Tom Thumb is caught in a mousetrap. He is baked in a pudding. He is swallowed by what beast you please, not to emerge till it shits.
‘But then, no one else tells the truth,’ the king says. ‘So how does Lady Lisle now?’
‘Weeping.’
‘She may well. My poor uncle.’ A pause. ‘Send my doctors over.’
Relieved, he bows again. ‘Lord Lisle will be indebted.’
Henry says, ‘I want to know what is inside her. Some women carry dead flesh in their wombs, they call it a mole, it is not alive and it cannot be born. But sometimes it is sloughed off, it proves to have the features of a monster child, such as hair, or teeth.’
When the king sees the mural Hans has painted, he says nothing. It is not for him to thank a mere artist. But he glitters: not merely augmented, but enhanced.
The queen stands by him, and his hand steals out, and rests on her belly, as if testing what he finds there: as he has many times in the last few days, while she holds her breath and wonders why. On the advice of her brother, her ladies and the doctors, the news from Calais has been kept from her. And she has trained herself not to pull away, but to keep her frame steady and her face as immobile as the face of a marble Madonna. If she shrinks a little now, and averts her eyes, it is from the man on the wall: from his fist planted on his hip, from his hand on the pommel of his dagger, from his belligerent gaze; from his straddled legs, unbandaged calves bulging with muscle; from his bejewelled manhood, with a bow tied on top.
Jane stands herself, caught in her own gaze, crimson and tawny: her painted eyes resting beyond the frame. Behind her, our king’s gracious mother, in an old-fashioned hood with long lappets. And leaning on the altar which bears his son’s praises, the pale invader who carried his banners from the sea to the altar at Paul’s: narrow-faced, narrow of shoulder, his robe twitched across his person, his hand half-concealed by the ermine lining his great sleeve. Four-square in front of him, his son seems twice his girth; he could tuck mother and father both inside his jacket, he could swallow them whole.
‘By the saints you were right,’ Hans whispers, ‘when you said I should turn him to face us.’ He seems awed by his own creation. ‘Jesus Maria. He looks as if he would spring out of the frame and trample you.’
‘I wish France could see this,’ Henry tells the company. ‘Or the Emperor. Or the King of Scots.’
‘There can be copies, Majesty,’ Hans says, modestly. Mirrors of his lively image: ever larger, more active with every telling.
‘Come, Jane.’ The king plucks his eyes away. ‘We are done here. Time to be off to the country.’
Like a cottager he takes his wife by the hand, and kisses her mouth. My dear darling, I to Esher, you to Hampton Court. I to pleasure, you to pain: but not just yet.
August: the Lady Mary requests a greyhound to course with the royal party, and so before the sport begins he is taking her one: pure white, clean-limbed, with a small proud head and a green and white collar of plaited leather. Himself, Richard his nephew, Gregory his son – soon to be a happy bridegroom – and Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp – soon to be a happy brother-in-law. And as their escort, Dick Purser to lead the hound, and the boy Mathew, in his Cromwell livery coat; and a score of followers who have tagged along.
Lord Beauchamp frowns at the boy Mathew. ‘Did you not use to be my man, down at Wolf Hall?’
‘Aye, sir. But I came to seek my fortune, and I have found it.’
‘I am at fault,’ he says. ‘I drew the boy from his rustic innocence.’
‘Country mouse to town rat,’ Dick Purser says, shoving Mathew in the back.
‘Stop that,’ he says. ‘Arrange your faces. Here is Norfolk’s boy.’
A blazing day, a young lord in orange satin: Surrey advances, his long limbs flying, his eyes screwed up, his hands beating the air like a man in a cloud of mosquitoes; the court is swarming with rumours about his father, and all of them sting.
‘Seymour!’ the young man yells.
I shall speak first, he thinks, the soul of courtesy – ‘My lord, I see you have quit Kenninghall –’
‘You are not wrong,’ Surrey says.
‘– and the court is the gainer.’
Surrey is upon them. His father is right, he looks ill: his face has fallen in. ‘My business is with Lord Beauchamp. I have nothing to say to you.’
Edward Seymour says, ‘Surrey, stand where you are.’
‘Or take a pace back,’ Richard Cromwell says. ‘I sincerely advise it.’
‘I stop where I please,’ Surrey says. ‘Do not tell me where to stop.’
‘Armed like a man,’ Richard says, ‘yet talks like a three-year-old.’
