He is out of the door. Rafe picks up the medal. ‘It's probably cursed.’
On the stairs they can hear the duke, his voice raised, plaintive: ‘I thought he was nearly dead! They told me he was nearly dead …’
He says to Rafe, ‘Seen him off.’
Rafe grins. ‘Suffolk too.’
Henry has never remitted the fine of thirty thousand pounds he imposed when Suffolk married his sister. From time to time he remembers it, and this is one of those times; Brandon has had to give up his lands in Oxfordshire and Berkshire to pay his debts, and now he keeps small state down in the country.
He closes his eyes. It is bliss to think of: two dukes on the run from him.
His neighbour Chapuys comes in. ‘I told my master in dispatches that the king has visited you. My master is amazed that the king would go to a private house, to one not even a lord. But I told him, you should see the work he gets out of Cromwell.’
‘He should have such a servant,’ he says. ‘But Eustache, you are an old hypocrite, you know. You would dance on my grave.’
‘My dear Thomas, you are always the only opponent.’
Thomas Avery smuggles in to him Luca Pacioli's book of chess puzzles. He has soon done all the puzzles, and drawn out some of his own on blank pages at the back. His letters are brought and he reviews the latest round of disasters. They say that the tailor at Münster, the King of Jerusalem with sixteen wives, has had a row with one of them and cut her head off in the marketplace.
He re-emerges into the world. Knock him down and he will get up. Death has called to inspect him, she has measured him, breathed into his face: walked away again. He is a little leaner, his clothes tell him; for a while he feels light, no longer grounded in the world, each day buoyant with possibilities. The Boleyns congratulate him heartily on his return to health, and so they should, for without him how would they be what they are now? Cranmer, when they meet, keeps leaning forward to pat his shoulder and squeeze his hand.
While he has been recovering, the king has cropped his hair. He has done this to disguise his increasing baldness, though it doesn't, not at all. His loyal councillors have done the same, and soon it becomes a mark of fellowship between them. ‘By God, sir,’ Master Wriothesley says, ‘if I wasn't frightened of you before, I would be now.’
‘But Call-Me,’ he says, ‘you were frightened of me before.’
There is no change in Richard's aspect; committed to the tilting ground, he keeps his hair cropped to fit under a helmet. The shorn Master Wriothesley looks more intelligent, if that were possible, and Rafe more determined and alert. Richard Riche has lost the vestiges of the boy he was. Suffolk's huge face has acquired a strange innocence. Monseigneur looks deceptively ascetic. As for Norfolk, no one notices the change. ‘What sort of hair did he have before?’ Rafe asks. Strips of iron-grey fortify his scalp, as if laid out by a military engineer.
The fashion spreads into the country. When Rowland Lee next pitches into the Rolls House, he thinks a cannonball is coming at him. His son's eyes look large and calm, a still golden colour. Your mother would have wept over your baby curls, he says, rubbing his head affectionately. Gregory says, ‘Would she? I hardly remember her.’
As April goes out, four treacherous monks are put on trial. The oath has been offered them repeatedly, and refused. It is a year since the Maid was put to death. The king showed mercy to her followers; he is not now so disposed. It is the Charterhouse of London where the mischief originates, that austere house of men who sleep on straw; it is where Thomas More tried his vocation, before it was revealed to him that the world needed his talents. He, Cromwell, has visited the house, as he has visited the recalcitrant community at Syon. He has spoken gently, he has spoken bluntly, he has threatened and cajoled; he has sent enlightened clerics to argue the king's case, and he has interviewed the disaffected members of the community and set them to work against their brethren. It is all to no avail. Their response is, go away, go away and leave me to my sanctified death.
If they think that they will maintain to the end the equanimity of their prayer-lives, they are wrong, because the law demands the full traitor's penalty, the short spin in the wind and the conscious public disembowelling, a brazier alight for human entrails. It is the most horrible of all deaths, pain and rage and humiliation swallowed to the dregs, the fear so great that the strongest rebel is unmanned before the executioner with his knife can do the job; before each one dies he watches his fellows and, cut down from the rope, he crawls like an animal round and round on the bloody boards.
Wiltshire and George Boleyn are to represent the king at the spectacle, and Norfolk, who, grumbling, has been dragged up from the country and told to prepare for an embassy to France. Henry thinks of going himself to see the monks die, for the court will wear masks, edging on their high-stepping horses among the city officials and the ragged populace, who turn out by the hundred to see any such show. But the king's build makes it difficult to disguise him, and he fears there may be demonstrations in favour of Katherine, still a favourite with the more verminous portion of every crowd. Young Richmond shall stand in for me, his father decides; one day he may have to defend, in battle, his half-sister's title, so it becomes him to learn the sights and sounds of slaughter.
The boy comes to him at night, as the deaths are scheduled next day: ‘Good Master Secretary, take my place.’
‘Will you take mine, at my morning meeting with the king? Think of it like this,’ he says, firm and pleasant. ‘If you plead sickness, or fall off your horse tomorrow or vomit in front of your father-in-law, he'll never let you forget it. If you want him to let you into your bride's bed, prove yourself a man. Keep your eyes on the duke, and pattern your conduct on his.’
But Norfolk himself comes to him, when it is over, and says, Cromwell, I swear upon my life that one of the monks spoke when his heart was out. Jesus, he called, Jesus save us, poor Englishmen.
‘No, my lord. It is not possible he should do so.’
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I know it from experience.’
The duke quails. Let him think it, that his past deeds have included the pulling out of hearts. ‘I dare say you're right.’ Norfolk crosses himself. ‘It must have been a voice from the crowd.’
The night before the monks met their end, he had signed a pass for Margaret Roper, the first in months. Surely, he thinks, for Meg to be with her father when traitors are being led out to their deaths; surely she will turn from her resolve, she will say to her father, come now, the king is in his killing vein, you must take the oath as I have done. Make a mental reservation, cross your fingers behind your back; only ask for Cromwell or any officer of the king, say the words, come home.
But his tactic fails. She and her father stood dry-eyed at a window as the traitors were brought out, still in their habits, and launched on their journey to Tyburn. I always forget, he thinks, how More neither pities himself nor takes pity on others. Because I would have protected my own girls from such a sight, I think he would too. But he uses Meg to harden his resolve. If she will not give way, he cannot; and she will not give way.
The following day he goes in to see More himself. The rain splashes and hisses from the stones underfoot; walls and water are indistinguishable, and around small corners a wind moans like a winter wind. When he has struggled out of his wet outer layers he stands chatting to the turnkey Martin, getting the news of his wife and new baby. How shall I find him, he asks at last and Martin says, have you ever noticed how he has one shoulder up and the other down?
It comes from overmuch writing, he says. One elbow on the desk, the other shoulder dropped. Well, whatever, Martin says: he looks like a little carved hunchback on a bench end.
More has grown his beard; he looks as one imagines the prophets of Münster to look, though he would abhor the comparison. ‘Master Secretary, how does the king take the news from abroad? They say the Emperor's troops are on the move.’
‘Yes,