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