From the top of Wayneflete’s tower, the countryside beneath him was more imagined than real, stretching away in the darkness. It will soon be All Hallows, he thought. It seemed to him time had shuddered and slowed, as if the transit of heavenly bodies was retarded by the catastrophe that had overtaken his master and all England. It was drizzling. There were lights in the river. As he climbed down, the voices of those below curled up to him – rounded, as if in song. But when someone spoke his name – ‘Thomas Cromwell’ – it was very close, as if in his ear.
Some trick the building has, he thought. The staircase was a spiral of brick, and he had seen it by day, flesh-coloured, flowing from floor to floor. In the dimness where the torch-light failed, the brick was the hue of stale blood, but each twist held a slit of light, like a promise. Delivered to the foot, he emerged and blinked, a child born into a harsh world.
They had found candles to light the lower chamber. ‘Who will cook my supper, Tom?’ the cardinal enquired.
‘I will, I can cook.’
‘Come here, you’re cobwebbed.’ It was George Cavendish, one of the cardinal’s gentlemen. ‘Allow me, Thomas.’
He let George brush him down, passive as an animal: his eyes on his master, a bereft old man in borrowed clothes. He stood with his back to the brick, feeling the beating of his own heart: waiting to see what he would do next.
PART TWO
I
Augmentation
The dead man comes out of the Well with Two Buckets, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, and stands looking up and down the street. He pulls up his hood, checks to see who is watching him, then strides towards the great gate of Austin Friars.
There is a new guard, who lays a hand on the visitor, and rifles through his wallet of papers. ‘Blade?’
The corpse stretches out his arms, pacific, allows himself to be patted down. An elder porter steps out. ‘We know the gentleman. In you go, Father Barnes.’
Inside they say, ‘His lordship’s expecting you.’ The corpse runs upstairs.
Go back ten years. Winter, 1526, the friar Robert Barnes is brought before Wolsey on suspicion of heresy. Through a frozen day, no light but the ice-light from standing pools, Barnes stands in an anteroom, clad in the black habit of his order. Beneath it, his flesh creeps. The cardinal, they tell him, is making his preparations. What kind of preparations could they be?
Christmas Eve last, at St Edward’s in Cambridge, Barnes preached at midnight Mass against the pomp and wealth of the church. It is impossible to do that, obviously, without preaching against the pomp and wealth of the cardinal.
Now it’s February:
‘Didn’t you bring your own firewood?’ There is a rustle from the onlookers, a snigger. Barnes moves, edging away from the cardinal’s ruffian.
In Wolsey’s room a great fire blazes. Barnes stands away from it, against the painted wall. ‘Prior Robert,’ Wolsey says. ‘Come where you feel the heat, man.’
He feels he has walked into a joke, set up to torment him. ‘I am not here on trial,’ he bursts out. ‘Your man Cromwell is out there, taunting me, talking about firewood.’
‘Of course you are not on trial.’ The cardinal is civil. His purple silks flash in air smoky with resins. ‘They say you are a heretic, yet it seems you have no difficulty with the teachings of the church. Your only difficulty is with me.’
Outside, a bell pierces frozen air. A man comes in with a tray of spiced wine. The cardinal pours it himself, from a jug gaudily enamelled with a Tudor rose. ‘So what do you want me to do, Barnes? You want me to leave off the state and ceremony which honours God, and to go in homespun? You want me to keep a miser’s table, and serve pease pudding to ambassadors? You want me to melt down my silver crosses, and give the money to the poor? The poor, which will piss it against the wall?’
There is a pause. After a time, faintly, Barnes says, ‘Yes.’
The ruffian Cromwell has come in behind him and is leaning against the door. Wolsey says, ‘I am sorry to see a scholar ruin himself. You must grasp that it is no use to avoid heresy, only to fall into sedition. Oppose the church, you will burn at Smithfield. Oppose the state, you will choke at Tyburn – and for present purposes, I am the church and I am also the state. But both fates are avoidable, if you repent now.’
Prior Barnes begins to shake. The interrogatory stare of the cardinal is enough to bring a man to his knees. ‘Your Grace, pardon me. I do no harm. Truly. I could not kill a cat.’
