Bring Up the Bodies (52 page)

The Duke of Suffolk is still standing. Richmond too. All others, who have knelt, now get to their feet. The executioner has turned away, modestly, and already handed over his sword. His assistant is approaching the corpse but the four women are there first, blocking him with their bodies. One of them says fiercely, ‘We do not want men to handle her.'

He hears young Surrey say, ‘No, they have handled her enough.' He says to Norfolk, my lord, take your son in charge, and take him away from this place. Richmond, he sees, looks ill, and he sees with approval how Gregory goes to him and bows, friendly as one young boy can be to another, saying, my lord, leave it now, come away. He does not know why Richmond did not kneel. Perhaps he believes the rumours that the queen tried to poison him, and will not offer her even that last respect. With Suffolk, it is more understandable. Brandon is a hard man and owes Anne no forgiveness. He has seen battle. Though never a bloodletting like this.

It seems Kingston did not think further than the death, to the burial. ‘I hope to God,' he, Cromwell says to no one in particular, ‘that the constable has remembered to have the flags taken up in the chapel,' and someone answers him, I think so, sir, for they were levered up two days ago, so her brother could go under.

The constable has not helped his reputation these last few days, though he has been kept in uncertainty by the king and, as he will admit later, he had thought all morning that a messenger might suddenly arrive from Whitehall, to stop it: even when the queen was helped up the steps, even to the moment she took off her hood. He has not thought of a coffin, but an elm chest for arrows has been hastily emptied and carried to the scene of the carnage. Yesterday it was bound for Ireland with its freight, each shaft ready to deal separate, lonely damage. Now it is an object of public gaze, a death casket, wide enough for the queen's little body. The executioner has crossed the scaffold and lifted the severed head; in a yard of linen he swaddles it, like a newborn. He waits for someone to take the burden. The women, unassisted, lift the queen's sodden remains into the chest. One of them steps forward, receives the head, and lays it – no other space – by the queen's feet. Then they straighten up, each of them awash in her blood, and stiffly walk away, closing their ranks like soldiers.

 

That evening he is at home at Austin Friars. He has written letters into France, to Gardiner. Gardiner abroad: a crouching brute nibbling his claws, waiting for his moment to strike. It has been a triumph, to keep him away. He wonders how much longer he can do it.

He wishes Rafe were here, but either he is with the king or he has gone back to Helen in Stepney. He is used to seeing Rafe most days and he cannot get used to the new order of things. He keeps expecting to hear his voice, and to hear him and Richard, and Gregory when he is at home, scuffling in corners and trying to push each other downstairs, hiding behind doors to jump on each other, doing all those tricks that even men of twenty-five or thirty do when they think their grave elders are not nearby. Instead of Rafe, Mr Wriothesley is with him, pacing. Call-Me seems to think someone should give an account of the day, as if for a chronicler; or if not that, that he should give an account of his own feelings. ‘I stand, sir, as if upon a headland, my back to the sea, and below me a burning plain.'

‘Do you, Call-Me? Then come in from the wind,' he says, ‘and have a cup of this wine Lord Lisle sends me from France. I do usually keep it for my own drinking.'

Call-Me takes the glass. ‘I smell burning buildings,' he says. ‘Fallen towers. Indeed there is nothing but ash. Wreckage.'

‘But it's useful wreckage, isn't it?' Wreckage can be fashioned into all sorts of things: ask any dweller on the sea shore.

‘You have not properly answered on one point,' Wriothesley says. ‘Why did you let Wyatt go untried? Other than because he is your friend?'

‘I see you do not rate friendship highly.' He watches Wriothesley take that in.

‘Even so,' Call-Me says. ‘Wyatt I see poses you no threat, nor has he slighted or offended you. William Brereton, he was high-handed and offended many, he was in your way. Harry Norris, young Weston, well, there are gaps where they stood, and you can put your own friends in the privy chamber alongside Rafe. And Mark, that squib of a boy with his lute; I grant you, the place looks tidier without him. And George Rochford struck down, that sends the rest of the Boleyns scurrying away, Monseigneur will have to scuttle back to the country and sing small. The Emperor will be gratified by all that has passed. It is a pity the ambassador's fever kept him away today. He would like to have seen it.'

No he would not, he thinks. Chapuys is squeamish. But you ought to get up from your sickbed if you need to, and see the results you have willed.

