Wolf Hall (92 page)

It is Christmas Eve when Alice More comes to see him. There is a thin sharp light, like the edge of an old knife, and in this light Alice looks old.

He greets her like a princess, and leads her into one of the chambers he has had repaneled and painted, where a great fire leaps up a rebuilt chimney. The air smells of pine boughs. “You keep the feast here?” Alice has made an effort for him; pinned her hair back fiercely, under a bonnet sewn with seed pearls. “Well! When I came here before it was a musty old place. My husband used to say,” and he notes the past tense, “my husband used to say, lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he'll be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks' tongues, and all the jailers will owe him money.”

“Did he talk a lot about locking me in dungeons?”

“It was only talk.” She is uneasy. “I thought you might take me to see the king. I know he's always courteous to women, and kind.”

He shakes his head. If he takes Alice to the king she will talk about when he used to come to Chelsea and walk in the gardens. She will upset him: agitate his mind, make him think about More, which at present he doesn't. “He is very busy with the French envoys. He means to keep a large court this season. You will have to trust my judgment.”

“You have been good to us,” she says, reluctant. “I ask myself why. You always have some trick.”

“Born tricky,” he says. “Can't help it. Alice, why is your husband so stubborn?”

“I no more comprehend him than I do the Blessed Trinity.”

“Then what are we to do?”

“I think he'd give the king his reasons. In his private ear. If the king said beforehand that he would take away all penalties from him.”

“You mean, license him for treason? The king can't do it.”

“Holy Agnes! Thomas Cromwell, to tell the king what he can't do! I've seen a cock swagger in a barnyard, master, till a girl comes one day and wrings his neck.”

“It's the law of the land. The custom of the country.”

“I thought Henry was set over the law.”

“We don't live at Constantinople, Dame Alice. Though I say nothing against the Turk. We cheer on the infidels, these days. As long as they keep the Emperor's hands tied.”

“I don't have much money left,” she says. “I have to find fifteen shillings every week for his keep. I worry he'll be cold.” She sniffs. “Still, he could tell me so himself. He doesn't write to me. It's all her, her, his darling Meg. She's not my child. I wish his first wife were here, to tell me if she was born the way she is now. She's close, you know. Keeps her own counsel, and his. She tells me now he gave her his shirts to wash the blood out, that he wore a shirt of hair beneath his linen. He did so when we were married and I begged him to leave it off and I thought he had. But how would I know? He slept alone and drew the bolt on his door. If he had an itch I never knew it, he was perforce to scratch it himself. Well, whatever, it was between the two of them, and me no part of it.”

“Alice—”

“Don't think I have no tenderness for him. He didn't marry me to live like a eunuch. We have had dealings, one time or another.” She blushes, more angry than shy. “And when that is true, you cannot help feeling it, if a man might be cold, if he might be hungry, his flesh being one with yours. You feel to him as you might a child.”

“Fetch him out, Alice, if it is within your power.”

“More in yours than mine.” She smiles sadly. “Is your little man Gregory home for the season? I have sometimes said to my husband, I wish Gregory Cromwell were my boy. I could bake him in a sugar crust and eat him all up.”

Gregory comes home for Christmas, with a letter from Rowland Lee saying he is a treasure and can come back to his household anytime. “So must I go back,” Gregory says, “or am I finished being educated now?”

“I have a scheme for the new year to improve your French.”

“Rafe says I am being brought up like a prince.”

“For now, you are all I have to practice on.”

“My sweet father. . .” Gregory picks up his little dog. He hugs her, and nuzzles the fur at the back of her neck. He waits. “Rafe and Richard say that when my education is sufficient you mean to marry me to some old dowager with a great settlement and black teeth, and she will wear me out with lechery and rule me with her whims, and she will leave her estate away from the children she has and they will hate me and scheme against my life and one morning I shall be dead in my bed.”

The spaniel swivels in his son's arms, turns on him her mild, round, wondering eyes. “They are making sport of you, Gregory. If I knew such a woman, I would marry her myself.”

Gregory nods. “She would never rule you, sir. And I dare say she would have a good deer park, which would be convenient to hunt. And the children would be in fear of you, even if they were men grown.” He appears half-consoled. “What's that map? Is it the Indies?”

“This is the Scots border,” he says gently. “Harry Percy's country. Look, let me show you. These are parcels of his estates he has given away to his creditors. We cannot let it continue, because we can't leave our borders to chance.”

“They say he is sick.”

“Sick, or mad.” His tone is indifferent. “He has no heir, and he and his wife never come together, so it is not likely he will. He has fallen out with his brothers, and he owes a deal of money to the king. So it would make sense to name the king his heir, would it not? He will be brought to see it.”

Gregory looks stricken. “Take his earldom?”

“He can keep the style. We'll give him something to live on.”

“Is this because of the cardinal?”

Harry Percy stopped Wolsey at Cawood, as he was riding south. He came in, keys in his hand, spattered with mud from the road: my lord, I arrest you for high treason. Look at my face, the cardinal said: I am not afraid of any man alive.

