Bring Up the Bodies (12 page)

‘I need a blessing,' he says.

‘You need to make your confession, sir,' one of the men says.

Smiles are exchanged. It is harmless, no one thinks the worse of him: only that their own beds were cold. He has noticed this: that men who have not met him dislike him, but when they have met him, only some of them do. We could have put up at a monastery, one of his guard had complained; but no girls in a monastery, I suppose. He had turned in the saddle: ‘You really think that?' Knowing laughter from the men.

In the church's frigid interior, his escort flap their arms across their bodies; they stamp their feet and cry ‘Brr,' like bad actors. ‘I'll whistle for a priest,' Christophe says.

‘You will do no such thing.' But he grins; can imagine his young self saying it, and doing it too.

But there is no need to whistle. Some suspicious janitor is edging in with a light. No doubt a messenger is stumbling towards the great house with news: watch out, make ready, lords are here. It is decorous for Katherine to have some warning, he feels, but not too much. ‘Imagine it,' Christophe says, ‘we might burst in on her when she is plucking her whiskers. Which women of that age do.'

To Christophe, the former queen is a broken jade, a crone. He thinks, Katherine would be my age, or thereabouts. But life is harsher to women, particularly women who, like Katherine, have been blessed with many children and seen them die.

Silently the priest arrives at his elbow, a timid fellow who wants to show the church's treasures. ‘Now you must be…' He runs through a list in his head. ‘William Lord?'

‘Ah. No.' This is some other William. A long explanation ensues. He cuts it short. ‘As long as your bishop knows who you are.' Behind him is an image of St Edmund, the man with five hundred fingers; the saint's feet are pointed daintily, as if he is dancing. ‘Hold up the lights,' he says. ‘Is that a mermaid?'

‘Yes, my lord.' A shadow of anxiety crosses the priest's face. ‘Must she come down? Is she forbidden?'

He smiles. ‘I just thought she's a long way from the sea.'

‘She's stinking fish.' Christophe yells with laughter.

‘Forgive the boy. He's no poet.'

A feeble smile from the priest. On an oak screen St Anne holds a book for the instruction of her little daughter, the Virgin Mary; St Michael the Archangel hacks away with a scimitar at a devil entwining his feet. ‘Are you here to see the queen, sir? I mean,' the priest corrects himself, ‘the Lady Katherine?'

This priest doesn't know me from Adam, he thinks. I could be any emissary. I could be Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk. I could be Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk. They have both tried on Katherine their scant persuasive powers and their best bully-boy tricks.

He doesn't give his name, but he leaves an offering. The priest's hand enfolds the coins as if to warm them. ‘You will forgive my slip, my lord? Over the lady's title? I swear I meant no harm by it. For an old countryman such as I am, it is hard to keep up with the changes. By the time we have understood one report from London, it is contradicted by the next.'

‘It's hard for us all,' he says, shrugging. ‘You pray for Queen Anne every Sunday?'

‘Of course, my lord.'

‘And what do your parishioners say to that?'

The priest looks embarrassed. ‘Well, sir, they are simple people. I would not pay heed to what they say. Though they are all very loyal,' he adds hastily. ‘Very loyal.'

‘No doubt. Will you please me now, and this Sunday in your prayers remember Tom Wolsey?'

The late cardinal? He sees the old fellow revising his ideas. This can't be Thomas Howard or Charles Brandon: for if you speak the name of Wolsey, they can hardly restrain themselves from spitting at your feet.

When they leave the church, the last light is vanishing into the sky, and a stray snowflake drifts along towards the south. They remount; it has been a long day; his clothes feel heavy on his back. He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets. When the woodcock flew up in its flash of reddish brown, his heart had knocked hard. As they rode he was aware of it, each beat a heavy wing-beat; as the bird found the concealment of trees, its tracing of feathers inked out to black.

 

They arrive in the half-dark: a hallooing from the walls, and an answering shout from Christophe: ‘Thomas Cremuel, Secretary to the king and Master of the Rolls.'

‘How do we know you?' a sentry bellows. ‘Show your colours.'

