The ambassador says, ‘I understand the Duke of Norferk is in London, and in a fever to see you.
‘He wants me to put him back in credit with the king.’
‘Henry thinks he has disrespected the corpse of the poor little Fitzroy,’ the ambassador says. ‘The king asked for no pomp, so the duke tips his dead bastard in a wagon.’
‘It gives you something to amuse the Emperor with. In your dispatches.’
‘I myself think Norferk was angry with the boy for dying. What about Madame Jane, is Henry tired of her yet?’
‘You see, this is how my master is traduced,’ he says. ‘Fickleness is not his vice – even you must allow that. He was with Katherine twenty years. He waited seven years for Boleyn.’
‘There were concubines, of course. Although, what king is without them? There was Richmond’s mother. And the Boleyn sister who he bedded before Anne. The court is speculating who will come next. They say Norferk will put his daughter forward. He must get use out of her, and perhaps it would pique Henry’s appetite, to penetrate the widow of his dead son.’
‘Eustache …’ he says.
‘I see you are out of humour.’
‘It’s the scent of treason in the air. It makes my eyes water. It sets my teeth on edge.’
Grievous, Chapuys murmurs.
‘If your master means to send aid to our rebels, he has left it late in the year.’
‘Ah, you call them rebels. I thought it was merely a few turnips, sodden with drink? What interest could my master have in their proceedings?’
‘None. Unless he has received bad advice. Through your usual bad sources.’
He imagines upending Lord Montague and other Poles, and smacking the soles of their feet till their secrets spill out of their mouths. He imagines laying a clasp-knife to the heart of Nicholas Carew, prising it open like an oyster. He imagines shaking Gertrude Courtenay, till treason drops from her like falling leaves. Slicing the cranium of her husband, the Marquis of Exeter, and stirring a forefinger in the murk of his intentions.
‘I shall not regret this business if it brings the traitors out,’ he says.
Chapuys is shocked. ‘You cannot mean the princess!’
‘Any approaches, Mary must report to me. Any letters, they must come straight from her hand to mine.’
‘By the way,’ the ambassador says, ‘I hear that the Courtenays have taken in Thomas Guiett’s woman. It is a charity.’
‘A duty. Bess Darrell gave all she had to Katherine in her trouble.’
‘An angel’s face,’ Chapuys says, ‘and an angel’s disposition. Ah, Thomas, it is always the women who suffer. Those tender creatures whose protection God has given into our hands.’
‘I told Mary, I have done all for her that I will do. Let her move one inch towards the rebels, and I will cut off her head.’
‘Truly, Thomas?’ The ambassador smiles. ‘We know this game, you and I. It is your duty to come here and boast to me of the strength of the king’s forces, and say how he is loved throughout the land. And it is my duty to exclaim, “Cremuel, what kind of imbecile do you take me for?” You know what I must say, and I know what you must say. Why do we not, as the tennis players say, cut to the chase?’
‘Very well,’ he says. ‘Let me say something new. If your master subverts my king in his own country, I will find means to make him suffer, by uniting my king with the princes of Germany, who are your master’s subjects – or he thinks they are.’
I doubt it,
‘You are my confessor?’
‘You have a great many secrets. You and your archbishop.’
He thinks, if Chapuys knows Cranmer has a wife, he will keep it back till it can do most damage.
‘Bread can be more than one thing,’ he says. ‘Anything can.’
‘If Henry were to destroy you for heresy, it would be …’ Chapuys thinks about it. ‘It would be a tragedy, Thomas.’
‘You would come to Smithfield to see me burned.’
‘That would be my painful duty.’
‘Painful my arse. You’d buy a new hat.’
Chapuys laughs. ‘Forgive me,’ he says. ‘I sympathise with you. At such a time you must feel the inferiority of your birth – which at other times’ – a courtly nod – ‘is not evident. Your rivals at court can turn out their tenantry, and arm them from their caches of weaponry that they have owned time out of mind. But you have no retainers of your own. You can expend some of your wealth, no doubt. Yet the cost of keeping even one soldier in the field, especially if he is mounted, and at this end of the season, fodder so dear … I do not care to estimate, but figures come easily to you. Of course, you could go and fight yourself –’
‘My soldiering days are done.’
