Bring Up the Bodies (41 page)

Jane unwraps her prize. She runs the chain through her fingers; it is as fine as one of her own hairs. She holds the tiny book in the palm of her hand and turns it over. In the gold and black enamel of its cover, initials are studded in rubies, and entwined: ‘H' and ‘A'.

‘Think nothing of it, the stones can be replaced,' he says quickly. Jane hands him the object. Her face has fallen; she does not yet know how thrifty the king can be, this most magnificent prince. Henry should have warned me, he thinks. Beneath Anne's initial you can still distinguish the ‘K'. He passes it to Nicholas Carew. ‘You take note?'

The knight opens it, fumbling with the tiny clasp. ‘Ah,' he says. ‘A Latin prayer. Or a Bible verse?'

‘If I may?' He takes it back. ‘Here is the Book of Proverbs. “Who can find a good, a virtuous woman? Her price is beyond rubies.”' Evidently it's not, he thinks: three presents, three wives, and only one jeweller's bill. He says to Jane, smiling, ‘Do you know this woman who is mentioned here? Her clothing is silk and purple, says the author. I could tell you much more about her, from verses this page cannot contain.'

Edward Seymour says, ‘You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.'

‘Edward,' he says, ‘I should have been Pope.'

He is taking his leave, when Carew crooks a peremptory finger. Oh, Lord Jesus, he breathes to himself, I am in trouble now, for not being humble enough. Carew motions him aside. But it is not to reproach him. ‘The Princess Mary,' Carew murmurs, ‘is very hopeful of a call to her father's side. What better remedy and comfort at such a time, for the king, than to have the child of his true marriage in his house?'

‘Mary is better where she is. The subjects discussed here, in the council and on the street, are not fit for the ears of a young girl.'

Carew frowns. ‘There may be something in that. But she looks to have messages from the king. Tokens.'

Tokens, he thinks; that can be arranged.

‘There are ladies and gentlemen from the court,' Carew says, ‘who wish to ride up-country to pay their respects, and if the princess is not to be conducted here, surely the terms of her confinement should be relaxed? It is hardly suitable, now, to have Boleyn women around her. Perhaps her old governor, the Countess of Salisbury…'

Margaret Pole? That haggard papist battleaxe? But now is not the time to deliver hard truths to Sir Nicholas; that can wait. ‘The king will dispose,' he says comfortably. ‘It is a close family matter. He will know what is best for his daughter.'

By night, when the candles are lit, Henry leaks easy tears over Mary. But by daylight he sees her for what she is: disobedient, self-willed, still unbroken. When all this is tidied away, the king says, I shall turn my attention to my duties as father. I am sad that the Lady Mary and I have become estranged. After Anne, reconciliation will become possible. But, he adds, there will be certain conditions. To which, mark my words, my daughter Mary will adhere.

‘One more thing,' Carew says. ‘You must pull Wyatt in.'

 

Instead, he has Francis Bryan fetched. Francis comes in grinning: he thinks himself the untouchable man. His eye patch is decorated with a small winking emerald, which gives a sinister effect: one green eye, and the other…

He examines it: says, ‘Sir Francis, what colour are your eyes? I mean, your eye?'

‘Red, generally,' Bryan says. ‘But I try not to drink during Lent. Or Advent. Or on Fridays.' He sounds lugubrious. ‘Why am I here? You know I'm on your side, don't you?'

‘I only asked you to supper.'

‘You asked Mark Smeaton to supper. And look where he is now.'

‘It is not I who doubts you,' he says with a heavy, actor's sigh. (How he enjoys Sir Francis.) ‘It is not I, but the world at large, who asks where your loyalties lie. You are, of course, the queen's kinsman.'

‘I am Jane's kinsman too.' Bryan is still at ease, and he shows it by leaning back in his chair, his feet thrust out under the table. ‘I hardly thought I should be interrogated.'

‘I am talking to everyone who is close to the queen's family. And you are certainly close, you have been with them since the early days; did you not go to Rome, chasing the king's divorce, pressing the Boleyns' case with the best of them? But what should you fear? You are an old courtier, you know everything. Used wisely, wisely shared, knowledge may protect you.'

He waits. Bryan has sat up straight.

