The Mirror and the Light

‘We are making up the preliminary accounts for Westminster Abbey,’ he says. ‘They will surrender in the new year. Riche has too much paper on his desk to take the surrender now, or they would not keep your Majesty waiting.’

Henry says, ‘You remember John Islip? Westminster was much decayed when he came in as abbot.’

‘Near bankrupt, sir. Though that must be forty years ago.’

Islip went through the books and put the abbey’s rents up. Once he had rebuilt the shrine of Edward the Confessor, it brought plenty of trade in. ‘Islip was a clever man,’ Henry says. ‘My father used to take me to see him when I was a child, at his house over Tothill Fields. The road was a disgrace – the ways so foul, the cattle churning up mud by the ponds – you’d see dead dogs, and pigs rooting, and all manner of carrion.’

‘It got worse, sir, when the sewer burst. But I’ve drained it now.’

Who but Cromwell? Your man for watercourses and sewers, charnel houses and spoilheaps.

‘But when he died,’ Henry says, ‘do you remember the funeral? It was a wonder to behold, it was more like a victory parade than a burial. Down Willow Walk with the banners flying. The monks chanting in procession. I have never seen such an incense cloud, the abbey walls seemed to be melting. And the feast afterwards, in his honour. You know it’s only six years? It seems a lifetime.’

When Bishop Stokesley died last September we hung the churches in black, no reverence was wanting. But Islip died in the Roman world. Henry says, ‘My father wanted King Harry VI to be made a saint, and that would have enriched the abbey too. But when he heard Rome’s price, it made him curse.’

‘The insensate greed of the Vatican, it beggars belief,’ he says. He would rather say something original, but he gives the king what he wants.

‘My father would send Islip wine,’ Henry says. ‘And the monks would send him back a marrowbone pudding. He used to eat them when he was young, I think, when he was a poor exile. It was a dish he liked above anything.’

‘My father too,’ he says: surprised to remember it.

‘You can get those puddings for a penny,’ Henry says. He smiles. ‘They must have been easy to please, our fathers.’

‘If God glanced down now, what would He see? Two ageing men in failing light, talking about their past because they have so much of it.’ He hardly likes to break the moment. But the candles will be coming in.

Henry says, ‘Tom, it is a long time now since I first saw you.’

‘It is more than a decade,’ he says. ‘Since then I have had the privilege to come into your presence –’

‘Almost daily, isn’t it?’ Henry says. ‘Yes, almost every day. I remember – I knew you by sight, but I remember our first interview. Suffolk, he did not know what to make of you. I knew, though. I saw your sharp little eyes. You told me not to go to war. Never fight, you said, you can’t afford it. Skulk indoors like a sick child – it will be good for the treasury. And I thought … by St Loy, the man has some stomach. He has some gall.’

‘I trust I did not offend.’

‘You did. I overlooked it.’

The king’s voice seems to be fading, like the light. ‘Islip was Wolsey’s friend,’ he says. ‘So I made him my councillor, but I never took to him myself. He had a nose for heresy though. Wolsey used to send him among your friends, the Hanse merchants. Down at the Steelyard.’

The king passes a hand over his face, as if wiping away Islip, the abbey, the heretics, their house. ‘You offended, and I forgave. A ruler must do it. I am greatly altered these ten years. You, not so much. You do not surprise me as once you did. I do not think you will surprise me again, considering all that you have said and done – some of it miraculous, Tom, I will not deny. You work beyond the capacities of ten ordinary men. But still I miss the Cardinal of York.’

When he goes out he can feel the pulse in his neck jumping. Wriothesley is there. ‘He is tired of me,’ he says cheerfully. ‘He told me so. I am bested by the cardinal’s ghost.’

Call-Me says, ‘I wondered what was happening, in there in the dark. Was he giving the cardinal a chance to appear?’

In his graveclothes. His shroud muffling his skull. The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.

While the bridal party is held up in Calais by bad weather, they pass the time in jousting and visiting from house to house, devising masques and plays. A merchantman is reported wrecked off Boulogne, casting onshore a cargo of wool and Castile soap. He imagines the ocean foaming, bubbles on the crest of each wave. Please God fetch Anna soon: the king is anxious. Fitzwilliam sends him the tide tables. If the cardinal were here, he says sardonically, no doubt he could whistle the wind into the right quarter.

Everyone who has seen her seems delighted with the new queen. Lady Lisle writes to her daughter Anne Bassett, one of the new maids of honour, and Anne takes the letter to the king, handing it with her deepest curtsey.