Outside the king’s room the nightwatch is set; but his gentlemen, as they leave him, place his sword by his bed, with a lighted candle. In the last instance, a king must defend himself.
At Windsor there has never been enough space for the kitchens, so they are always throwing up some lean-to in the courts around, and such temporary arrangements have been subsiding and leaking fumes since Adam was a lad. He wants to know if they have damped their fires and cleaned their pans, and see it with his own eyes: no point saving your king from rebels if he is burned up by grease from a loyal turnspit. He swoops in on odd nights to catch them out – just as, on odd days without warning, he arrives at the Tower Mint and weighs their gold coins.
A mist is rising; he rubs his hands against the cold. He knows these back-courts; in all the king’s houses he knows them, the forgotten yards and unpatrolled snickets. In a corner where a wall-torch burns, he sees the jester Sexton alone in a pool of light, scuffling a deerskin football against a wall. ‘Sexton? Why are you abroad?’
Sexton scoops up the ball. ‘No curfew in Patchtown.’
‘You have no business in the kitchens.’
Sexton huddles the ball against his chest. ‘You never know where you’ll find a joke, do you?’
He lunges, knocks the ball out of the man’s grasp, tosses it up and catches it. ‘Your head, Patch.’ A slap of his palm sends it over the wall. He hears a yelp from the darkness; some stranger has had a shock.
Returning, he sees there is a guard set outside his door. The man says, good night and God bless you. The shapes of other men, armed, occupy each recess.
Christophe is sitting up for him. His spaniel is snoring; the marmoset is huddled close to the embers, chattering to himself. When he first brought the creature in, the king had said, ‘Beware, Lord Cromwell, my father had a little monkey that got hold of one of his books of memoranda, and tore it to shreds with his nails and teeth. They pieced the fragments together, but no one could read the result. And so it falls out that today there are gentlemen in luxury, who would have been beggars if my father had sent them their tax bills, and others snug in their parlours who would have been clapped in a strait prison, if the monkey had not altered their fate.’
‘Gregory is abed already,’ Christophe yawns, then absently kisses his cheek: ‘Do not sit up writing, sir.’
Christophe rolls towards his pallet, pulling off his jerkin, scratching himself as he goes. Alone, he – Lord Cromwell – takes the knife from under his shirt, and sets it down. If some north country ogre burst up the stair, would he defend his son, or his son defend him? As the king says, Gregory promises brawn and sinew, the keen level eye of the sportsman, the set jaw of a man accustomed to the weight of a helm. But still like a child he whispers in the dark: ‘The king would see Anne’s books if he pleased. Kings can see through stone walls, and hear remarks passed in the reign of Uther Pendragon. They feel more than common men – as the spider feels the finger before the finger touches it. A king is more like an animal in certain regards, but do not say I said so, it might be ill-taken.’
His head hits the pillow. ‘Might it?’ he says. ‘Well, perhaps you should err on the side of caution. Men have lost their heads for less.’
You think of the prince as living on an exalted plane, finer and higher than other men. But perhaps Gregory has a point: is a prince even human? If you add him up, does the total make a man? He is made of shards and broken fragments of the past, of prophecies and of the dreams of his ancestral line. The tides of history break inside him, their current threatens to carry him away. His blood is not his own, but ancient blood. His dreams are not his own, but the dreams of all England: the dark forest, deserted heath; the stir in the leaves, the dragon’s footprint; the hand breaking the waters of a lake. His forefathers interrupt his sleep to castigate, to warn, to shake their heads in mute disappointment. At a prince’s coronation, God transfigures him, his human faults falling away, his human capacities increased; but that burst of light has to last him. That instant’s transfusion of grace must sustain him for thirty years, forty years, for the rest of his mortal life.