‘Tell him show a light and let me in,' he says, ‘or I'll show his backside my boot.'

He has to say these things, when he's up-country; it's expected of him, the king's common adviser.

The drawbridge must come down for them: an antique scrape, a creak and rattling of bolts and chains. At Kimbolton they lock in early: good. ‘Remember,' he says to his party, ‘do not make the priest's mistake. When you talk to her household she is the Dowager Princess of Wales.'

‘What?' Christophe says.

‘She is not the king's wife. She never was the king's wife. She is the wife of the king's deceased brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales.'

‘Deceased means dead,' Christophe says. ‘I know it.'

‘She is not a queen, or former queen, as her second so-called marriage was not licit.'

‘That is, not permissible,' Christophe says. ‘She make the mistake of conjugation with both brothers, Arthur first then Henry.'

‘And what are we to think of such a woman?' he says, smiling.

Flare of torches and, taking form out of dimness, Sir Edmund Bedingfield: Katherine's keeper. ‘I think you might have warned us, Cromwell!'

‘Grace, you didn't want warning of me, did you?' He kisses Lady Bedingfield. ‘I didn't bring my supper. But there's a mule cart behind me, it will be here tomorrow. I have venison for your own table, and some almonds for the queen, and a sweet wine that Chapuys says she favours.'

‘I am glad of anything that will tempt her appetite.' Grace Bedingfield leads the way into the great hall. In the firelight she stops and turns to him: ‘Her doctor suspects she has a growth in her belly. But it may take a long course. When you would think she has suffered enough, poor lady.'

He hands his gloves, his riding coat, to Christophe. ‘Will you wait upon her straight away?' Bedingfield asks. ‘Though we were not expecting you, she may be. It is hard for us, because the townspeople favour her and word slips in with servants, you cannot prevent it, I believe they stand and signal from beyond the moat. I think she knows most of what goes on, who passes on the road.'

Two ladies, Spanish by their dress and well-advanced in age, press themselves against a plaster wall and look at him with resentment. He bows to them, and one remarks in her own tongue that this is the man who has sold the King of England's soul. The wall behind them is painted, he sees, with the fading figures of a scene from paradise: Adam and Eve, hand in hand, stroll among beasts so new to creation they have not yet learned their names. A small elephant with a rolling eye peeps shyly through the foliage. He has never seen an elephant, but understood them to be higher by far than a warhorse; perhaps it's not had time to grow yet. Branches bowed with fruit hang above its head.

‘Well, you know the form,' Bedingfield says. ‘She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps.'

Katherine is sitting by the fire shrunk into a cape of very good ermines. The king will want that back, he thinks, if she dies. She glances up, and puts out a hand for him to kiss: unwilling, but more because of the chill, he thinks, than because she is reluctant to acknowledge him. She is jaundiced, and there is an invalid fug in the room – the faint animal scent of the furs, a vegetal stench of undrained cooking water, and the sour reek from a bowl with which a girl hurries away: containing, he suspects, the evacuated contents of the dowager's stomach. If she is ill in the night, perhaps she dreams of the gardens of the Alhambra, where she grew up: the marble pavements, the bubbling of crystal water into basins, the drag of a white peacock's tail and the scent of lemons. I could have brought her a lemon in my saddlebag, he thinks.

As if reading his thoughts, she speaks to him in Castilian. ‘Master Cromwell, let us abandon this weary pretence that you do not speak my language.'

He nods. ‘It has been hard in times past, standing by while your maids talked about me. “Jesu, isn't he ugly, do you think he has a hairy body like Satan?”'

‘My maids said that?' Katherine seems amused. She withdraws her hand, out of his sight. ‘They are long gone, those lively girls. Only old women remain, and a handful of licensed traitors.'

‘Madam, those about you love you.'

