Bring Up the Bodies (7 page)

He is thinking ahead: if the king had the monks' land, not just a little but the whole of it, he would be three times the man he is now. He need no longer go cap in hand to Parliament, wheedling for a subsidy. His son Gregory says to him, ‘Sir, they say that if the Abbot of Glastonbury went to bed with the Abbess of Shaftesbury, their offspring would be the richest landowner in England.'

‘Very likely,' he says, ‘though have you seen the Abbess of Shaftesbury?'

Gregory looks worried. ‘Should I have?'

Conversations with his son are like this: they dart off at angles, end up anywhere. He thinks of the grunts in which he and Walter communicated when he was a boy. ‘You can look at her if you like. I must visit Shaftesbury soon, I have something to do there.'

The convent at Shaftesbury is where Wolsey placed his daughter. He says, ‘Will you make a note for me, Gregory, a memorandum? Go and see Dorothea.'

Gregory longs to ask, who is Dorothea? He sees the questions chase each other across the boy's face; then at last: ‘Is she pretty?'

‘I don't know. Her father kept her close.' He laughs.

But he wipes the smile from his face when he reminds Henry: when monks are traitors, they are the most recalcitrant of that cursed breed. When you threaten them, ‘I will make you suffer,' they reply that it is for suffering they were born. Some choose to starve in prison, or go praying to Tyburn and the attentions of the hangman. He said to them, as he said to Thomas More, this is not about your God, or my God, or about God at all. This is about, which will you have: Henry Tudor or Alessandro Farnese? The King of England at Whitehall, or some fantastically corrupt foreigner in the Vatican? They had turned their heads away; died speechless, their false hearts carved out of their chests.

 

When he rides at last into the gates of his city house at Austin Friars, his liveried servants bunch about him, in their long-skirted coats of grey marbled cloth. Gregory is on his right hand, and on his left Humphrey, keeper of his sporting spaniels, with whom he has had easy conversation on this last mile of the journey; behind him his falconers, Hugh and James and Roger, vigilant men alert for any jostling or threat. A crowd has formed outside his gate, expecting largesse. Humphrey and the rest have money to disburse. After supper tonight there will be the usual dole to the poor. Thurston, his chief cook, says they are feeding two hundred Londoners, twice a day.

He sees a man in the press, a little bowed man, scarcely making an effort to keep his feet. This man is weeping. He loses sight of him; he spots him again, his head bobbing, as if his tears were the tide and were carrying him towards the gate. He says, ‘Humphrey, find out what ails that fellow.'

But then he forgets. His household are happy to see him, all his folk with shining faces, and a swarm of little dogs about his feet; he lifts them into his arms, writhing bodies and wafting tails, and asks them how they do. The servants cluster round Gregory, admiring him from hat to boots; all servants love him for his pleasant ways. ‘The man in charge!' his nephew Richard says, and gives him a bone-crushing hug. Richard is a solid boy with the Cromwell eye, direct and brutal, and the Cromwell voice that can caress or contradict. He is afraid of nothing that walks the earth, and nothing that walks below it; if a demon turned up at Austin Friars, Richard would kick it downstairs on its hairy arse.

His smiling nieces, young married women now, have slackened the laces on their bodices to accommodate swelling bellies. He kisses them both, their bodies soft against his, their breath sweet, warmed by ginger comfits such as women in their condition use. He misses, for a moment…what does he miss? The pliancy of gentle, willing flesh; the absent, inconsequential conversations of early morning. He has to be careful in any dealings with women, discreet. He should not give his ill-wishers the chance to defame him. Even the king is discreet; he doesn't want Europe to call him Harry Whoremaster. Perhaps he'd rather gaze at the unattainable, for now: Mistress Seymour.

At Elvetham Jane was like a flower, head drooping, modest as a drift of green-white hellebore. In her brother's house, the king had praised her to her family's face: ‘A tender, modest, shame-faced maid, such as few be in our day.'

Thomas Seymour, keen as always to crash into the conversation and talk over his elder brother: ‘For piety and modesty, I dare say Jane has few equals.'

