The Mirror and the Light

‘You trust him with that?’

‘I will send Rafe too, if the king will spare him. But Mary is tender of her status and she may think Rafe is too much associated with …’

‘With us,’ Richard says.

Mr Wriothesley, on the other hand, descends from a family of heralds. Heralds have a status all of their own, and they are keen on according to others what is due to them and no more. Call-Me comes in with parchments in hand: ‘When shall we begin addressing you as Lord Cromwell, sir?’

‘Soon as you like.’

‘I wonder … now that you are elevated, would you like a fresh look at your provenance?’ He unrolls coloured devices. ‘Here we see the arms of Ralph Cromwell, of Tattershall Castle, who was Lord Treasurer to the great Harry who conquered France.’

We have been here before. ‘I am nothing to Lord Ralph’s folk, nor they to me. You know my father and where I come from. If you don’t, you can ask Stephen Gardiner. He sent a man down to Putney to dig out my secrets.’

Call-Me longs to ask, and did he? But he holds to his point. ‘You should revisit the matter. The king would feel more at ease with you.’

Richard says, ‘He could hardly be more at ease than he is.’

‘But you would be the more esteemed if you had an ancient name. Not just by your peers, but by all the common people, and in foreign courts too. They slight you, abroad – they are saying that Henry has dismissed you and appointed two bishops to govern.’

‘I would lay a wager one of them is Bishop Stephen.’ He admires these speculative worlds, that grow up in the crevices between truths. ‘What else are they saying?’

‘That the lovers of the concubine have been quartered, she forced to watch before she was burned. They take us for barbarians like themselves. They say her whole family is locked up. I can see the lady’s father will have trouble convincing people he is not dead too. I suppose you spared him because …’ Call-Me hesitates. ‘I suppose he fell in with your wishes, and you need to show people that you can reward them for doing that.’

If you call it a reward, the life Thomas Boleyn will lead now. He says, ‘I believe in economy of means. The headsman has to be paid, you know, Wriothesley. Do you think he practises his trade gratis?’

Call-Me checks, and blinks, and takes a breath: earnest, he sticks to his task. ‘They are saying that the Lady Mary is back at court already, and wearing the jewels of the late queen. They say that the king has in mind to marry her to the French king’s son, the Duke of Angoulême, and that the prince will come and live in England, to be trained up as king.’

‘I hear she is disinclined to matrimony.’

‘You have broached it then?’

‘One must keep French hopes alive.’

Call-Me is not sure whether he is being teased. He – Lord Cromwell – examines the other Lord Cromwell’s coat of arms. ‘I prefer the Cornish choughs I got from the cardinal. Anything today from Calais?’

In Calais, the spites and feuds of the leading families are enclosed by the town walls: those crumbling walls, England’s defence, are a sink of expenditure, and riddled by rumour, undermined by intrigue. Calais is a sort of purgatory; pained, one waits and waits, not for forgiveness but for a favourable wind. What is said in the citadel is carried across the sea, hissing, rustling, amplified by the waves; it breaks against the king’s attention in Whitehall. Calais is our last foothold on the mainland. Its pale is our last territory. It should be ruled by the strongest and steadiest man the king has. Instead it is ruled by Lord Lisle. Lisle is the king’s uncle – one of old King Edward’s bastards – and Henry is fond of him, having found him a genial playmate when he was a child. Already he is pestering for some advantage from recent events. Mindful of the need to be constantly in the king’s thoughts, he had Harry Norris in his pocket, pushing his name forward for sinecures and promotions. That’s all gone now, Norris being worm-food.

Call-Me says, ‘It’s Lisle’s wife who causes the trouble. She is a shrew and I hear she is a papist. You know she has daughters from her first marriage? She was always trying to get one of them placed with Anne. She will want to try again with our new queen.’

‘I think Jane is supplied,’ he says. ‘Call-Me, I want you and Rafe to go up to Hunsdon and try and talk Mary into sense. But be gentle with her. She’s not well.’

Mary’s letter is in his pocket. Even in his own house he dare not leave it down. Mary says she has a rheum in her head. She cannot sleep. Her teeth ache. It would comfort her to see her father. False friends keep them apart. When the false friends are cast aside or smitten by the sword of justice, when the false counsellors are elbowed into the Thames, her father the king will turn to her, she says – the scales falling from his eyes – and see her for what she is, his true heir and daughter.