The Mirror and the Light

‘And the moon is made of cheese,’ Lady Rochford says. ‘Calais, have you forgot? Harry Norris said to me, Mary Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell are out in the garden together, I do not think it’s for their health, do you? I said to him, No, Harry, but for their recreation, and he laughed. Oh, dear Lord, he said, suppose he makes a little Cromwell?’

‘That we were in the garden, I concede.’

Lady Rochford is laughing at him. ‘All I know is, next day Mary was in a giddy humour and had bruises all over her neck. Harry Norris said to her, Cromwell worked you hard then, Mary – you see what it is to have a rough man for your lover – I hope you have fixed another meeting tonight, because no one else will want you, your flesh is so dappled you look like a fish on the turn.’

He thinks, Norris was a gentleman, he would not say such a thing. But then, of course, like all those gentlemen about the late Anne, he was capable of more than we knew.

‘William Stafford was in the garden too,’ he says. ‘He that Mary married, afterwards. She must have liked his love-making. She had no experience of mine.’

‘If you say not. But what I heard was, you pulled out a dagger and held it to his throat, drove him off and then dragged your prey indoors.’

Part of this is true. Stafford came up behind him in the dark. He took him for a murderer. He remembers the man trying to squirm away from him, the stuff of his jacket bunched in his fist.

‘Well, however it may be,’ Rochford says, ‘that sweet creature is Mary’s girl. And the little chicken she has by the hand, that is Norris’s daughter, Mary.’

He glances at Mary Norris. He cannot see she is like her father. Her mother died young, he scarcely remembers her. He is uneasy. ‘Uncle Norfolk’s ward,’ he says, ‘is she not?’

‘Trust Uncle Norfolk,’ Rochford says, ‘to put his folk in. His ward Norris, and his niece Carey – and he has another niece, one of his brother Edmund’s batch.’

Edmund Howard, God rest him. He was a poor gentleman, one of Norfolk’s half-brothers: five children of his own, and five stepchildren at least. He once declared to the cardinal that if he were not a lord he would go out and earn an honest living by digging and delving, a labouring man; but rank condemned him to indigence.

‘Here Norfolk comes,’ Rochford says. The duke struts in with a tiny girl on his arm. ‘That is the one, Katherine Howard – she we sent back because she looked twelve. But they swear she is of sufficient age, and here she is again.’

He hears the girl say, ‘Uncle Norfolk …’ in a clear, childish voice. She is pulling at the old brute’s arm, trying to attract his attention to something.

‘He has a peach there,’ Mr Wriothesley says. ‘I could spend an hour, my lord, could not you?’

‘I don’t know I could,’ he says. ‘I think Uncle Norfolk’s shade might come and lie between us.’

The child’s flower face turns on its stem, her lips emit a stream of chatter. Norfolk’s face wears an expression of strained tolerance – he is alert in case the king comes in. The girl forgets her uncle, drops his arm and stares around. Her glance slips absently over the men, but rakes the women head to toe. Clearly she has never seen so many great ladies before; she is studying how they stand, how they move. ‘Sizing up her rivals,’ he says; she has no guile.

‘She has no mother, bless her. She was but an infant when she died.’

He casts a glance at Rochford. ‘A soft word from you, my lady.’

‘I am not a monster, my lord.’

Mary Norris and Catherine Carey are eyeing up their new companion. Rochford says, ‘Would you call her blonde? Or red?’

He would not call her anything. His gaze has moved elsewhere.

‘I wonder who paid for what’s on her back,’ Rochford says. ‘That cloth did not come out of the old dowager’s wardrobe. And those rubies – did they not belong to Anne Boleyn?’

‘If they did, they should be back in the king’s jewel house. How did they come into Norfolk’s hands?’

‘Ah, that got your attention!’ Jane Rochford says.

On 26 November, Anna leaves her home to travel towards Calais. She will have an escort of some 250 persons, and her ladies travelling with her, so there are times when they will not make more than five miles a day. Drums and trumpeters precede her, and she travels in a gilded chariot emblazoned with the swan emblem and the arms of Cleves-Mark-Jülich-Berg.

Gregory comes to Austin Friars for final instructions. ‘Now I will repeat them back to you,’ he says. ‘Write home the minute I see Anna. Make sure she knows who I am. Be kind. Be patient. Make sure she has the things she likes to eat. Give her a purse of ready money.’

‘And do not embark for home without checking that all her train’s debts are paid. It may be the weather delays you.’ He thinks of the king, six years back, penned in the fortress with Anne Boleyn. ‘Be aware that the longer you stay, the more the household will be tempted by French merchants. By the way, keep your own accounts.’

‘You know you are talking to me as if I am Wyatt?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘And you are flattered.’