The Mirror and the Light полностью

It is a day of raw cold, a metal light. But great fires are blazing in the king’s chambers, and the scent of pine and amber floats towards him on a warm cloud. ‘Come and get warm, Thomas,’ the king says. ‘Come and look at what these fellows have brought.’ His face is alight with innocent pleasure.

The merchants murmur and make him a bow. They have thrown open the lids of their travelling chests and are spreading out their stock: not only embroidered garments but looking glasses and gemstones. They show the king a standing cup whose lid is topped by a naked boy riding a dolphin. They unfurl a needlework panel four yards long, and line up with it plastered across their persons. The king’s eyes pass left to right over Susanna going to bathe, the Elders spying from the bushes. They offer a child’s cap garnished with gold buttons in the shape of the sun in splendour; the king smiles and perches it on his fingers, saying, ‘If only I had a child to fit it.’

Mr Wriothesley’s eyes signal to his: distract the king, please. ‘Ah, you have dog collars!’ he exclaims: as if dog collars were his only thought.

‘Let us see,’ the king says. ‘Ah, this is pretty, it would look well on little Pumpkin!’ He says to the Frenchmen, almost shyly, it is my wife the queen’s pet, Lord Cromwell got her from Calais.

At once, they write him down for a velvet collar, six shillings, and making further curtseys draw out bags, and disgorge crucifixes and clocks and puppets and masks, topaz rings and tortoiseshell bowls. Kneeling, they offer bracelets enamelled with the signs of the zodiac, and a picture of the Blessed Virgin standing on a carpet of fleur-de-lys, her immortal child in the crook of one arm and a sceptre in the other. They lay out chessmen and cases of knives, and the king’s hand reaches out, as if to set the board or test a blade. From a linen shroud the Frenchmen draw a jeu d’esprit – a pair of sleeves in grass-green, embroidered with deep-red strawberries: to each berry there is a dewdrop, a diamond clear as water.

‘Oh.’ The king glances away, to dilute their sweetness. He is pink with desire. ‘But I am too old for those.’

‘Never!’ The French speak as one man. Call-Me joins the chorus. He keeps quiet. The king is right, the sleeves are meant for a tender youth, like Gregory or the late Fitzroy. But you can see how Henry’s mouth waters.

A hush falls on the Frenchmen. It is the signal, he knows, that they have arrived at their best item. Their captain gestures the youngest of them forward. The Frenchman stoops over a chest; he clicks a key in its lock; he pauses, then draws out and floats into the air something like a swathe of evening sky, or a thousand peacocks, or a vestment for an archangel. Murmuring in delight, they flourish, they spread, they caress the gorgeous vestment: ‘We designed it expressly for you, your Majesty. No other prince in Europe could carry this off.’

The king is entranced. ‘I may as well try it, since you’ve come so far.’ His face is shadowed by a sea-green ripple. ‘We call it pavonazzo,’ the Frenchman says: a turn of the wrist, and the cloth flows in liquid iridescence, turning from sea-green to azure to sapphire. The king shines like Leviathan, upheaved from the ocean bed. He takes a breath at the sight of himself.

They mention a sum. The king laughs, incredulous. But you can see him edging towards the purchase. Mr Wriothesley, brave man, makes an ah-hem. The king acknowledges it with a flicker of his blue eye, then he grimaces, cunning as any old miser: ‘It is a pauper king who stands before you, messieurs. I have spent all my money on the wars.’

‘Really, Majesty?’ The Frenchmen look at each other; you can be certain one or more of them are spies. ‘We thought it was only a spit-spat,’ their captain says, ‘some far-flung agitation of no import, and no more to your puissance than a flea-bite.’

‘At least,’ one adds, ‘that is what Monseigneur Cremuel is telling the world.’

Even while the false Frenchman is saying it, he is sliding other wares from a leather bag soft as a virgin’s sigh. It crosses his mind that in Harry Norris’s day, they would not have got access: unless of course Norris was taking a percentage.

The sun has come out, a white haze infiltrating the forenoon. It emboldens the merchants, who hold up their mirrors, and walk around the room with them: as they angle them, they catch little off-cuts of the king’s person, and with each caprice of the light, he dazzles himself.

Yet still Henry hesitates. ‘Come, Majesty,’ they say. ‘We are giving you first refusal. Think how you will feel if one of your courtiers were to buy it – it would be a humiliation for any prince.’

An inspiration seizes the king: ‘You know my vessel the Mary Rose is enlarged? I mean to make her carry more ordnance, and to build some new warships – two or three. I believe those are the drawings, that the Lord Privy Seal has in his bag.’