‘And you want to please the king,' he says. ‘All I ask is to be sure that, if you are put to it, you will give evidence on any point I require.'

He could swear that Francis sweats Gascon wine, his pores leaking that mouldy, ropey stuff he's been buying cheap and selling dear to the king's own cellars.

‘Look, Crumb,' Bryan says. ‘What I know is, Norris always imagined rutting with her.'

‘And her brother, what did he imagine?'

Bryan shrugs. ‘She was sent to France and they never knew each other till they were grown. I have known such things happen, have not you?'

‘No, I cannot say I have. We never went in for incest where I grew up, God knows we had crimes enough and sins, but there were places our fantasy did not stretch.'

‘You saw it in Italy, I wager. Only sometimes people see it and they don't dare name it.'

‘I dare name anything,' he says calmly. ‘As you will see. My imagination may lag behind each day's revelations, but I am working hard to catch up with them.'

‘Now she is not queen,' Bryan says, ‘because she is not, is she…I can call her what she is, a hot minx, and where has she better opportunity, than with her family?'

He says, ‘By that reasoning, do you think she goes to it with Uncle Norfolk? It could even be you, Sir Francis. If she has a mind to her relatives. You are a great gallant.'

‘Oh, Christ,' Bryan says. ‘Cromwell, you would not.'

‘I only mention it. But as we are at one in this matter, or we appear to be, will you do me a service? You could ride over to Great Hallingbury, and prepare my friend Lord Morley for what is coming. It is not the sort of news you can break in a letter, not when the friend is elderly.'

‘You think it's better face to face?' An incredulous laugh. ‘My lord, I shall say, I come myself to spare you a shock – your daughter Jane will soon be a widow, because her husband is to be decapitated for incest.'

‘No, the matter of incest we leave to the priests. It is for treason he will die. And we do not know the king will choose decapitation.'

‘I do not believe I can do it.'

‘But I do. I have great faith in you. Think of it as a diplomatic mission. You have performed those. Though I wonder how.'

‘Sober,' Francis Bryan says. ‘I shall need a drink for this one. And you know, I have a dread of Lord Morley. He is always pulling out some ancient manuscript, and saying, “Look here, Francis!” and laughing heartily at the jokes in it. And you know my Latin, any schoolboy would be ashamed of it.'

‘Don't wheedle,' he says. ‘Saddle your horse. But before you ride to Essex, do me a further service. Go see your friend Nicholas Carew. Tell him I agree to his demands and I will talk to Wyatt. But warn him, tell him not to push me because I will not be pushed. Remind Carew that there may be more arrests, I am not yet able to say who. Or rather, if I am able, I am not willing. Understand, and make your friends understand, that I must have a free hand to deal. I am not their waiting boy.'

‘Am I free to go?'

‘Free as air,' he says, blandly. ‘But what about supper?'

‘You can eat mine,' Francis says.

 

Though the king's chamber is dark, the king says, ‘We must look into a glass of truth. I think I am to blame, as what I suspected I did not own.'

Henry looks at Cranmer as if to say, it's your turn now: I admit my fault, so give me absolution. The archbishop looks harrowed; he does not know what Henry will say next, or if he can trust himself to respond. This is not a night for which Cambridge ever trained him. ‘You were not remiss,' he tells the king. He darts a questioning look, like a long needle, at him, Cromwell. ‘In these matters, surely the accusation should not come before the evidence.'

‘You must bear in mind,' he says to Cranmer – for he is bland and easy and full of phrases – ‘you must bear in mind that not I but the whole council examined the gentlemen who now stand accused. And the council called you in, laid the matter before you, and you did not demur. As you have said yourself, my lord archbishop, we would not have gone so far in the matter without grave consideration.'

‘When I look back,' Henry says, ‘so much falls into place. I was misled and betrayed. So many friends lost, friends and good servants, lost, alienated, exiled from court. And worse…I think of Wolsey. The woman I called my wife practised against him with all her ingenuity, with every weapon of slyness and rancour.'

Which wife would that be? Both Katherine and Anne worked against the cardinal. ‘I do not know why I have been so crossed,' Henry says. ‘But does not Augustine call marriage “a mortal and slavish garment”?'

‘Chrysostom,' Cranmer murmurs.