He saw brother Edward hide a smile. Under his interested eye, Jane's family have begun – with a certain incredulity – to sense which way the wind is blowing. Thomas Seymour said, ‘I could not brazen it out, even if I were the king I could not face it, inviting a lady like sister Jane to come to my bed. I wouldn't know how to begin. And would you, anyway? Why would you? It would be like kissing a stone. Rolling her about from one side of the mattress to the other, and your parts growing numb from cold.'

‘A brother cannot picture his sister in a man's embrace,' Edward Seymour says. ‘At least, no brother can who calls himself a Christian. Though they do say at court that George Boleyn –' He breaks off, frowning. ‘And of course the king knows how to propose himself. How to offer himself. He knows how to do it, as a gallant gentleman. As you, brother, do not.'

It's hard to put down Tom Seymour. He just grins.

But Henry had not said much, before they rode away from Elvetham; made his hearty farewells, and never a word about the girl. Jane had whispered to him, ‘Master Cromwell, why am I here?'

‘Ask your brothers.'

‘My brothers say, ask Cromwell.'

‘So is it an utter mystery to you?'

‘Yes. Unless I am to be married at last. Am I to be married to you?'

‘I must forgo that prospect. I am too old for you, Jane. I could be your father.'

‘Could you?' Jane says wonderingly. ‘Well, stranger things have happened at Wolf Hall. I didn't even realise you knew my mother.'

A fleeting smile and she vanishes, leaving him looking after her. We could be married at that, he thinks; it would keep my mind agile, wondering how she might misconstrue me. Does she do it on purpose?

Though I can't have her till Henry's finished with her. And I once swore I would not take on his used women, did I not?

Perhaps, he had thought, I should scribble an aide-memoire for the Seymour boys, so they are clear on what presents Jane should and should not accept. The rule is simple: jewellery yes, money no. And till the deal is done, let her not take off any item of clothing in Henry's presence. Not even, he will advise, her gloves.

 

Unkind people describe his house as the Tower of Babel. It is said he has servants from every nation under the sun, except Scotland; so Scots keep applying to him, in hope. Gentlemen and even noblemen from here and abroad are pressing him to take their sons into his household, and he accepts all he thinks he can train. On any given day at Austin Friars a group of German scholars will be deploying the many varieties of their tongue, frowning over the letters of evangelists from their own territories. At dinner young Cambridge men exchange snippets of Greek; they are the scholars he has helped, now come to help him. Sometimes a company of Italian merchants come in for supper, and he chats with them in those languages he learned when he worked for the bankers in Florence and Venice. The retainers of his neighbour Chapuys loll about drinking at the expense of the Cromwell buttery, and gossip in Spanish, in Flemish. He himself speaks in French to Chapuys, as it is the ambassador's first language, and employs French of a more demotic sort to his boy Christophe, a squat little ruffian who followed him home from Calais, and who is never far from his side; he doesn't let him far from his side, because around Christophe fights break out.

There is a summer of gossip to catch up on, and accounts to go through, receipts and expenses of his houses and lands. But first he goes out to the kitchen to see his chief cook. It's that early-afternoon lull, dinner cleared, spits cleaned, pewter scoured and stacked, a smell of cinnamon and cloves, and Thurston standing solitary by a floured board, gazing at a ball of dough as if it were the head of the Baptist. As a shadow blocks his light, ‘Inky fingers out!' the cook roars. Then, ‘Ah. You, sir. Not before time. We had great venison pasties made against your coming, we had to give them out to your friends before they went bad. We'd have sent some up to you, only you move around so fast.'

He holds out his hands for inspection.

‘I beg pardon,' Thurston says. ‘But you see I have young Thomas Avery down here fresh from the account books, poking around the stores and wanting to weigh things. Then Master Rafe, look Thurston, we have some Danes coming, what can you make for Danes? Then Master Richard crashing in, Luther has sent his messengers, what sort of cakes do Germans like?'

He gives the dough a pinch. ‘Is this for Germans?'

‘Never mind what it is. If it works, you'll eat it.'

‘Did they pick the quinces? It can't be long before we have frost. I can feel it in my bones.'

‘Listen to you,' Thurston says. ‘You sound like your own grandam.'

‘You didn't know her. Or did you?'

Thurston chuckles. ‘Parish drunk?'

