Bring Up the Bodies (11 page)

‘If you should ever want someone to put a polish on their performance, think of me.'

‘I will, Mark.' He thinks, I wouldn't trust you around my little boys.

‘You will find the queen discontented,' the young man says. ‘You know her brother Rochford has lately gone into France on a special embassy, and today he has sent a letter; it seems to be the common talk over there that Katherine has been writing to the Pope, asking him to put into effect that wicked sentence of excommunication he has pronounced against our master. And which would result in untold hurts and perils to our realm.' He nods, yes, yes, yes; he does not need Mark to tell him what excommunication is; can he not make it short? ‘The queen is angry,' the boy says, ‘for if this is so, Katherine is a plain traitor, and the queen wonders, why do we not act against her?'

‘Suppose I tell you the reason, Mark? Would you take it in to her? It seems you could save me an hour or two.'

‘If you would entrust me –' the boy begins; then sees his cold smile. He blushes.

‘I'd trust you with a motet, Mark. Although.' He looks at him thoughtfully. ‘It does seem to me that you must stand high in the queen's favour.'

‘Master Secretary, I believe that I do.' Flattened, Mark is already bouncing back. ‘It is we lesser men, often, who are most fit for royal confidence.'

‘Well then. Baron Smeaton, eh, before long? I shall be the first to congratulate you. Even if I am still toiling on the benches of the Commons.'

With a whisk of her hand, Anne shoos away the ladies around her, who bob to him and whisper out. Her sister-in-law, George's wife, lingers: Anne says, ‘Thank you, Lady Rochford, I shall not need you again tonight.'

Only her fool stays with her: a dwarf woman, peeping at him from behind the queen's chair. Anne's hair is loose beneath a cap of silver tissue shaped like a crescent moon. He makes a mental note of it; the women about him always enquire what Anne is wearing. This is how she receives her husband, the dark tresses displayed only for him, and incidentally for Cromwell, who is a tradesman's son and doesn't matter, any more than the boy Mark does.

She begins, as she often does, as if in the middle of a sentence. ‘So I want you to go. Up-country to see her. Very secret. Only take the men you need. Here, you may read my brother Rochford's letter.' She flourishes it at her fingers' ends, then changes her mind, whips it back. ‘Or…no,' she says, and decides to sit on it instead. Perhaps, amid the news, it contains dispraise of Thomas Cromwell? ‘I am very suspicious of Katherine, very suspicious. It seems they know in France what we only guess at. Your people are not vigilant, perhaps? My lord brother believes the queen is urging the Emperor to invade, as is the ambassador Chapuys, who by the way should be banished this kingdom.'

‘Well, you know,' he says. ‘We can't go throwing ambassadors out. Because then we don't get to know anything at all.'

Truth is, he is not afraid of Katherine's intrigues: the mood between France and the Empire is at the moment unremittingly hostile, and if open war breaks out, the Emperor will have no troops to spare for invading England. These things swing about in a week, and the Boleyn reading of any situation, he has noticed, is always a little behind the times, and influenced by the fact that they pretend to have special friends at the Valois court. Anne is still in pursuit of a royal marriage for her ginger little daughter. He used to admire her as a person who learned from her mistakes, who would pull back, re-calculate; but she has a streak of stubbornness to equal that of Katherine, the old queen, and it seems in this matter she will never learn. George Boleyn has been over to France again, intriguing for the match, but with no result. What's George Boleyn
for
? That's a question he asks himself. He says, ‘Highness, the king could not compromise his honour by any ill-treatment of the queen that was. If it became known, it would be a personal embarrassment to him.'

Anne looks sceptical; she does not grasp the idea of embarrassment. The lights are low; her silver head bobs, glittering and small; the dwarf fusses and chuckles, muttering to herself out of sight; seated on her velvet cushions, Anne dangles her velvet slipper, like a child about to dip a toe in a stream. ‘If I were Katherine, I too would intrigue. I would not forgive. I would do as she does.' She gives him a dangerous smile. ‘You see, I know her mind. Though she is a Spaniard, I can put myself in her place. You would not see me meek, if Henry cast me off. I too would want war.' She takes a strand of hair between fingers and thumb, runs its length, thoughtful. ‘However. The king believes she is ailing. She and her daughter both, they are always mewling, their stomachs are disordered or their teeth falling out, they have agues or rheum, they are up all night puking and down all day moaning, and all their pain is due to Anne Boleyn. So look. Do you, Cremuel, go and see her without warning. Then tell me if she is feigning, or no.'

She maintains, as an affectation, a skittish slur in her speech, the odd French intonation, her inability to say his name. There is a stir at the door: the king is coming in. He makes a reverence. Anne does not rise or curtsey; she says without preliminary, ‘I have told him, Henry, to go.'

‘I wish you would, Cromwell. And give us your own report. There is no one like you for seeing into the nature of things. When the Emperor wants a stick to beat me with, he says his aunt is dying, of neglect and cold, and shame. Well, she has servants. She has firewood.'

‘And as for shame,' Anne says, ‘she should die inside, when she thinks of the lies she has told.'

‘Majesty,' he says, ‘I shall ride at dawn and tomorrow send Rafe Sadler to you, if you permit, with the day's agenda.'

The king groans. ‘No escape from your big lists?'

‘No, sir, for if I gave you a respite you would forever have me on the road, on some pretext. Till I return, would you just…sit on the situation?'

