He lies sleepless: Baron Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal, his mind ranging across country over the dales and rivers to where the factious in their encampments stir in their sleep and curse his name. It ranges west, far west, beyond the river Tamar, to where the sons of Cornishmen cold-sweat and heave, their ale foaming through their blood, and where Bolster in his sea cave blows giant bubbles in the midnight deeps, and dreams of swimming up for air; of planting his giant feet on hill and dale, fording the rivers in spate and demolishing the bridges with his heels; of marching to London, to net the ministers of the king, and snap their necks, and grind them up like spices to sprinkle on his porridge.
A giant cannot imagine what it is like to be a man of ordinary height. He cannot enter into their feelings. He never learns to bargain, or deceive: why would he, when he gets his way simply by cracking his knuckles?
When you are a child you think you have to kill the giant, but as you grow up you think different. Suppose you meet him by chance one day: you about your common business, picking up sticks or inspecting your rabbit traps, and he taking the air at the entrance to his cave, or toiling on a mountainside to uproot great oaks. Giants are lonely; they don’t know any other giants. Sometimes they want a boy like Jack to amuse them, to run errands and teach them songs.
Conquer your awe then, grab your chance. If you know how to talk to a giant it works like a spell. The monster becomes your creature. He thinks you serve him, but in fact you serve yourself.
He is restless – he, Lord Cromwell. He gets out of bed. Opens the shutter. Rain. He shields a candle flame with his hand. His head bobs against the ceiling. But he is not the giant – he is sprightly Jack. You leave your home and head east, you cross the sea, you think Bolster is behind you, but he is ahead. Wherever you arrive, he has arrived first. It’s here at Windsor, the swollen Thames surging under your walls, the water gurgling in downspouts and ditches – it’s here, after all the years, you find your confluence.
In his spare moments he is studying to improve his Greek. Old Bishop Fisher was in his seventies when he began the language, and he is not to be bested by a dead prelate. In a year or two, he wishes to be able to join the divines in their subtle dissection of each point of translation. This week he is reading a book of letters written by the philosophers and soldiers of those ancient times; though you wonder Alexander the Great had time for letters. Our king does not care to write his own – his writing seems to turn back on itself, so after long labour he makes no progress. Instead he corrects the manuscripts of others, or makes marginal notes of a startling nature. Probably the great Macedonian was the same – no doubt he laid aside his lyre and murmured the gist of his message, and a slave inscribed it, the Thomas Wriothesley of his day: bowing in a tent on a day of still heat, the perfume of frankincense masking the reek of elephants on the move.
Long ago in Venice he bought this book, trusting sometime he would have leisure for study. It is from the Aldus workshop, with his dolphin mark: clean, though one page marred by a thumbprint from its first owner. Sometimes he wonders who he was, and why he would part with such a work. Perhaps he is dead and his heirs sold his book, thumbprint and all. Or perhaps he lost interest in the ancient world and turned his mind back to business; tomorrow morning he will be strolling to the piazza with a basket and a street-child to carry it, shopping for olives and pumpkins, pine-nuts and garlic.
When he was an infant, Thomas was afraid of the river: of high tide as it crept around his ankles. He feared it would burst its banks and widen like the sky above us – he had no other way of thinking of it, for he had never seen the sea. He thought the river should be walled off to keep the streets safe, or banks built, to allow men to walk dry-shod above it and view its rising. Imagine then when he came to Venice. The child stirred inside him, crying, ‘Look, look what it’s done! I told you so!’
In Venice he saw, by torchlight, the whole of Heaven painted, and high above the canal a woman’s face brooding in the space between planets. He went back in daylight to view it better, and saw the world painted on a wall, with scaly landmasses and blue oceans; forests where deer sprang from coverts, where nymphs with the heads of birds sang in the trees. He saw a rider richly dressed riding into the distance, his horse’s shoes turned back to the onlooker; the hoof prints are impressed in memory, while the rider fades into an avenue of fallen columns, diminishing to a dot and vanishing from view.
Sometimes Henry says to him, ‘Still at the antique letters, Lord Cromwell? What did you learn today?’
He says, ‘I learned that
