The Mirror and the Light

Wyatt says, ‘I have been adding my life up – it is ten years this year since I first went to France, with Cheney on his embassy. They said my legs were young and my stomach strong, so I was the go-between, tossed on the waves. I would turn up sweating and desperate with a killed horse under me, and Wolsey would say, “Where in God’s name have you been, boy – picking flowers?” The Lord Cardinal was a great man for speed.’

‘He was a great man for everything.’

‘Now the Boleyns and their friends are gone, you have made space for yourself. You can put your own people close to the king. Harry Norris, I see why you would want him gone. Brereton, George Boleyn – I see the benefit to you. But Weston was a boy. And Mark may have had a jewel in his bonnet, but I warrant he had not twenty pence to buy his shroud.’

‘Poor Mark,’ he says. ‘He knelt at Anne’s feet and she laughed at him.’

He imagines the cart, the pile of corpses, a canvas over them smeared and stippled with blood; the boy’s hand tumbling out, as if wanting to be held. He says, ‘I only wanted Mark as a witness. But he accused himself. I did not hurt him.’

‘I believe you. Though no one else does.’

‘Give me a few days. A week, at the outside. When you get out you will have a hundred pounds from the Treasury.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘Believe me, you do.’

‘They will say it is a reward for betraying my friends.’

‘Jesus Christ!’ He slaps Petrarch down on the table. ‘Your friends? What friendship did they ever show you? What was Weston – a grinning puppet who couldn’t keep his prick in his breeches. Or Brereton, that braggart – I tell you, his folk in the north are well-warned. They think they write the law. But those days are done. There are no private kingdoms now. There is one law, and that is the king’s.’

‘Be careful,’ Wyatt says. ‘You are on the brink of explaining yourself.’

Or I am just on the brink, he thinks. ‘I sweated blood to save you, Tom. Your life hung by a hair.’

Wyatt looks up. ‘I will tell you why I am still alive. It is not because I fear death or am content to live in shame. It is because a woman is having my child. If it were not for that, then if you wanted Anne dead you would have had to contrive it some other way.’

He stares at him. ‘Who is she?’ He sits down on a three-legged stool. ‘You know you will tell me sooner or later.’ A thought strikes him. ‘Tell me it is not Edward Darrell’s daughter. She who followed Katherine, when the king banished her?’

Wyatt inclines his head.

‘Can you not love a woman, except she is poised to do you harm?’

‘I am as I am. It is a poor excuse.’

He says, ‘I remember Bess Darrell as a child when she was in the Dorset household. I used to do business for them. I know her father was bound in loyalty – he was Katherine’s chamberlain. But he is dead now, and the girl was never bound.’

‘You think she would have been better off with Anne Boleyn?’

Fair point. ‘Better in a nunnery. But I suppose you have your ways.’

‘I suppose I have,’ Wyatt says sadly. ‘I love her, and I have loved her a long time. It is only because she was away from the court we could keep it secret.’

When I rode up to Kimbolton, he thinks, to Katherine – was Bess there in the shadows? He remembers the old Spanish ladies; they did not trust the kitchen so they were cooking for Katherine in their own chamber, and the smell of smoke and vegetable water was trapped in their clothes. They insulted him in their own tongue, wondering aloud if he had a hairy body like Satan. He sees himself walk into Katherine’s presence, sees her huddled in her furs; the invalid smell envelops him, and from the corner of his eye he sees a slight form sliding away with a bowl. He had thought at the time, her maid carries the queen’s vomit covered, as if it were the sacred host. That must have been Edward Darrell’s daughter, golden hair under a servant’s cap.

‘I begged her,’ Wyatt says, ‘if she would not leave Katherine, then at least to take the oath when it was put to her. What is it to you, Bess, I said, if the king wants to call himself head of his church? I cited the precedents. I argued my best. Bishop Gardiner had not more force. But she would not let Henry win the argument. She was with Katherine when she died.’

‘Money?’ he says.

‘She had none. What Katherine left her was never paid. She has no protector if I fail. She knows I am married and nothing to be done there. She cannot go back to her family, carrying my child. I cannot send her home to Allington, my father will not receive her. I do not know who will take her in, because my wife’s family have turned everyone against me. This will give them occasion to rejoice. Nothing they love more, than to see me clawing my way through thorns.’

Wyatt won’t speak his wife’s name, not if he can help it. He has a child with her, a boy, but God knows how he got it.

‘Allington is your best hope. Shall I talk to your father?’

‘He is ill. I want to spare him. I dread his contempt. And I know I have earned it.’