‘They report on me. All my words. They even listen in to my prayers. Well, master.' She raises her face to the light. ‘How do you think I look? What will you say of me when the king asks you? I have not seen myself in a mirror these many months.' She pats her fur cap, pulls its lappets over her ears; laughs. ‘The king used to call me an angel. He used to call me a flower. When my first son was born, it was the depths of winter. All England lay under snow. There were no flowers to be had, I thought. But Henry gave me six dozen roses made of the purest white silk. “White as your hand, my love,” he said, and kissed my fingertips.' A twitch beneath the ermine tells him where a bunched fist lies now. ‘I keep them in a chest, the roses. They at least do not fade. Over the years I have given them to those who have done me some service.' She pauses; her lips move, a silent invocation: prayers for departed souls. ‘Tell me, how is Boleyn's daughter? They say she prays a good deal, to her reformed God.'

‘She has indeed a reputation for piety. As she has the approbation of the scholars and bishops.'

‘They are using her. As she is using them. If they were true churchmen they would shrink from her in horror, as they would shrink from an infidel. But I expect she is praying for a son. She lost the last child, I am told. Ah well, I know how that is. I pity her from the bottom of my heart.'

‘She and the king have hopes of another child soon.'

‘What? Particular hope, or general hope?'

He pauses; nothing definite has been said; Gregory could be wrong. ‘I thought she confided in you,' Katherine says sharply. She scans his face: is there some rift, some
froideur
? ‘They say Henry pursues other women.' Katherine's finger strokes the fur: absently round and round, rubbing at the pelt. ‘It is so soon. They have only been married such a little space. I suppose she looks at the women about her, and says to herself, always questioning, is it you, madam? Or you? It has always surprised me that those who are untrustworthy themselves are blind when placing their own trust. La Ana thinks she has friends. But if she does not give the king a son soon, they will turn on her.'

He nods. ‘You may be right. Who will turn first?'

‘Why should I alert her?' Katherine asks drily. ‘They say that when she is crossed she carps like a common scold. I am not surprised. A queen, and she calls herself a queen, must live and suffer under the world's eye. No woman is above her but the Queen of Heaven, so she can look for no companionship in her troubles. If she suffers she suffers alone, and she needs a special grace to bear it. It appears Boleyn's daughter has not received this grace. I ask myself why that could be.'

She breaks off; her lips open and her flesh draws itself together, as if squirming away from her clothes. You are in pain, he starts to say, but she waves him to silence, it's nothing, nothing. ‘Gentlemen about the king, who swear now they will lay down their lives for her smile, will soon offer their devotion to another. They used to offer that same devotion to me. It was because I was the king's wife, it was nothing to do with my person. But La Ana takes it as a tribute to her charms. And besides, it is not just the men she should fear. Her sister-in-law, Jane Rochford, now there is a vigilant young woman…when she served me she often brought secrets to me, love secrets, secrets I would perhaps rather not know, and I doubt her ears and eyes are less sharp nowadays.' Still her fingers work away, now massaging a spot near her breastbone. ‘You wonder, how can Katherine, who is banished, know the workings of the court? That is for you to ponder.'

I don't have to ponder long, he thinks. It is Nicholas Carew's wife, a particular friend of yours. And it is Gertrude Courtenay, the Marquis of Exeter's wife; I caught her out in plotting last year, I should have locked her up. Perhaps even little Jane Seymour; though Jane has her own career to serve, since Wolf Hall. ‘I know you have your sources,' he says. ‘But should you trust them? They act in your name, but not in your best interests. Or those of your daughter.'

‘Will you let the princess visit me? If you think she needs counsel to steady her, who better than I?'

‘If it stood to me, madam…'

‘What harm can it do the king?'

‘Put yourself in his place. I believe your ambassador Chapuys has written to Lady Mary, saying he can get her out of the country.'

‘Never! Chapuys can have no such thought. I guarantee it in my own person.'

‘The king thinks that perhaps Mary might corrupt her guards, and if permitted to make a journey to see you she might spur away, and take ship for the territories of her cousin the Emperor.'

It almost brings a smile to his lips, to think of the skinny, scared little princess embarking on such a desperate and criminal course of action. Katherine smiles too; a twisted, malicious smile. ‘And then what? Does Henry fear my daughter will come riding back, with a foreign husband by her side, and turn him out of his kingdom? You can assure him, she has no such intention. I will answer for her, again, with my own person.'