‘Now we shall have peace in England,' Wriothesley says.

A phrase runs through his head – was it Thomas More's? – ‘the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home'. He sees the scattered carcasses, some killed with one snap of the jaw, the rest bitten and shredded as the fox whirls and snaps in panic as the hens flap about him, as he spins around and deals death: the remnants then to be sluiced away, the mulch of scarlet feathers plastered over the floor and walls.

‘All the players gone,' Wriothesley says. ‘All four who carried the cardinal to Hell; and also the poor fool Mark who made a ballad of their exploits.'

‘All four,' he says. ‘All five.'

‘A gentleman asked me, if this is what Cromwell does to the cardinal's lesser enemies, what will he do by and by to the king himself?'

He stands looking down into the darkening garden: transfixed, the question like a knife between his shoulderblades. There is only one man among all the king's subjects to whom that question would occur, only one who would dare pose it. There is only one man who would dare question the loyalty he shows to his king, the loyalty he demonstrates daily. ‘So…' he says at last. ‘Stephen Gardiner calls himself a gentleman.'

Perhaps, caught in the little panes which distort and cloud, Wriothesley sees a dubious image: confusion, fear, emotions that do not often mark Master Secretary's face. Because if Gardiner thinks this, who else? Who else will think it in the months and years ahead? He says, ‘Wriothesley, surely you don't expect me to justify my actions to you? Once you have chosen a course, you should not apologise for it. God knows, I mean nothing but good to our master the king. I am bound to obey and serve. And if you watch me closely you will see me do it.'

He turns, when he thinks it is fit for Wriothesley to see his face. His smile is implacable. He says, ‘Drink my health.'

LONDON, SUMMER 1536

The king says, ‘What happened to her clothes? Her headdress?'

He says, ‘The people at the Tower have them. It is their perquisite.'

‘Buy them back,' the king says. ‘I want to know they are destroyed.'

The king says, ‘Call in all the keys that admit to my privy chamber. Here and elsewhere. All the keys to all the rooms. I want the locks changed.'

There are new servants everywhere, or old servants in new offices. In place of Henry Norris, Sir Francis Bryan is appointed chief of the privy chamber, and is to receive a pension of a hundred pounds. The young Duke of Richmond is appointed Chamberlain of Chester and North Wales, and (replacing George Boleyn) Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle. Thomas Wyatt is released from the Tower and granted a hundred pounds also. Edward Seymour is promoted Viscount Beauchamp. Richard Sampson is appointed Bishop of Chichester. The wife of Francis Weston announces her remarriage.

He has conferred with the Seymour brothers on the motto Jane should adopt as queen. They settle on, ‘Bound to Obey and Serve'.

They try it out on Henry. A smile, a nod: perfect contentment. The king's blue eyes are serene. Through the autumn of this year, 1536, in glass windows, in carvings of stone or wood, the badge of the phoenix will replace the white falcon with its imperial crown; for the heraldic lions of the dead woman, the panthers of Jane Seymour are substituted, and it is done economically, as the beasts only need new heads and tails.

The marriage is swift and private, in the queen's closet at Whitehall. Jane is found to be the king's distant cousin, but all dispensations are granted in proper form.

He, Cromwell, is with the king before the ceremony. Henry is quiet, and more melancholy that day than any bridegroom ought to be. He is not thinking about his last queen; she is ten days dead and he never speaks of her. But he says, ‘Crumb, I don't know if I will have any children now. Plato says that a man's best offspring are born when he is between thirty years and thirty-nine. I am past that. I have wasted my best years. I don't know where they have gone.'

The king feels he has been cheated of his fate. ‘When my brother Arthur died, my father's astrologer predicted that I should enjoy a prosperous reign and father many sons.'

You're prosperous at least, he thinks: and if you stick with me, richer than you can ever have imagined. Somewhere, Thomas Cromwell was in your chart.

The debts of the dead woman now fall to be paid. She owes some thousand pounds, which her confiscated estate is able to meet: to her furrier and her hosier, her silkwomen, her apothecary, her linen draper, her saddler, her dyer, her farrier and her pinmaker. The status of her daughter is uncertain, but for now the child is well provided with gold fringing for her bed, and with caps of white and purple satin with gilt trim. The queen's embroiderer is owed fifty-five pounds, and one can see where the money went.