‘But let that pass,' he, Cromwell, says hastily. ‘If this marriage is dissolved, Majesty, Parliament will petition you to marry again.'

‘I dare say it will. How may a man do his duty, to both his realm and to God? We sin even in the very act of generation. We must have offspring, and kings especially must, and yet we are warned against lust even in marriage, and some authorities say, do they not, that to love your wife immoderately is a kind of adultery?'

‘Jerome,' Cranmer whispers: as if he would just as soon disown the saint. ‘But there are many other teachings that are more comfortable, and that praise the married state.'

‘Roses snatched from the thorns,' he says. ‘The church does not offer much comfort to the married man, though Paul says we should love our wives. It is hard, Majesty, not to think marriage is sinful inherently, since the celibates have spent many centuries saying that they are better than we are. But they are not better. Repetition of false teachings does not make them true. You agree, Cranmer?'

Just kill me now, the archbishop's face says. Against all the laws of king and church, he is a married man; he married in Germany when he was among the reformers, he keeps Frau Grete secretly, he hides her in his country houses. Does Henry know? He must know. Will Henry say? No, because he is intent on his own plight. ‘Now I cannot see why I ever wanted her,' the king says. ‘That is why I think she has practised on me with charms and enchantments. She claims she loves me. Katherine claimed she loved me. They say love, and mean the opposite. I believe Anne has tried to undermine me at every turn. She was always unnatural. Think how she would taunt her uncle, my lord of Norfolk. Think how she would scorn her father. She would presume to censure my own conduct, and press on me advice in matters well beyond her understanding, and give me such words as no poor man would willingly hear from his wife.'

Cranmer says, ‘She was bold, it is true. She knew it for a fault and would try to bridle herself.'

‘Now she shall be bridled, by God.' Henry's tone is ferocious; but the next moment he has modulated it, to the plaintive accents of the victim. He opens his walnut writing box. ‘Do you see this little book?' It is not really a book, or not yet, just a collection of loose leaves, tied together; there is no title page, but a sheet black with Henry's own laboured hand. ‘It is a book in the making. I have written it. It is a play. It is a tragedy. It is my own case.' He offers it.

He says, ‘Keep it sir, till we have more leisure to do justice to it.'

‘But you ought to know,' the king insists. ‘Her nature. How ill she has behaved to me, when I gave her everything. All men should know and be warned about what women are. Their appetites are unbounded. I believe she has committed adultery with a hundred men.'

Henry looks, for a moment, like a hunted creature: hounded by women's desire, dragged down and shredded. ‘But her brother?' Cranmer says. He turns away. He will not look at the king. ‘Is it likely?'

‘I doubt she could resist him,' Henry says. ‘Why spare? Why not drink the cup to the filthy dregs? And while she was indulging her own desires, she was killing mine. When I would approach her, only to do my duty, she would give me such a look as would daunt any man. I know now why she did so. She wanted to be fresh for her lovers.'

The king sits. He begins to talk, to ramble. Anne took him by the hand, these ten years ago and more. She led him into the forest, and at the sylvan edge, where the broad light of day splinters and filters into green, he left his good judgement, his innocence. She drew him on all day, till he was trembling and exhausted, but he could not stop even to catch his breath, he could not go back, he had lost the path. All day he chased her, until the light faded, and he followed her by the light of torches: and then she turned on him, and stifled the torches, and left him alone in the dark.

 

The door opens softly: he looks up, and it is Rafe, where once it would have been Weston, perhaps. ‘Majesty, my lord of Richmond is here to say good night. May he come in?'

Henry breaks off. ‘Fitzroy. Of course.'

Henry's bastard is now a princeling of sixteen, though his fine skin, his open gaze, make him seem younger than his age. He has the red-gold hair of King Edward IV's line; he has a look of Prince Arthur too, Henry's elder brother who died. He is hesitant as he confronts his bull of a father, hovering in case he is unwanted. But Henry rises and embraces the boy, his face wet with tears. ‘My little son,' he says, to the child who will soon make six foot. ‘My only son.' The king is crying so hard now that he has to blot his face on his sleeve. ‘She would have poisoned you,' he moans. ‘Thank God that by the cunning of Master Secretary the plot was found out in time.'