Wolf Hall: Bring Up the Bodies (21 page)

When he hears the shout of ‘Fire!’ he turns over and swims back into his dream. He supposes the conflagration is a dream; it’s the sort he has.

Then he wakes to Christophe bellowing in his ear. ‘Get up! The queen is on fire.’

He is out of bed. The cold slices into him. Christophe yells, ‘Quick, quick! She is totally incinderated.’

Moments later, when he arrives on the queen’s floor, he finds the smell of singed cloth heavy in the air, and Anne surrounded by gibbering women, but unhurt, in a chair, wrapped in black silk, with a chalice of warmed wine in her hands. The cup jiggles, spills a little; Henry is tearful, hugging her, and his heir who is inside her. ‘If only I had been with you, sweetheart. If only I had spent the night. I could have put you out of danger in an instant.’

On and on he goes. Thank the Lord God who watches over us. Thank the God who protects England. If only I. With a blanket, a quilt, stifling them. I, in an instant, beating out the flames.

Anne takes a gulp of her wine. ‘It is over. I am not harmed. Please, my lord husband. Peace. Let me drink this.’

He sees, in a flash, how Henry irritates her; his solicitude, his doting, his clinging. And in the depth of a January night she can’t disguise the irritation. She looks grey, her sleep broken. She turns to him, Cromwell, and speaks in French. ‘There is a prophecy that a queen of England will be burned. I did not think it meant in her own bed. It was an unattended candle. Or so one assumes.’

‘By whom unattended?’

Anne shudders. She looks away.

‘We had better take order,’ he says to the king, ‘that water be kept to hand, and one woman be appointed on every rota to check that all lights are extinguished about the queen. I cannot think why it is not the custom.’

All these things are written down in the Black Book, which comes from King Edward’s time. It orders the household: orders everything, in fact, except the king’s privy chamber, whose workings are not transparent.

‘If only I had been with her,’ says Henry. ‘But, you see, our hopes being what they are…’

The King of England cannot afford carnal relations with the woman carrying his child. The risk of miscarriage is too great. And for company he looks elsewhere too. Tonight you can see how Anne’s body stiffens as she pulls away from her husband’s hands, but in daylight hours, their position is reversed. He has watched Anne as she tries to draw the king into conversation. His abruptness, all too often. His turned shoulder. As if to deny his need of her. And yet his eyes follow her…

He is irritated; these are women’s things. And the fact that the queen’s body, wrapped only in a damask nightgown, seems too narrow for that of a woman who will give birth in spring; that is a woman’s thing too. The king says, ‘The fire did not come very near her. It is the corner of the arras that is burned up. It is Absalom hanging in the tree. It is a very good piece and I would like you to…’

‘I’ll get someone over from Brussels,’ he says.

The fire has not touched King David’s son. He hangs from the branches, strung up by his long hair: his eyes are wild and his mouth opens in a scream.

It is hours yet till daylight. The rooms of the palace seem hushed, as if they are waiting for an explanation. Guards patrol through the dark hours; where were they? Should not some woman have been with the queen, sleeping on a pallet at the foot of her bed? He says to Lady Rochford, ‘I know the queen has enemies, but how were they allowed to come so near her?’

Jane Rochford is on her high horse; she thinks he is attempting to blame her. ‘Look, Master Secretary. Shall I be plain with you?’

‘I wish you would.’

‘First, this is a household matter. It is not within your remit. Second, she was in no danger. Third, I do not know who lit the candle. Four, if I did I would not tell you.’

He waits.

‘Five: no one else will tell you either.’

He waits.

‘If, as it may happen, some person visits the queen after the lights are out, then it is an event over which we should draw a veil.’

‘Some person.’ He digests this. ‘Some person for the purposes of arson, or for purposes of something else?’

‘For the usual purposes of bedchambers,’ she says. ‘Not that I say there is such a person. I would not have any knowledge of it. The queen knows how to keep her secrets.’

‘Jane,’ he says, ‘if the time comes when you wish to disburden your conscience, do not go to a priest, come to me. The priest will give you a penance, but I will give you a reward.’

What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

Tidying up after Katherine’s death, he had been moved to explore some legends of her early life. Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals. Katherine had always said that, between the death of Arthur and her marriage to the young Prince Henry, she had been miserably neglected, wretchedly poor: eaten yesterday’s fish, and so on. One had blamed the old king for it, but when you look at the books, you see he was generous enough. Katherine’s household were cheating her. Her plate and jewels were leaking on to the market; in that she must have been complicit? She was lavish, he sees, and generous; regal, in other words, with no idea of living within her means.

You wonder what else you have always believed, believed without foundation. His father Walter had laid out money for him, or so Gardiner said: compensation, for the stab wound he inflicted, the injured family paid off. What if, he thinks, Walter didn’t hate me? What if he was just exasperated with me, and showed it by kicking me around the brewery yard? What if I deserved it? Because I was always crowing, ‘Item, I have a better head for drink than you; Item, I have a better head for everything. Item, I am prince of Putney and can wallop anybody from Wimbledon, let them come from Mortlake and I will mince them. Item, I am already one inch taller than you, look at the door where I have put a notch, go on, go on, father, go and stand against the wall.’

