They gape at each other. Each man struck dumb. The king pushes back the coverlet, as if impatient.
‘Sir,’ one ventures, ‘Norris is dead.’
The king yawns. ‘What?’ He spoke out of his dream, and as his feet hit the floor, he has forgotten it.
But the grooms stumble out, babbling: ‘My lord Cromwell …’
‘He must have been half-asleep. But tell me if he asks for Norris again.’
Mr Wriothesley laughs. ‘Why, are you going to supply him?’
Riche says, ‘You cannot raise the dead.’
‘No? That’s not my experience.’
He nods to the esquires: they bow in their turn, and go in to Henry with their perfumes and linen cloths. It is their honour to rub down the king’s person till his skin is tender and pink, then raise the lids of cedar chests and shake out his shirts, soft as April air. All those garments are gone long since, that Katherine embroidered with Spanish blackwork, and now they are stitched by paid and proficient hands, with lions and laurel crowns.
Hovering beyond the door, inventories in hand, is the Yeoman of the Wardrobe. A page bears a box of jewellery so the king can make choice; but first the king sits on his velvet stool for his barber. While his beard is trimmed and his hair combed his physicians come in, and gather in a black knot with their basins and urine flasks. They smell his breath, and enquire into his sleep and dreams.
The poor labourer owns his sleep and his stool, and can sell his piss to the fuller, whereas the king’s piss and stool is the property of all England, and every fantasy that disturbs his night hours is recorded somewhere in a book of dreams, which is written in the clouds massing over the fields and forests of his realm: every stir of lust, every frightful waking. Should he be costive, he is ordered a potion; should his bowel be loose, its product is taken away in a bowl under an embroidered cloth. They can only judge what is within him, by what comes out: a pity he is not made of glass.
Then a signal passes room to room, hot water comes in a silver ewer, and cloths of diamond weave and the softest nap: scissors clink in a basin, and the most deft of the esquires cleans and re-bandages the sore leg. The process brings tears to the king’s eyes. He jerks his chin away, and studies the tapestry or the ceiling. ‘All done, sir,’ they say, as if to a little child.
Unsteadily, he stands: is Cromwell there, any news? In his closet he kneels at his prie-dieu, his chaplain ready beyond the lattice. The king’s prayers are Latin prayers, and his hand beats his breast: his head bows, for we are all sinners, we sin as we breathe. Why is it when our eyes water with pain our mouth fills with the taste of phlegm and blood? Why do tears sting, after they have been blinked away? With a creak of wood he stands, leaving the cleric in a private cloud of incense: and as soon as he leaves his inner rooms, a laundress creeps in for yesterday’s shirts and the soiled bandages, and the king’s bed is unmade, the sheets tossed onto the floor, his velvet coverlets shaken and folded: beating and scrubbing begins, scouring, for no speck of dust can ever come under his eye, lurking in the pinions of a carved angel, or in the plaster curls of a Wild Man, or between the toes of a marble god.
Once the king leaves his inner rooms and enters his privy chamber, his natural body unites to his body politic: here he is dressed and presented to the world, a bulky, new-barbered man scented with rose oil. As rebels run free in the north, and the members break faith with the head, a kind of mutiny or civil war has broken out in the king’s body.
The doctors stop him: ‘Lord Cromwell, you have influence with our sovereign: could you persuade him to rise earlier from table?’
‘Not I,’ he says. A man who is accustomed to hard riding will fatten when he leaves off, and he knows it from his own person. When he was young in the cardinal’s service he would ride forty miles a day, forty the next, forty the day after: many horses but only one Cromwell. These days he is coddled by clerks who chase about at his whim. He says, I am fifty, and even at thirty I was never lean. He does not take his belly, as the king does, as an insult to God’s design, nor dwell on days when he did great exploits in the saddle. After Mass the king sits with Gregory working through the score sheets from old tournaments. Their voices are low and absorbed, their heads together, decoding the notches on the staff: jousts are transcribed like music, the anthems of violent and passionate men. ‘See where he misses.’ Henry’s fingers stab the line. ‘That is not because he is unskilful, but because he is aiming for the head.’
‘It is chancier, sir,’ his son says.
‘But here he aims lower and begins to succeed. Two hits, and on the third he breaks his lance. Atteint, atteint – and then, broken on the body.’