Anne shifts in her chair, brother George's letter under her. ‘I shall do nothing without you,' Henry says. ‘Take care, the roads are treacherous. I shall be your beadsman. Good night.'

He looks about the outer chamber, but Mark has vanished, and there is only a knot of matrons and maids: Mary Shelton, Jane Seymour and Elizabeth, the Earl of Worcester's wife. Who's missing? ‘Where is Lady Rochford?' he says, smiling. ‘Do I see her shape behind the arras?' He indicates Anne's chamber. ‘Going to bed, I think. So you girls get her installed and then you will have the rest of the night for your ill behaviour.'

They giggle. Lady Worcester makes creepy motions with her finger. ‘Nine of the clock, and here comes Harry Norris, bare beneath his shirt. Run, Mary Shelton. Run rather slowly…'

‘Who do you run from, Lady Worcester?'

‘Thomas Cromwell, I could not possibly tell you. A married woman like myself?' Teasing, smiling, she creeps her fingers along his upper arm. ‘We all know where Harry Norris would like to lie tonight. Shelton is only his bedwarmer for now. He has royal ambitions. He will tell anyone. He is sick with love for the queen.'

‘I shall play cards,' Jane Seymour says. ‘With myself, so there will be no undue losses. Master, is there any news of the Lady Katherine?'

‘I have nothing to tell you. Sorry.'

Lady Worcester's glance follows him. She is a fine woman, careless and rather free-spending, no older than the queen. Her husband is away and he feels she too could run rather slowly, if he gave her the nod. But then, a countess. And he a humble master. And sworn to the road before sunrise.

 

They ride up-country towards Katherine without banner or display, a tight knot of armed men. It is a clear day and bitter cold. The brown tussocky land shows through layers of hard frost, and herons flap from frozen pools. Clouds stack and shift on the horizon, slate-grey and a mild deceptive rose; leading them from early afternoon is a silvered moon as mean as a clipped coin. Christophe rides beside him, growing more voluble and disgusted the further they travel from urban comfort. ‘
On dit
the king chose a hard country for Katherine. He hopes the mould will get into her bones and she will die.'

‘He has no such thought. Kimbolton is an old house but very sound. She has every comfort. Her household costs the king four thousand pounds a year. It is no mean sum.'

He leaves Christophe to ponder that locution: no mean sum. At last the boy says, ‘Spaniards are
merde
, anyway.'

‘You watch the track and keep Jenny's feet out of holes. Any spills and I'll have you follow me home on a donkey.'

‘
Hi-han
,' Christophe bellows, loud enough to make the men at arms turn in their saddles. ‘French donkey,' he explains.

French fuckwit, one says, amiably enough. Riding beneath dark trees at the close of that first day's travel, they sing; it lifts the tired heart, and dispels spirits lurking in the verges; never underestimate the superstition of the average Englishman. As this year closes, the favourite will be variations on the song the king wrote himself, ‘Pastime with good company/I love and shall until I die.' The variations are only mildly obscene, or he would feel obliged to check them.

The landlord of their inn is a harassed wisp of a man, who does his futile best to find out whom he is entertaining. His wife is a strong, discontented young woman, with angry blue eyes and a loud voice. He has brought his own travelling cook. ‘What, my lord?' she says. ‘You think we'd poison you?' He can hear her banging around in the kitchen, laying down what shall and shan't be done with her skillets.

She comes to his chamber late and asks, do you want anything? He says no, but she comes back: what, really, nothing? You might lower your voice, he says. This far from London, the king's deputy in church affairs can perhaps relax his caution? ‘Stay, then,' he tells her. Noisy she may be, but safer than Lady Worcester.

He wakes before dawn, so suddenly that he doesn't know where he is. He can hear a woman's voice from below, and for a moment he thinks he is back at the sign of the Pegasus, with his sister Kat crashing about, and that it is the morning of his flight from his father: that all his life is before him. But cautiously, in the dark chamber without a candle, he moves each limb: no bruises; he is not cut; he remembers where he is and what he is, and moves into the warmth the woman's body has left, and dozes, an arm thrown across the bolster.

Soon he hears his landlady singing on the stairs. Twelve virgins went out on a May morning, it seems. And none of them came back. She has scooped up the money he left her. On her face, as she greets him, no sign of the night's transaction; but she comes out and speaks to him, her voice low, as they prepare to ride. Christophe, with a lordly air, pays the reckoning to their host. The day is milder and their progress swift and without event. Certain images will be all that remain from his ride into middle England. The holly berries burning in their bushes. The startled flight of a woodcock, flushed from almost beneath their hooves. The feeling of venturing into a watery place, where soil and marsh are the same colour and nothing is solid under your feet.

Kimbolton is a busy market town, but at twilight the streets are empty. They have made no great speed, but it is futile to wear out horses on a task that is important, but not urgent; Katherine will live or die at her own pace. Besides, it is good for him to get out to the country. Squeezed in London's alleys, edging horse or mule under her jetties and gables, the mean canvas of her sky pierced by broken roofs, one forgets what England is: how broad the fields, how wide the sky, how squalid and ignorant the populace. They pass a wayside cross that shows recent signs of excavation at its base. One of the men at arms says, ‘They think the monks are burying their treasure. Hiding it from our master here.'

‘So they are,' he says. ‘But not under crosses. They're not that foolish.'

In the main street they draw rein at the church. ‘What for?' says Christophe.