‘You are angry. Innocence is tranquil.’
Don’t speak to me of innocence, he thinks. I pulled down certain men who insulted your father, as an example to others – call them innocent, if your definition stretches. I ripped them from their gambling and dancing and tennis play. I made each one a bridegroom: I married them to crimes they had barely imagined, and walked them to their wedding breakfast with the headsman. I heard young Weston beg for his life. I held George Boleyn as he wept and called on Jesus. I heard Mark whimper behind a locked door; I thought, Mark is a feeble child, I will go down and free him, but then I thought, no, it is his turn to suffer.
‘If you are of this fixed opinion,’ he says, ‘then I shall not trouble you more. Since you hold it against all evidence and reason, how can I oppose it? I would swear an oath, I would do it gladly, but you would think –’
‘I would know you were a perjurer. I have been told, by those I trust, there is no faith or truth in Cromwell.’
He says, ‘When those you trust abandon you – Dorothea, come to me. I will never refuse you. I loved your father next to God, and any child of his body, or any soul who was true to him, may command me to any service. No risk, no cost, no effort too great.’
‘Take this with you,’ she says. She holds out the kerchief. ‘And these books, whatever they are.’
He picks up the gifts and leaves her. He stands outside the room. He leans against the wall, his eyes resting on a picture, where a twisted man adheres to a tree, and bleeds from head, hands and heart.
Richard Riche bustles up: ‘Sir?’
Christophe’s face is stricken. ‘Master, what has she said?’
‘I believe I have not cried since Esher,’ he says. ‘Since All Souls’ Eve.’
Riche says, ‘Have you not? You surprise me. The king’s great trials have not drawn a tear?’
‘No.’ He tries to smile. ‘When he is vexed the king cries enough for two men, so I thought my efforts needless.’
‘And what provokes this now?’ Riche asks. ‘If I may ask? With all respect?’
‘False accusation.’
‘Bitter,’ Riche says.
‘Richard, you do not think I betrayed the cardinal, do you?’
Riche blinks. ‘It never crossed my mind. You didn’t, did you?’
He thinks, Riche would not fault me, if I had betrayed him: what use is a fallen magnate? He says, ‘If not for me, the cardinal would have been killed in those days of his first disgrace, or if he had lived he would have lived a beggar. I put myself in hazard for him, my house and all I had. If I treated with Norfolk, it was only to speak for my master. I did not like Thomas Howard then and I do not now, and I was never his man and never will be, and if he came to me for a post as a pot boy I would not employ him.’
‘Nor I,’ says Christophe. ‘I would kick him in a ditch.’
‘When I wept,’ he says, ‘that day at Esher – my wife lately dead and my daughters, the ashes cold in the grates, the wind howling through every crack – then the dead souls came out of purgatory, blowing around the courtyards and rattling at the shutters to be let in. That was what we believed in those days. What many believed.’
‘I still,’ Christophe says.
‘I do not believe I shall cry again,’ he says. ‘I am done with tears.’ He hears his own voice, running on. ‘Do you know, when Wolsey was in the north, a fellow came to me, a factor for the cloth merchants: “The cardinal owes us over a thousand pounds.” I said, “Be exact.” He said, “One thousand and fifty-four pounds and some odd pence.” I said, “Will you remit the pence, for the love you bear him?” He said, “My masters have remitted and remitted, supplying cloth for vestments out of their piety and at no profit to themselves – and we are talking about cloth of gold.”’
He thinks, I tried by every means to save my master: I tried by exhortation, by prayer, and when that failed, I tried accountancy. Riche is wondering at him, but he cannot stop. ‘He said to me, this fellow, “The cardinal has owed the merchant Cavalcanti the sum of eighty-seven pounds, standing over these seven years, for richest cloth of gold at thirty shillings a yard, 311½ yards: and of the lesser quality, 195½ yards.” He said, “The whole order was left at York Place – I have the delivery note. The cardinal claims the king will pay,” he said to me – “but I think we shall see doomsday sooner than that.”’
‘Sir,’ Christophe says, ‘sit down on this chest. Using that handkerchief you may wipe your eyes.’
He looks at the green leaves, the loving stitches Helen has made, to give pleasure to a stranger. ‘So I said to Cavalcanti’s man, “Very well, I acknowledge the debt, all but five hundred marks – for the merchants swore they would give that sum to the cardinal, to have his friendship – and no doubt it will do them good at the Last Judgement.” But he said, “The sum was already knocked off, you cannot have it twice.” And I had to concede it.’
He sits down on the chest. Christophe says, ‘Sir, do not weep any more. You said you would not.’
