It is a good enough answer. Why would she know, if he doesn’t? He brings her out from under the table, and says he’ll teach her. ‘But I should warn you,’ she says, ‘I’m not fit to have a book.’ She speaks in her mother’s voice. ‘Give that child anything and she destroys it. You’d think she was brought up in a midden. Look at the state of her.’
When Anne applies to her needle, beads of blood decorate her work. Liz says, she’d be better with a cobbler’s awl, except a cobbler wouldn’t be so chatty. He will not let his wife strike her; Anne cannot be faulted for diligence, and for the rest he feels she should not be faulted. ‘I suppose she will outgrow it,’ Liz says. As Gregory will outgrow his bad dreams, in which demons who live south of the river try to bribe the guards to let them across the bridge; or knock down the watermen and commandeer their barges, leaving them bloody smudges on the quays; or simply wade through the black tide and pad the streets with their webbed feet, looking for Gregory Cromwell to chew and digest.
When Gregory commands a story he wants the same one over and over, till he can take it away and murmur it, his private possession: the fair knights Gawain and Galahad, or the giants Grip and Wade. But Anne shouts, ‘Oh, we killed that beast yesterday, isn’t there a worser?’ What next, she says, what next? The world is burning under her hand. She lives in intense striving, her earnest little face creased with concentration: the women say, don’t frown like that, Anne, you’ll stay that way and then no one will marry you.
Before Advent he made the peacock wings for Grace, working with a penknife and a fine brush, sticking feather to fabric with bluebell-root glue. ‘Sad work to be doing by candlelight,’ Liz had said. But the days were short and there was no choice if she was to have them for the Christmas play. He prayed he would not be called away before the job was done; he was always out making money for the cardinal. He would have liked Grace to know it was for her that he was so often on the road, to provide for her future: but how would she understand that, when he never comes home, if he comes at all, till the fires are damped and all God’s people sound asleep? Sometimes he would stand by the door of the room where she was bundled into bed with Anne and a young servant, the three entwined like puppies. Once, once only in all the nights, she had raised her head and looked at him from the darkness, her eyes open wide and the flicker of the candlelight inside them; perhaps she thought he was in her dream, as she was in his. She wore no expression, nothing he could later recall: he remembered only the shape of the bedcurtain, a curve of shadow; the glow of a white sleeve, a white face, and the flame in her eyes.
Jenneke says, ‘It was a cruel time for you, the children dead so young. I ask myself, why did you not begin another family?’
‘I had Gregory.’
‘But why did you not marry again?’
He doesn’t know why. Perhaps because he didn’t want to have to give an account of himself, to say what he was thinking. It didn’t matter in Lizzie’s day, because he only had the usual thoughts. Some men can make a tidy parcel of their past and hand it over; not he. But when he looks at Jenneke he cannot help but imagine other histories. If he and Anselma had wed, would they have had only one child? Or is he more potent than the banker? In this reconfiguration of circumstance, Gregory would be unborn. His soul would be bobbing around in the somewhere, still waiting for a body. Anne and Grace, likewise, would never have been conceived. And this house would not have been his house. The day not his day, when they told him his wife was dead, and the day not his day, when his daughters were sewn into their shrouds and carried to burial: two lost little girls, weighing nothing, owning nothing, leaving barely a memory behind.
‘So what have you done since?’ his daughter asks. ‘About women?’
‘You are blunt.’
‘An Englishwoman would not ask?’
‘Not out loud. She would wonder. And listen to gossip. And add to it. Invent something.’
‘Better to say the truth. Of course,’ she says, ‘one buys women. No doubt your people arrange it for you. They are in awe of you.’
‘I am in awe of myself,’ he says. ‘I never know what I will do next.’
He goes to court: in his bag are plans for war machines. Better he has the king’s ear in these matters than Norfolk, whose ideas are old-fashioned.
But the gentlemen grooms intercept him: there are six French merchants with the king, with chests full of fabrics and ready-made garments – they have guessed at his measurements. ‘He is trying on all their stock,’ the grooms warn. Their faces say plainly, stop him, Lord Cromwell, before he spends the cost of a castle, or fritters away some cannon.
