‘Ah, but women, you see. Women reading the Bible, there's another point of contention. Does she know what Brother Martin thinks is a woman's place? We shouldn't mourn, he says, if our wife or daughter dies in childbirth – she's only doing what God made her for. Very harsh, Brother Martin, very intractable. And perhaps she is not a Bible-woman. Perhaps it is a slur on her. Perhaps it is just that she is out of patience with churchmen. I wish she did not blame me for her difficulties. Not blame me so very much.’
Lady Anne sends friendly messages to the cardinal, but he thinks she does not mean them. ‘If,’ Wolsey had said, ‘I saw the prospect of an annulment for the king, I would go to the Vatican in person, have my veins opened and allow the documents to be written in my own blood. Do you think, if Anne knew that, it would content her? No, I didn't think so, but if you see any of the Boleyns, make them the offer. By the way, I suppose you know a person called Humphrey Monmouth? He is the man who had Tyndale in his house for six months, before he ran off to wherever. They say he sends him money still, but that can't possibly be true, as how would he know where to send? Monmouth … I am merely mentioning his name. Because … now why am I?’ The cardinal had closed his eyes. ‘Because I am merely mentioning it.’
The Bishop of London has already filled his own prisons. He is locking up Lutherans and sectaries in Newgate and the Fleet, with common criminals. There they remain until they recant and do public penance. If they relapse they will be burned; there are no second chances.
When Monmouth's house is raided, it is clear of all suspect writings. It's almost as if he was forewarned. There are neither books nor letters that link him to Tyndale and his friends. All the same, he is taken to the Tower. His family is terrified. Monmouth is a gentle and fatherly man, a master draper, well liked in his guild and the city at large. He loves the poor and buys cloth even when trade is bad, so the weavers may keep in work. No doubt the imprisonment is designed to break him; his business is tottering by the time he is released. They have to let him go, for lack of evidence, because you can't make anything of a heap of ashes in the hearth.
Monmouth himself would be a heap of ashes, if Thomas More had his way. ‘Not come to see us yet, Master Cromwell?’ he says. ‘Still breaking dry bread in cellars? Come now, my tongue is sharper than you deserve. We must be friends, you know.’
It sounds like a threat. More moves away, shaking his head: ‘We must be friends.’
Ashes, dry bread. England was always, the cardinal says, a miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people, who are working slowly towards their deliverance, and who are visited by God with special tribulations. If England lies under God's curse, or some evil spell, it has seemed for a time that the spell has been broken, by the golden king and his golden cardinal. But those golden years are over, and this winter the sea will freeze; the people who see it will remember it all their lives.
Johane has moved into the house at Austin Friars with her husband John Williamson and her daughter little Johane – Jo, the children call her, seeing she is too small for a full name. John Williamson is needed in the Cromwell business. ‘Thomas,’ says Johane, ‘what exactly is your business these days?’
In this way she detains him in talk. ‘Our business,’ he says, ‘is making people rich. There are many ways to do this and John is going to help me out with them.’
‘But John won't have to deal with my lord cardinal, will he?’
The gossip is that people – people of influence – have complained to the king, and the king has complained to Wolsey, about the monastic houses he has closed down. They don't think of the good use to which the cardinal has put the assets; they don't think of his colleges, the scholars he maintains, the libraries he is founding. They're only interested in getting their own fingers in the spoils. And because they've been cut out of the business, they pretend to believe the monks have been left naked and lamenting in the road. They haven't. They've been transferred elsewhere, to bigger houses better run. Some of the younger ones have been let go, boys who have no calling to the life. Questioning them, he usually finds they know nothing, which makes nonsense of the abbeys' claims to be the light of learning. They can stumble through a Latin prayer, but when you say, ‘Go on then, tell me what it means,’ they say, ‘Means, master?’ as if they thought that words and their meanings were so loosely attached that the tether would snap at the first tug.
‘Don't worry about what people say,’ he tells Johane. ‘I take responsibility for it, I do, alone.’
The cardinal has received the complaints with a supreme hauteur. He has grimly noted in his file the names of the complainers. Then he has taken out of his file the list, and handed it over to his man, with a tight smile. All he cares for are his new buildings, his banners flying, his coat of arms embossed on the brickwork, his Oxford scholars; he's plundering Cambridge to get the brightest young doctors over to Cardinal College. There was trouble before Easter, when the dean found six of the new men in possession of a number of forbidden books. Lock them up by all means, Wolsey said, lock them up and reason with them. If the weather is not too hot, or not too wet, I might come up and reason with them myself.
No use trying to explain this to Johane. She only wants to know her husband's not within arrow-shot of the slanders that are flying. ‘You know what you're doing, I suppose.’ Her eyes dart upwards. ‘At least, Tom, you always look as if you do.’
Her voice, her footstep, her raised eyebrow, her pointed smile, everything reminds him of Liz. Sometimes he turns, thinking that Liz has come into the room.
The new arrangements confuse Grace. She knows her mother's first husband was called Tom Williams; they name him in their household prayers. Is Uncle Williamson therefore his son? she asks.
Johane tries to explain it. ‘Save your breath,’ Anne says. She taps her head. Her bright little fingers bounce from the seed pearls of her cap. ‘Slow,’ she says.
Later, he says to her, ‘Grace isn't slow, just young.’
‘I never remember I was as foolish as that.’
‘They're all slow, except us? Is that right?’
Anne's face says, more or less, that is right. ‘Why do people marry?’
‘So there can be children.’
‘Horses don't marry. But there are foals.’
‘Most people,’ he says, ‘feel it increases their happiness.’
‘Oh, yes, that,’ Anne says. ‘May I choose my husband?’
‘Of course,’ he says; meaning, up to a point.
‘Then I choose Rafe.’
For a minute, for two minutes together, he feels his life might mend. Then he thinks, how could I ask Rafe to wait? He needs to set up his own household. Even five years from now, Anne would be a very young bride.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘And time goes by so slowly.’
It's true; one always seems to be waiting for something. ‘You seem to have thought it through,’ he says. You don't have to spell out to her, keep this to yourself, because she knows to do that; you don't have to lead this female child through a conversation with the little shifts and demurs that most women demand. She's not like a flower, a nightingale: she's like … like a merchant adventurer, he thinks. A look in the eye to skewer your intentions, and a deal done with a slap of the palm.
She pulls off her cap; she twists the seed pearls in her fingers, and tugs at a strand of her dark hair, stretching it and pulling out its wave. She scoops up the rest of her hair, twists it and wraps it around her neck. ‘I could do that twice,’ she says, ‘if my neck were smaller.’ She sounds fretful. ‘Grace thinks I cannot marry Rafe because we are related. She thinks everybody who lives in a house must be cousins.’
‘You are not Rafe's cousin.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I am sure. Anne … put your