The fee to the French executioner is over twenty-three pounds, but it is an expense unlikely to be repeated.

At Austin Friars, he takes the keys and lets himself into the little room where they store Christmas: where Mark was held, and where he cried out in fear in the night. The peacock wings will have to be destroyed. Rafe's little girl will probably not ask for them again; children do not remember from one Christmas to the next.

When the wings are shaken out of their linen bag he stretches the fabric, holds it up to the light and sees that the bag is slit. He understands how the feathers crept out and stroked the dead man's face. He sees that the wings are shabby, as if nibbled, and the glowing eyes dulled. They are tawdry things after all, not worth setting store by.

He thinks about his daughter Grace. He thinks, was my wife ever false to me? When I was away on the cardinal's business as I so often was, did she take up with some silk merchant she knew through her business, or did she, as many women do, sleep with a priest? He can hardly believe it of her. Yet she was a plain woman, and Grace was so beautiful, her features so fine. They blur in his mind these days; this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

He says to Johane, his wife's sister, ‘Do you think Lizzie ever had to do with another man? I mean, while we were married?'

Johane is shocked. ‘Whatever put that into your head? Put it right out again.'

He tries to do that. But he cannot escape the feeling that Grace has slipped further from him. She was dead before she could be painted or drawn. She lived and left no trace. Her clothes and her cloth ball and her wooden baby in a smock are long ago passed to other children. But his elder daughter, Anne, he has her copy book. Sometimes he takes it out and looks at it, her name inked in her bold hand, Anne Cromwell, Anne Cromwell her book; the fish and birds she drew in the margin, mermaids and griffins. He keeps it in a wooden box faced and lined with red leather. On the lid the colour has faded to a pale rose. Only when you open it up do you see the original, shocking scarlet.

These light nights find him at his desk. Paper is precious. Its offcuts and remnants are not discarded, but turned over, reused. Often he takes up an old letter-book and finds the jottings of chancellors long dust, of bishop-ministers now cold under inscriptions of their merits. When he first, in this fashion, turned up Wolsey's hand after his death – a hasty computation, a discarded draft – his heart had clenched small and he had to put down his pen till the spasm of grief passed. He has grown used to these encounters, but tonight, as he flicks over the leaf and sees the cardinal's writing, it is strange to him, as if some trick, perhaps a trick of the light, has altered the letter forms. The hand could be that of a stranger, of a creditor or a debtor you have dealt with just this quarter and don't know well; it could be that of some humble clerk, taking dictation from his master.

A moment passes: a soft flicker of the beeswax flame, a nudge of the book towards the light, and the words take on their familiar contours, so he can see the dead hand that inscribed them. During daylight hours he thinks only of the future, but sometimes late at night memory comes to nag him. However. His next task is somehow to reconcile the king and the Lady Mary, to save Henry from killing his own daughter; and before that, to stop Mary's friends from killing him. He has helped them to their new world, the world without Anne Boleyn, and now they will think they can do without Cromwell too. They have eaten his banquet and now they will want to sweep him out with the rushes and the bones. But this was his table: he runs on the top of it, among the broken meats. Let them try to pull him down. They will find him armoured, they will find him entrenched, they will find him stuck like a limpet to the future. He has laws to write, measures to take, the good of the commonwealth to serve, and his king: he has titles and honours still to attain, houses to build, books to read, and who knows, perhaps children to father, and Gregory to dispose in marriage. It would be some compensation for the children lost, to have a grandchild. He imagines standing in a daze of light, holding up a small child so the dead can see it.

He thinks, strive as I might, one day I will be gone and as this world goes it may not be long: what though I am a man of firmness and vigour, fortune is mutable and either my enemies will do for me or my friends. When the time comes I may vanish before the ink is dry. I will leave behind me a great mountain of paper, and those who come after me – let us say it is Rafe, let us say it is Wriothesley, let us say it is Riche – they will sift through what remains and remark, here is an old deed, an old draft, an old letter from Thomas Cromwell's time: they will turn the page over, and write on me.

Summer, 1536: he is promoted Baron Cromwell. He cannot call himself Lord Cromwell of Putney. He might laugh. However. He can call himself Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. He ranged all over those fields, when he was a boy.

The word ‘however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.