He writes:

He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, ‘Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?’

‘Send a commission against it, sir,’ the boy says. ‘It must be put down. Bishop Rowland Lee would go up against it. Or Fitz.’

He gives his son a long look. ‘You do know it’s Arthur Cobbler’s tales?’

Gregory gives him a long look back. ‘Yes, I do know.’ He sounds regretful. ‘But it makes people so happy when I believe them. Mr Wriothesley, especially. Though now he has grown so grave. He used to amuse himself by holding my head under a water spout. But now he turns his eyes up to Heaven and says “the King’s Majesty”. Though he used to call him, His High Horridness. And imitate how he walks.’ Gregory plants his fists on his hips and stamps across the room.

He raises a hand to cover his smile.

The day of the tournament comes. He is at Greenwich but excuses himself from the spectators’ stand. The king had been at him that morning, as they sat side by side in his closet at early Mass: ‘How much does the lordship of Ripon bring in? To the Archbishop of York?’

‘A little over two hundred and sixty pounds, sir.’

‘And what does Southwell bring in?’

‘Scant one hundred and fifty pounds, sir.’

‘Do you say so? I thought that it would be more.’

Henry is taking the closest interest in the finances of the bishops. Some people say, and he would not demur, that we should put the bishops on a fixed stipend and take the profits of their sees for the treasury. He has worked out that the money raised could pay for a standing army.

But this is not the time to put it to Henry. The king falls to his knees and prays to whatever saint guards knights in the lists. ‘Majesty,’ he says, ‘if you run against my son Gregory, will you forbear to unhorse him? If you can help it?’

But the king says, ‘I would not mind if little Gregory unhorsed me. Though it is unlikely, I would take it in good part. And we cannot help what we do, really. Once you are thundering down at a man, you cannot check.’ He stops himself and says kindly, ‘It is quite a rare event, you know, to bring your opponent down. It is not the sole aim of the contest. If you are concerned about what showing he will make, you need not be. He is very able. He would not be a combatant otherwise. One cannot break a lance on a timid opponent, he must run at full pace against you. Besides, no one ever does badly. It is not allowed. You know how the heralds put it. As it might be, “Gregory Cromwell has jousted well, Henry Norris has jousted very well, but our Sovereign Lord the king has jousted best of all.”’

‘And have you, sir?’ He smiles to take any sting from the words.

‘I know you councillors think I should take to the spectators’ bench. And I will, I promise, it has not escaped me that a man of my age is past his best. But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.’

But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other…

The king says, ‘You turn your boy out beautifully, and your nephew Richard too. No nobleman could do more. They are a credit to your house.’

Gregory has done well. Gregory has done very well. Gregory has done best of all. ‘I don’t want him to be Achilles,’ he says, ‘I only want him not to be flattened.’

There is a correspondence between the score sheet and the human body, in that the paper has divisions marked off, for the head and the torso. A touch on the breastplate is recorded, but not fractured ribs. A touch on the helm is recorded, but not a cracked skull. You can pick up the score sheets afterwards and read back a record of the day, but the marks on paper do not tell you about the pain of a broken ankle or the efforts of a suffocating man not to vomit inside his helmet. As the combatants will always tell you, you really needed to see it, you had to be there.

Gregory was disappointed when his father had excused himself from watching. He pleaded a prior engagement with his papers. The Vatican is offering Henry three months to return to obedience, or the bull of excommunication against him will be printed and distributed through Europe, and every Christian hand will be against him. The Emperor’s fleet is set for Algiers, with forty thousand armed men. The abbot of Fountains has been systematically robbing his own treasury, and entertains six whores, though presumably he needs a rest between. And the parliamentary session opens in a fortnight.

He had met an old knight once, in Venice, one of those men who had made a career of riding to tournaments all over Europe. The man had described his life to him, crossing frontiers with his band of esquires and his string of horses, always on the move from one prize to the next, till age and the accumulation of injuries put him out of the game. On his own now, he tried to pick up a living teaching young lords, enduring mockery and time-wasting; in my day, he had said, the young were taught manners, but now I find myself fettling horses and polishing breastplates for some little tosspot I wouldn’t have let clean my boots in the old days; for look at me now, reduced to drinking with, what are you, an Englishman?

The knight was a Portuguese, but he spoke dog-Latin and a kind of German, interspersed with technicalities which are much the same in all languages. In the old days each tournament was a testing-ground. There was no display of idle luxury. Women, instead of simpering at you from gilded pavilions, were kept for afterwards. In those days the scoring was complex and the judges had no mercy on any infringement of the rules, so you could shatter all your lances but lose on points, you could flatten your opposer and come out not with a bag of gold but with a fine or a blot on your record. A breach of rules would trail you through Europe, so some infringements committed, let’s say, in Lisbon, would catch up with you in Ferrara; a man’s reputation would go before him, and in the end, he said, given a bad season, a run of ill-luck, reputation’s all you’ve got; so don’t you push your luck, he said, when fortune’s star is shining, because the next minute, it isn’t. Come to that, don’t pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up?