Probably. What sort of woman could have suckled his father Walter Cromwell, and not turned to drink? Thurston says, as if it's just struck him, ‘Mind you, a man has two grandams. Who were your mother's people, sir?'

‘They were northerners.'

Thurston grins. ‘Come out of a cave. You know young Francis Weston? He that waits on the king? His people are giving out that you're a Hebrew.' He grunts; he's heard that one before. ‘Next time you're at court,' Thurston advises, ‘take your cock out and put it on the table and see what he says to that.'

‘I do that anyway,' he says. ‘If the conversation flags.'

‘Mind you…' Thurston hesitates. ‘It's true, sir, you are a Hebrew because you lend money at interest.'

Mounting, in Weston's case. ‘Anyway,' he says. He gives the dough another nip; it's a bit solid, is it not? ‘What's new on the streets?'

‘They're saying the old queen's sick.' Thurston waits. But his master has picked up a handful of currants and is eating them. ‘She's sick at heart, I should think. They say she's put a curse on Anne Boleyn, so she won't have a boy. Or if she does have a boy, it won't be Henry's. They say Henry has other women and so Anne chases him around his chamber with a pair of shears, shouting she'll geld him. Queen Katherine used to shut her eyes like wives do, but Anne's not the same mettle and she swears he will suffer for it. So that would be a pretty revenge, wouldn't it?' Thurston cackles. ‘She cuckolds Henry to pay him back, and puts her own bastard on the throne.'

They have busy, buzzing minds, the Londoners: minds like middens. ‘Do they guess at who the father of this bastard will be?'

‘Thomas Wyatt?' Thurston offers. ‘Because she was known to favour him before she was queen. Or else her old lover Harry Percy –'

‘Percy's in his own country, is he not?'

Thurston rolls his eyes. ‘Distance don't stop her. If she wants him down from Northumberland she just whistles and whips him down on the wind. Not that she stops at Harry Percy. They say she has all the gentlemen of the king's privy chamber, one after another. She don't like delay so they all stand in a line frigging their members, till she shouts, “Next.”'

‘And in they troop,' he says. ‘One and then another.' He laughs. Eats the final currant from his palm.

‘Welcome home,' Thurston says. ‘London, where we believe anything.'

‘After she was crowned, I remember she called her whole household together, men and maids, and she sermonised them on how they should behave, no gambling except for tokens, no loose language and no flesh on show. It's slid a bit from there, I agree.'

‘Sir,' Thurston says, ‘you've got flour on your sleeve.'

‘Well, I must go upstairs and sit down in council. Don't let supper be late.'

‘When is it ever?' Thurston dusts him tenderly. ‘When is it ever?'

 

This is his household council, not the king's; his familiar advisers, the young men, Rafe Sadler and Richard Cromwell, quick and ready with figures, quick to twist an argument, quick to seize a point. And also Gregory. His son.

This season young men carry their effects in soft pale leather bags, in imitation of the agents for the Fugger bank, who travel all over Europe and set the fashion. The bags are heart-shaped and so to him it always looks as if they are going wooing, but they swear they are not. Nephew Richard Cromwell sits down and gives the bags a sardonic glance. Richard is like his uncle, and keeps his effects close to his person. ‘Here's Call-Me,' he says. ‘Will you look at the feather in his hat?'

Thomas Wriothesley comes in, parting from his murmuring retainers; he is a tall and handsome young man with a head of burnished copper hair. A generation back, his family were called Writh, but they thought an elegant extension would give them consequence; they were heralds by office, so they were well-placed for reinvention, for the reworking of ordinary ancestors into something more knightly. The change does not go by without mockery; Thomas is known at Austin Friars as Call-Me-Risley. He has grown a trim beard recently, has fathered a son, and is accreting dignity each year. He drops his bag on the table and slides into his place. ‘And how is Gregory?' he asks.

Gregory's face opens in delight; he admires Call-Me, and he hardly hears the note of condescension. ‘Oh, I am well. I have been hunting all summer and now I will be back to William Fitzwilliam's household to join in his train, for he is a gentleman close to the king and my father thinks I can learn from him. Fitz is good to me.'

‘Fitz.' Wriothesley snorts with amusement. ‘You Cromwells!'

‘Well,' Gregory says, ‘he calls my father Crumb.'