, since they say if you sleep you will die. But the pull of the sickness is stronger than they are, and she falls exhausted against the bolster, struggling for breath, and falls further, into black stillness, only her hand moving, the fingers clenching and unclenching. He takes it in his own and tries to still it, but it is like the hand of a soldier itching for a fight.

Later she rouses herself, asks for her mother. She asks for the copybook in which she has written her name. At dawn the fever breaks. Johane bursts into tears of relief, and Mercy sends her away to sleep. Anne struggles to sit up, she sees him clearly, she smiles, she says his name. They bring a basin of water strewn with rose petals, and wash her face; her finger reaches out, tentative, to push the petals below the water, so each of them becomes a vessel shipping water, a cup, a perfumed grail.

But when the sun comes up her fever rises again. He will not let them begin it again, the pinching and pummelling, the shaking; he gives her into God's hands, and asks God to be good to him. He talks to her but she makes no sign that she hears. He is not, himself, afraid of contagion. If the cardinal can survive this plague four times, I am sure I am in no danger, and if I die, I have made my will. He sits with her, watching her chest heaving, watching her fight and lose. He is not there when she dies – Grace has already taken sick, and he is seeing her put to bed. So he is out of the room, just, and when they usher him in, her stern little face has relaxed into sweetness. She looks passive, placid; her hand is already heavy, and heavy beyond his bearing.

He comes out of the room; he says, ‘She was already learning Greek.’ Of course, Mercy says: she was a wonderful child, and your true daughter. She leans against his shoulder and cries. She says, ‘She was clever and good, and in her way, you know, she was beautiful.’

His thought had been: she was learning Greek: perhaps she knows it now.

Grace dies in his arms; she dies easily, as naturally as she was born. He eases her back against the damp sheet: a child of impossible perfection, her fingers uncurling like thin white leaves. I never knew her, he thinks; I never knew I had her. It has always seemed impossible to him that some act of his gave her life, some unthinking thing that he and Liz did, on some unmemorable night. They had intended the name to be Henry for a boy, Katherine for a girl, and, Liz had said, that will do honour to your Kat as well. But when he had seen her, swaddled, beautiful, finished and perfect, he had said quite another thing, and Liz had agreed. We cannot earn grace. We do not merit it.

He asks the priest if his elder daughter can be buried with her copybook, in which she has written her name: Anne Cromwell. The priest says he has never heard of such a thing. He is too tired and angry to fight.

His daughters are now in Purgatory, a country of slow fires and ridged ice. Where in the Gospels does it say ‘Purgatory’?

Tyndale says, now abideth faith, hope and love, even these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Thomas More thinks it is a wicked mistranslation. He insists on ‘charity’. He would chain you up, for a mistranslation. He would, for a difference in your Greek, kill you.

He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.

Tyndale says, ‘Love never falleth away.’

October comes in. Wolsey presides, as usual, over the meetings of the king's council. But in the law courts, as Michaelmas term opens, writs are moved against the cardinal. He is charged with success. He is charged with the exercise of power. Specifically, he is charged with asserting a foreign jurisdiction in the king's realm – that is to say, with exercising his role as papal legate. What they mean to say is this: he is alter rex. He is, he has always been, more imperious than the king. For that, if it is a crime, he is guilty.

So now they swagger into York Place, the Duke of Suffolk, the Duke of Norfolk: the two great peers of the realm. Suffolk, his blond beard bristling, looks like a pig among truffles; a florid man, he remembers, turns my lord cardinal sick. Norfolk looks apprehensive, and as he turns over the cardinal's possessions, it is clear that he expects to find wax figures, perhaps of himself, perhaps with long pins stuck through them. The cardinal has done his feats by a compact with the devil; that is his fixed opinion.

He, Cromwell, sends them away. They come back. They come back with further and higher commissions and better signatures, and they bring with them the Master of the Rolls. They take the Great Seal from my lord cardinal.

Norfolk glances sideways at him, and gives him a fleeting, ferrety grin. He doesn't know why.

‘Come and see me,’ the duke says.

‘Why, my lord?’

Norfolk turns down his mouth. He never explains.

‘When?’

‘No hurry,’ Norfolk says. ‘Come when you've mended your manners.’

It is 19 October 1529.

III Make or Mar All Hallows 1529

Halloween: the world's edge seeps and bleeds. This is the time when the tally-keepers of Purgatory, its clerks and gaolers, listen in to the living, who are praying for the dead.

At this time of year, with their parish, he and Liz would keep vigil. They would pray for Henry Wykys, her father; for Liz's dead husband, Thomas Williams; for Walter Cromwell, and for distant cousins; for half-forgotten names, long-dead half-sisters and lost step-children.

Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Wherever the cardinal is, I will be.

At some point he must have slept. When daylight came, the room felt so empty it was empty even of him.

All Hallows Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to capsize him. He doesn't believe that the dead come back; but that doesn't stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wing-tips, against his shoulder. Since last night they have been less individual forms and faces than a solid aggregated mass, their flesh slapping and jostling together, their texture dense like sea creatures, their faces sick with an undersea sheen.

Now he stands in a window embrasure, Liz's prayer book in hand. His daughter Grace liked to look at it, and today he can feel the imprint of her small fingers under his own. These are Our Lady's prayers for the canonical hours, the pages illuminated by a dove, a vase of lilies. The office is Matins, and Mary kneels on a floor of chequered tiles. The angel greets her, and the words of his greeting are written on a scroll, which unfurls from his clasped hands as if his palms are speaking. His wings are coloured: heaven-blue.

He turns the page. The office is Lauds. Here is a picture of the Visitation. Mary, with her neat little belly, is greeted by her pregnant cousin, St Elizabeth. Their foreheads are high, their brows plucked, and they look surprised, as indeed they must be; one of them is a virgin, the other advanced in years. Spring flowers grow at their feet, and each of them wears an airy crown, made of gilt wires as fine as blonde hairs.

He turns a page. Grace, silent and small, turns the page with him. The office is Prime. The picture is the Nativity: a tiny white Jesus lies in the folds of his mother's cloak. The office is Sext: the Magi proffer jewelled cups; behind them is a city on a hill, a city in Italy, with its bell tower, its view of rising ground and its misty line of trees. The office is None: Joseph carries a basket of doves to the temple. The office is Vespers: a dagger sent by Herod makes a neat hole in a shocked infant. A woman throws up her hands in protest, or prayer: her eloquent, helpless palms. The infant corpse scatters three drops of blood, each one shaped like a tear. Each bloody tear is a precise vermilion.

He looks up. Like an after-image, the form of the tears swims in his eyes; the picture blurs. He blinks. Someone is walking towards him. It is George Cavendish. His hands wash together, his face is a mask of concern.

Let him not speak to me, he prays. Let George pass on.

‘Master Cromwell,’ he says, ‘I believe you are crying. What is this? Is there bad news about our master?’

He tries to close Liz's book, but Cavendish reaches out for it. ‘Ah, you are praying.’ He looks amazed.

Cavendish cannot see his daughter's fingers touching the page, or his wife's hands holding the book. George simply looks at the pictures, upside down. He takes a deep breath and says, ‘Thomas …?’

‘I am crying for myself,’ he says. ‘I am going to lose everything, everything I have worked for, all my life, because I will go down with the cardinal – no, George, don't interrupt me – because I have done what he asked me to do, and been his friend, and the man at his right hand. If I had stuck to my work in the city, instead of hurtling about the countryside making enemies, I'd be a rich man – and you, George, I'd be inviting you out to my new country house, and asking your advice on furniture and flower beds. But look at me! I'm finished.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.