He shrugs. “Gregory, go and play. Take Bella and practice your French with her; she came to me from Lady Lisle in Calais. I won't be long. I have to settle the kingdom's bills.”

For Ireland at the next dispatch, brass cannon and iron shot, rammers and charging ladles, serpentine powder and four hundredweight of brimstone, five hundred yew bows and two barrels of bowstrings, two hundred each of spades, shovels, crowbars, pickaxes, horsehides, one hundred felling axes, one thousand horseshoes, eight thousand nails. The goldsmith Cornelys has not been paid for the cradle he made for the king's last child, the one that never saw the light; he claims for twenty shillings disbursed to Hans for painting Adam and Eve on the cradle, and he is owed for white satin, gold tassels and fringes, and the silver for modeling the apples in the Garden of Eden.

He is talking to people in Florence about hiring a hundred arquebusiers for the Irish campaign. They don't down tools, like Englishmen do, if they have to fight in the woods or on rocky terrain.

The king says, a lucky New Year to you, Cromwell. And more to follow. He thinks, luck has nothing to do with it. Of all his presents, Henry is most pleased with the Queen of Sheba, and with a unicorn's horn, and a device to squeeze oranges with a great gold “H” on it.

Early in the new year the king gives him a title no one has ever held before: Vicegerent in Spirituals, his deputy in church affairs. Rumors that the religious houses will be put down have been running about the kingdom for three years and more. Now he has the power to visit, inspect and reform monasteries; to close them, if need be. There is hardly an abbey whose affairs he does not know, by virtue of his training under the cardinal and the letters that arrive day by day—some monks complaining of abuses and scandals and their superiors' disloyalty, others seeking offices within their communities, assuring him that a word in the right quarter will leave them forever in his debt.

He says to Chapuys, “Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth,” he says, “set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the center. Straight to where you should be.”

Officially, he and the ambassador are barely on speaking terms. Unofficially, Chapuys sends him a vat of good olive oil. He retaliates with capons. The ambassador himself arrives, followed by a retainer carrying a parmesan cheese.

Chapuys looks doleful and chilly. “Your poor queen keeps the season meagerly at Kimbolton. She is so afraid of the heretic councillors about her husband that she has all her food cooked over the fire in her own room. And Kimbolton is more like a stable than a house.”

“Nonsense,” he says briskly. He hands the ambassador a warming glass of spiced wine. “We only moved her from Buckden because she complained it was damp. Kimbolton is a very good house.”

“Ah, you say that because it has thick walls and a wide moat.” The scent of honey and cinnamon wafts into the room, logs crackle in the hearth, the green boughs decorating his hall diffuse their own resinous scent. “And the Princess Mary is ill.”

“Oh, the Lady Mary is always ill.”

“The more cause to care for her!” But Chapuys softens his tone. “If her mother could see her, it would be much comfort to them both.”

“Much comfort to their escape plans.”

“You are a heartless man.” Chapuys sips his wine. “You know, the Emperor is ready to stand your friend.” A pause, heavy with significance; into which, the ambassador sighs. “There are rumors that La Ana is distraught. That Henry is looking at another lady.”

He takes a breath and begins to talk. Henry has no time for other women. He is too busy counting his money. He is growing very close, he doesn't want Parliament to know his income. I have difficulty getting him to part with anything for the universities, or to pay his builders, or even for the poor. He only thinks of ordnance. Munitions. Shipbuilding. Beacons. Forts.

Chapuys turns down his mouth. He knows when he's being spun a line; if he didn't, where would be the pleasure in it? “So I am to tell my master, am I, that the King of England is so set on war he has no time for love?”

“There will be no war unless your master makes it. Which, with the Turks at his heels, he scarcely has time to do. Oh, I know his coffers are bottomless. The Emperor could ruin us all if he liked.” He smiles. “But what good would that do the Emperor?”

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. The king—lord of generalities—must now learn to labor over detail, led on by intelligent greed. As his prudent father's son, he knows all the families of England and what they have. He has registered their holdings in his head, down to the last watercourse and copse. Now the church's assets are to come under his control, he needs to know their worth. The law of who owns what—the law generally—has accreted a parasitic complexity: it is like a barnacled hull, a roof slimy with moss. But there are lawyers enough, and how much ability does it require, to scrape away as you are directed? Englishmen may be superstitious, they may be afraid of the future, they may not know what England is; but the skills of adding and subtraction are not scarce. Westminster has a thousand scratching pens, but Henry will need, he thinks, new men, new structures, new thinking. Meanwhile he, Cromwell, puts his commissioners on the road.
Valor ecclesiasticus
. I will do it in six months, he says. Such an exercise has never been attempted before, it is true, but he has already done much that no one else has even dreamed of.

One day at the beginning of spring he comes back from Westminster chilled. His face aches, as if his bones lie open to the weather, and nagging at his memory is that day when his father mashed him into the cobblestones: his sideways view of Walter's boot. He wants to get back to Austin Friars, because he has had stoves installed and the whole house is warm; the Chancery Lane house is only warm in patches. Besides, he wants to be behind his wall.