The king had watched him, head tilted, as if sceptical about his sudden passion. To reinforce it the Lord Privy Seal had shaken his fist in the direction of Dover. Richard Riche had gaped at him, and the Lord Chancellor dropped his penknife in shock.
He sands his papers. The prospect of an heir, he thinks, will strike Pole a blow to the heart. Though if Jane is in a happy condition, it changes our plans. The king will want to stay by her side this summer. He will never go north. There will be no coronation in York.
Christophe comes in. ‘That Mathew, sneezing,’ he says. ‘If he has a disease, you will not be able to go to court.’
At any time, the king is always afraid of contagion. And now, of course, every precaution will be necessary.
Christophe says, ‘Call-Me is here for his supper.’
He thinks, Mary looks at me as if she doesn’t know who I am.
Supper is pike, with rosemary and fried onions. Call-Me says, ‘I hear when Rafe is done in Scotland he will go to France.’
‘I shall try to get him home first. Helen says she is sick for the sight of him. She is expecting a child in the autumn.’
‘I suppose by now she knows the signs,’ Call-Me says. ‘It seems they took a liking to Rafe, the Scots?’
‘Who would not like Rafe? He goes to France now with messages to King James. James lingers there, does he not?’
‘Rafe will meet Bishop Gardiner while he is in Paris. He cannot avoid it. Gardiner is asking for his recall.’
He pokes his fish around the plate. ‘God forgive me, but I wonder why He ever made pike?’
Mr Wriothesley extracts a bone. ‘I imagine the bishop’s return would be as welcome to your lordship as hemlock in a salad.’
He sighs. ‘It will be a while before we taste salad. I hear from France there will be no cherries till July.’
Christophe brings almonds and dried fruit. Mr Wriothesley says, ‘I perceive how the Lady Mary is continually applying to you for money and favours. Lady Rochford says,’ he smiles, ‘that Mary avoids looking at you, only for the great love she bears you. You are too dazzling a sight for her maiden eyes.’
‘We have to be gracious to Lady Rochford,’ he says. ‘Without her, the king and queen might not be married. Anne Boleyn would still be queen.’
And our heir unconceived. It appears that despite his sharp ears, Call-Me has not caught on to the day’s most important news, because he only wants to talk about Calais. ‘Lisle is careless. You do well to warn him, sir. It is not only papists he is harbouring. It is sectaries, they say. Sacramentaries.’
‘So Chapuys tells me.’ He eats a fig, meditatively. ‘I’d rather be in bed with a scorpion than with Honor Lisle.’
‘I too,’ Christophe says loyally, coming in with cheese. ‘I would squash her beneath my foot. Are you sitting up writing your king book tonight?’
Call-Me turns a curious glance on him. But he does not ask.
When the northern lords have made their excuses for their conduct during the winter past, the king sends them home wearing the badge of St George. He decrees the red cross a mark of allegiance for all men who have a coat to pin it on: wear a red ribbon, or sew a red thread that connects you to your sovereign. Because though the rebels are stood down, and the weapons confiscated, there is no truce in the war of words. The south calls the north traitorous; the north calls the south heretical. The north says, you have abused us for a thousand years: all we represent is a barrier between you and the Scots, a wall of corpses to delay them, while you have time to lock up your wives and daughters and put your gold in store.
The southerners say, have you ever been to Dover? Have you ever stood on the cliffs and seen the lights on the French coast, and considered how narrow is the Narrow Sea – how much we risk, and how much we pay, to save you from the slavers and pirates and barbarians who have been battering our shores since shores were thought of?
He says to the king, in the north they have contempt for the king’s peace, they want to administer their own murders. If Norfolk cannot subdue them they will fall into their old savagery, where each eye or limb or life itself is costed out, and all flesh has a price. In our forefathers’ time a nobleman’s life was worth six times that of a man who followed the plough. The rich man can slaughter as he pleases, if his pocket can bear the fines, but the poor man cannot afford one murder across his lifetime. We repudiate this, he tells the king: we say a man of violence cannot go free because his cousin is the judge, no more than a wealthy sinner can make up for his sins by founding a monastery. Before God and the law, all men are equal.
