The Mirror and the Light

‘Then he remembered I was of mean parentage,’ he says, smiling. ‘If it were not for that, he would very much like to be related to me.’ He looks around at them. They are waiting. He remembers how Wyatt had said, you are in danger of explaining yourself. ‘God knows,’ he says, ‘I would have moved sooner, but I had to let Mary fetch herself to where we needed her to be. You were there, Riche, that day the king threw Fitzwilliam out of the council chamber –’

‘It was you who threw him out, I think.’

‘Believe me, it was better so.’ It was hard for me to walk back, he thinks, with his chain of office in my hand. I felt a breeze on my neck, as if my head were lifting away. I could have kept walking. Like Jesus, walked on the water. Or deployed my wings.

Master Wriothesley touches his arm. ‘Sir, your friends wish me to say – they have authorised me to say – that they hope you do not lose by the amity you have shown the king’s daughter. For while, on the one hand, it must be a blessed work to reconcile father and daughter, and bring an unruly child to proper obedience –’

‘Call Me, have a strawberry,’ Rafe says.

‘– yet on the other hand, we have no reason to believe proper gratitude will follow. Let us hope you have no reason to regret your goodness towards her.’

‘Gardiner will be in a rage,’ he says. ‘He will think I have stolen a mean advantage.’

‘You have,’ Helen says. ‘Mary cannot take her eyes off you.’

‘But not like that,’ he says. She watches me, he thinks, as one watches some rare beast – what might it do, if it would? ‘I promised Katherine I would look after her.’

‘What?’ Rafe is shocked. ‘When? When did you?’

‘When I went up to Kimbolton. When Katherine was ill.’

‘And you bedded that woman at –’ Gregory breaks off. ‘Sorry.’

‘At the inn. Yes. But I did not have her husband poisoned. Or invent a new crime and have him hanged for it.’

‘No one thinks you did,’ Riche says soothingly.

‘Bishop Gardiner does.’ He laughs. ‘I never saw the woman after.’

But I remember her, he thinks: at dawn, singing on the stairs. I remember the sickroom at the castle, and Katherine shrunken into her cape of ermines: her face marked with what she had already endured, and what she knew she would endure in the weeks to come. No wonder she was not afraid of the axe. ‘Contemptible,’ Katherine had called him that day. He remembers the young woman – whom he knows, now, was Bess Darrell – gliding away with a basin. Master Cromwell, Katherine had asked him, do you take the sacraments still? In what language do you confess? Or perhaps you do not confess at all?

What had he said? He can’t recall. Perhaps he said he would confess if ever he was sorry, which mostly he wasn’t. He was leaving, but – ‘Master Secretary? A moment.’

He had thought, it is always the case: it is just as you are heading out of the door – as if to show you no longer care – that your prisoner concedes guilt, or offers you a bargain, or yields up the name you have been waiting for. Katherine had said, ‘You recall when we met at Windsor?’ She had added, unflinching, ‘The day the king left me?’

The very swans on the river stunned with heat, the trees drooping, the hounds from the courtyard making their hound music, till their bell-like voices withdrew into the distance, and the train of gallant horsemen moved away over the meadows, and the queen knelt praying in the afternoon light, and the king who went hunting never came back.

‘I remember,’ he said. ‘Your daughter was ill. I made her sit. I did not intend she should faint and crack her head.’

‘You think I am a bad mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘But still I believe you are my friend.’

He had looked at her, astonished. Painfully, clasping her hands on the arms of her chair, the dowager got to her feet. The ermines slid to the floor, nosing each other, curling at her feet in a soft feral heap. ‘I am dying, as you see, Cromwell. When the time comes that I can no longer protect her, do not let them harm the Princess Mary. I commend her to your care.’

She did not wait for his answer. She nodded to him: you go now. He could smell the leather binding of her books, the stale sweat from her linen. He made his reverence to her: Madam. Ten minutes later he was on the road: and ridden here, to the conclusion of the enterprise, to the place where promises are kept.

Gregory says, ‘Why did you do it?’

‘I pitied her.’ A dying woman in a strange country.

You know what I am, he thinks. You should by now. Henry Wyatt told me, look after my son, don’t let him destroy himself. I have kept the promise though I had to lock him up to do it. In the cardinal’s day they used to call me the butcher’s dog. A butcher’s dog is strong and fills its skin; I am that, and I am a good dog too. Set me to guard something, I will do it.

Richard Cromwell says, ‘You could not know, sir, what Katherine was asking.’

That’s the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn’t have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.

‘Well,’ Rafe says. ‘You kept this close.’