The Mirror and the Light

There is a stir in the air. My lord Privy Seal looks up from the king’s itinerary. Call-Me-Risley is here, flitting against the light in yellow. He throws himself into a chair and shouts for small ale. He fans himself with his hat. ‘Gardiner,’ he says. ‘Jesus! To accuse you of murder! Though if you did rid the world of a cardinal, what of it? It was in another jurisdiction, and a long time ago now.’

He says, ‘I’ll pull Stephen down. Just watch me.’

Call-Me eyes him. ‘Yes, I believe you.’

‘I’m doing these,’ he says. ‘Excuse me.’ He turns back to the paper. After Guildford, Farnham. Every town must be certified clear of plague before the king enters the neighbourhood. At the slightest suspicion, his route must be changed, so there must be extra hosts standing by, their silverware polished, their feather beds aired. ‘Farnham to Petworth? How far is that?’

‘Scant twenty miles cross-country,’ Call-Me says. ‘But more if it rains and you go round about.’

Twenty miles is what the king can ride, at present. ‘Do you know the king is planning a visit to Wolf Hall?’

Call-Me considers. ‘It is small, for his train.’

‘The Seymours will move out. Edward has it planned.’ He thinks of the shade of Jane, walking in the young lady’s garden; he thinks of her alive under the green trees, in her new carnation-coloured dress.

He frowns over the papers. ‘Suppose he rides from Petworth to Cowdray, to William Fitzwilliam? Then to Essex … Ah, here comes Mathew.’

Mathew carries in a bowl of plums and sets them down reverently. ‘The fruits of success,’ Wriothesley says, smiling. ‘I congratulate you, sir.’

He used to think that the plums in this country weren’t good enough, and so he has reformed them, grafting scion to rootstock. Now his houses have plums ripening from July to late October, fruits the size of a walnut or a baby’s heart, plums mottled and streaked, stippled and flecked, marbled and rayed, their skins lemon to mustard, russet to scarlet, azure to black, some smooth and some furred like little animals with lilac or white or ash; round amber fruits dotted with the grey of his livery, thin-skinned fruits like crimson eggs in a silver net, their flesh firm or melting, honeyed or vinous; his favoured kind the perdrigon, the palest having a yellow skin dotted white, sprinkled red where the sun touches it, its perfumed flesh ripe in late August; then the perdrigon violet and its black sister, favouring east-facing walls, yielding September fruits solid in the hand, their flesh yellow-green and rich, separating easily from the stone. You can preserve them whole to last all winter, eat them as dessert, or just sit looking at them in an idle moment: globes of gold in a pewter bowl, black fruit like shadows, spheres of cardinal red.

He says to Mathew, ‘You remember when we hunted at your old master’s house? The day the king lost his hat?’

Mathew grins. Who could forget the hunting party riding home, their faces baked like hams?

When the wind takes off a gentleman’s hat, his companions at once take off theirs. The courteous man says, put on your hats again, do not suffer for my sake. But the king, though he would not accept another man’s hat, never thought to tell them to cover; so they came home blistered and striped. He says, ‘You should have seen Rafe Sadler. His eyes were boiled in his head.’

Mathew says, ‘My friend Rob led a search after the king’s hat, but we found naught. He had St Hubert in his cap badge, and his eyes were real sapphires, so I doubt not we would have been rewarded had we found it.’

He picks up his pen. Returns to the royal summer. The king will go to Stansted, then Bishop’s Waltham, presently to Thruxton; then leaving Hampshire, he will ride west. In Savernake, Hubert squints down, entangled in branches. In high summer we will ride the same paths and he will see us as we are now: girth thickened, sins multiplied.

‘Mid-August,’ he writes. ‘Five days. Wolf Hall.’

II

Twelfth Night

Autumn 1539

In August Hans rolls up the bride, brings her home, and slaps her on a panel for the king’s inspection.

‘I had to be quick,’ Hans says, ‘make sure she was dry before I could take my leave. I brought Amelia too, the young one. But frankly, Amelia is not so much.’

‘Show me Anna first,’ he says. He steps back to admire her, a shining princess who is more metal than flesh. Her clothes mould her, like the armour of some goddess, and look as if they would stand up by themselves. You drag your eyes upwards from her gleaming breastplate to her face. It is a serene oval, vulnerable, bare. It is not so young and rosy as Christina’s, but shows a modest charm. She has tender eyes, veiled: the Holy Virgin, brooding over her unexpected turn of fortune. ‘Henry should like her,’ the painter says. ‘I would. You would. It is a good picture. You would not guess how I sweated over it.’

‘Show me Amelia,’ he says.